Run-Stop-Fierce: Race, Meritocracy, and the Cosmopolitan Canopy Dissertation, University of Minnesota (2026)

The fighting game community is one of the most racially diverse spaces in competitive gaming. This dissertation asks why. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with players in the Twin Cities and at national tournaments, historical analysis of urban arcade infrastructure, and discourse analysis of online community sentiment, I argue that the FGC’s demographic composition is not incidental but structural: a product of the material conditions that made fighting games accessible in urban centers where other forms of competitive gaming were not. The arcade required a quarter and proximity. PC gaming required hardware, domestic space, and stable internet. These different infrastructural thresholds produced different communities along predictable lines of race and class.

It also examines how players understand and narrate this history, how the community’s grassroots meritocratic ethos functions as what Elijah Anderson calls a “cosmopolitan canopy,” and how that ethos comes under pressure as esports professionalization imports institutional norms from genres with very different material origins. The result is a case study in how the built environment shapes cultural formation, how communities construct meaning around that formation, and what happens when the economic ground beneath a subculture shifts.