PART 5
The Saga of
the fine Young Capitalists
Now we shall go back to a simpler time. A time when gaming journalists and their readers were only mildly adversarial, when each had a healthy distrust and dislike of each other. It is in this climate that that events would ripple out in ways no one could have foreseen. The Fine Young Capitalists are a group of entrepreneurs who saw a problem. They felt that there were women that had good ideas and could make a good video game but didn't know how to start. How they decided to address this problem was not by making a video about it or writing about the problem, but by actually helping a woman to make a game. They started an Indiegogo campaign to crowd fund a project. Women could submit their ideas, the community would vote on a winner and TFYC would help to make the game. The winner would get 8% of the proceeds and the rest would be donated to charity. This proactive stance to help women who would otherwise not be able to make a game actually get a foot into the industry seems like something that no one could possibly have a problem with.
Or so you would think. There were a group of people that had a problem with this. Not the equality hating boys club of gamers, but a different critic. In the course of looking for developers to help with making the game, TFYC approached Zoe Quinn. While initially interested, Quinn had an issue with the developers working for free. TFYC went onto explain that this was for a charity. Quinn continued to not give support to the product, now for a different reason. It was her assertion that TFYC were in fact transphobic. A bold claim to make against a charity working to allow women to make games. The policy in question?
Again no editorializing is needed here. The reader can decide for themselves if this rule was there to discriminate against transgendered people or if it was there to prevent someone from just saying they were a female and entering the competition. But now we must take a step back. Certainly Quinn is entitled to her opinion and can choose not to work with a charity if she so decides. Furthermore, I made the Arch Duke Ferdinand reference regarding Quinn, so why is she coming up again if she is not the point of gamer gate? It is because her and her P.R. Agent collectively released on Twitter the personal information of the contact person involved at TFYC. This led to not only them being blasted with emails but actually having their entire campaign attacked and hacked, shutting it down and forfeiting all the money they had raised.
This was not the end of TFYC saga however. They, in addition to everything else that happened to them, found that they were black listed by many major gaming publications they approached. What was the reason for this you may be asking? Reports that they were transphobic. When they pushed back denying this claim, they were encouraged instead to donate to Quinn's Rebel Game Jam. Time and time again they would attempt to get their side of the story out, and time and time again they would find their pleas falling on deaf ears.
In an interview with APG Nation, members of The Fine Young Capitalists explain:
"Kotaku’s Jason Schreier contacted us after our Indiegogo page got hacked on Aug 25. At the time, we assumed Zoe had simply not understood the terms of our website, and asked to do an article on the facts of the issues, explaining Zoe was confused and did not understand them. We wanted to set the record straight on what happened, but again, the article was never published."
In an interview with APG Nation, members of The Fine Young Capitalists explain:
"Kotaku’s Jason Schreier contacted us after our Indiegogo page got hacked on Aug 25. At the time, we assumed Zoe had simply not understood the terms of our website, and asked to do an article on the facts of the issues, explaining Zoe was confused and did not understand them. We wanted to set the record straight on what happened, but again, the article was never published."
It was actually the Reddit post above that would eventually get the charity to their fundraising goal. When it was discovered by 4chan's /v/ board that the same person who had such disdain for them had encouraged the black listing of a charity, they knew exactly how to fire back. These wailing hyper consumers would donate to the charity. It is unlikely, prior to this, that anyone, /v/ users especially, would have thought they would raise nearly $40,000 for this feminist charity. They raised so much money in fact that they got to design their own character to go in the game. Who is this character that surely would be nothing more than a hyper-sexualized trophy for a male power fantasy?
Vivianne James, a corruption of "video games", is the character they came up with. Angsty, frustrated, and irritated. Irritated, but not misogynistic. TFYC approved the design and Vivianne will be a character in the upcoming game. Predictably, those who paid them no attention earlier now felt they should not accept the money from 4chan because they are "historically anti-feminist." The charity came under even more scrutiny and explained that it was a good thing to have 4chan sitting at the table, engaging in a dialogue they traditionally had not been a part of. It is true that often 4chan and many feminists have been at odds in the past. This speaks to the power of video games to unite people from every walk of life. There's no reason 4chan couldn't make a positive female character for a game and there's no reason a woman can't make a good game. This project was about defying expectations and it did so in more ways than most would have expected. This is but one of the reasons the assertion that GamerGate is anti-woman is ludicrous. This is why you see such push back against members of the gaming industry who speak about inclusiveness and then seek to lock out huge sections of the audience. This is the problem with closeness between the industry and those covering it. Two groups were at odds, and the journalists were friends with one of the groups. Again, this is not really about Zoe Quinn saying this organization was transphobic. It's about a news corp that is not capable of doing its job because of ties to its subjects. I mention Quinn not to inspire hate towards her or any other woman, but to show the importance of professional distance, and what happens when that erodes.