A Comparative Study of Attachment: Fighting Games and Taekwondo in Life

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, compares how players form lasting attachments to two very different activities: digital fighting games and analog taekwondo. Its central aim is to find tentative evidence of points where these practices converge and diverge, situating the inquiry within broader debates about analog and digital play and the relationship between esports and traditional sport. The study is qualitative and exploratory rather than representative, drawing on 14 forum narratives and 15 onsite interviews with fighting game players, alongside 9 forum narratives, 8 onsite interviews with taekwondo practitioners, and 14 essays from a World Taekwondo Federation collection. All participants had practiced their activity for multiple years.

The findings identify two parallel developmental patterns. In both domains, people typically began with a friend mainly for enjoyment, then deepened their commitment as they gained skill and joined communities, often moving into competition. Fighting game players described a shift from button-mashing to strategic thinking, while taekwondo practitioners often marked progress through their first official tournament. Respondents in both groups expressed a strong ethos of long-term commitment, framing their continued participation in physically grounded terms, such as playing or practicing for as long as their wrists or bodies allowed.

Community emerged as a central factor sustaining engagement in both groups, with participants describing taekwondo peers as a "family" and fighting game players stating they would stop without their local offline scene. The key difference lay in scale: fighting game communities were perceived as largely regional and tied to national tournaments, whereas taekwondo communities were understood as international and sustained through travel. The authors acknowledge the heterogeneity of their mixed-method data and stress that their sample is not representative, positioning the narratives as qualitative illustrations of cross-activity development involving attachment to an activity's meaning and integration into its social structure.