Ok, so now I'd like to talk about a piece in detail that I did not cover in my opening post, because at the time I did not understand it. Namely
The Fine Young CapitalistsAnd...bear in mind, I'm not linking an article on this, because I...haven't seen everything collected nicely in one place. This post is a result of coalation and digging I've done.
To catch people up to speed, TFYC is the "feminist charity" that gamergate donated to a while back. They're also a group with which Zoe Quinn had a disagreement several months before any of this started.
So...some clarifications about them: they're not actually a charity; they're a for-profit company and have claimed so themselves. This shouldn't be too surprising with the word "capitalist" in the title, but still. They also agree with the statement:
http://pixietalksgamergate.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/tfyc-questions/They are a brand new organization; they have yet to run a contest to completion with a released game. So...it might turn out that nothing will come from the project (a lot of crowdfunded projects end up being duds). And their transparency is very low (no address, no list of employees, the one known employee hides it on his linkedin).
The story of their disagreement involved Zoe calling them exploitative and transphobic, and them claiming that she doxxed and DDOSed them. Let's go through each of these.
exploitativeSo this is somewhat subjective, but the structure of TFYC's competition is strange. The woman who wins provides an idea, and then a comapny in Colombia makes the game. This...isn't really what people like me are saying when we want more women in game development; we want more women actually creating content for the games. "Idea person" is not really a job within the game industry; the jobs are normally "Artist" "Animator" "Programmer" "Designer" "Producer". All of these actually create things (except producers, who still spend a lot of time on schedules, and getting resources for the team--and also not all companies have producers).
The winner of TFYC's contest just gets to be an idea person; doesn't actually make anything. And they get 8% of the profits if the game makes profits. It's not a great system to be honest.
TransphobicSo this is a bit messy...because their current policy is displayed
here but does not seem to be the policy they had back in March (and also
internet archiving suggests the page didn't exist until August 22). Previous communications suggest a different wording:
https://twitter.com/TFYCapitalists/status/522251529517297664https://docs.google.com/document/d/166fECwNpcRT3elDf0qUAnzVjU2gsJENwZaU9pGnIQdE/edithttp://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/224ktk/mozillas_ceo_steps_down/cgjm994I couldn't find the full version of the old wording, nor could other people I talked to, BUT here is the wording according to Zoe Quinn herself, who was nice enough to reply:
http://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2mseyq/question_has_tfycs_trans_policy_changed/cm7frdkThe trans policy was originally simply "Is the contest open to transgendered individuals that identify as female? Yes, as long as they transitioned before the start of the contest."
Which...I have no reason to doubt this statement given that it matches emails that they themselves wrote.
So lets look into this statement; is it problematic? For starters, I can't find the word "transitioned" defined by any human rights groups. It gets used (rarely) in sentences like these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender#TranssexualPeople who have transitioned may or may not necessarily identify as transgender or transsexual any longer, but simply as a man or a woman.
Which sounds...like it's much, much further into the process than "the point at which you self-identify as a gender". Basically, according to lists of terms I'm googling, "transitioned" doesn't actually mean anything in particular, but gets used colloquially to mean something FAR, FAR different from what TFYC believe it to mean.
I'm also going to pause and paraphrase a few choice quotes from this particular discussion from...about April (a month after they interacted with Quinn):
http://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/224ktk/mozillas_ceo_steps_down/cgjm994TFYC: [details disagreement]
fluff: "That's your fault; words mean things"
TFYC: "FUCK YOU"
fluff: "I can't imagine why people were put off by your behavior"
TFYC: "I'm tired having to deal with Cis individuals fighting for the rights of people that they have no idea about what so ever."
fluff: "I'm not cis, you ignorant asshole."
TFYC: "Your still wrong"
fluff: "live in your fantasy land if you want."
TFYC: [quotes the definition of "transition" NOT "transitioned" from here. Note also that the definition of transition quoted here does NOT match "self-identified".
fluff: That's not going to help you any.
The point of quoting (and shortening) this is just to demonstrate the stubbornness. This is a month after the original wording was suggested as problematic.
doxxing by ZoeThat wasn't her. Some random twitter follower of hers did. TFYC later admitted this much
DDOS by ZoeNever happened. She linked the website from her twitter. Lots of twitter followers + small website, it crashed. But there was no malicious intent
On their participation in gamergateSo...around the time hate is blowing up around Zoe Quinn, they re-tell their story, complete with several false claims, and because they are against Zoe Quinn, they become allies of Gamergate, and Gamergate funds them. This isn't so crazy; as we've seen with Jack Thompson, gamergate is cool with "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic. So...gamergate funds them, creates the Vivian James avatar for them to use (which to an outsider looks fine, but has some issues. Notably the green and purple colouring is a reference to a 4 chan meme about rape). 4 chan also gets them to post this:
https://twitter.com/tfycapitalists/status/502528192327204864And they defend receiving money from 4 chan, saying that to do otherwise would be to opress 4 chan:
http://thefineyoungcapitalists.tumblr.com/post/95548937520/on-opression-and-narrativeAnd their twitter account becomes pretty active within the gamergate hashtag, following some explicitly anti-feminist gamergaters (like...people with the tagline "feminists are stupid" in their twitter description).
So...let's rewind for a bit; is there anything particularly immoral in this section so far? The one thing I really take issue with is inserting themselves into a harassment campaign, and leveraging it for funding. This is...opportunistic at best, and harmful at worst. It's very much a "do the means justify the ends?" question. As for the rest of it...all of the 4 chan associations are hypothetically not a moral issue, HOWEVER, if your goal is to get women into making games, such strategies...might not be the best PR.
____________
So....basically....
Zoe Quinn, for all that my overall impression of her have been mixed, seems like her objections to TFYC in March were 100% valid and reasonable. Gamergate calling TFYC a "feminist charity"...they aren't a charity and never called themselves as such, and a lot of their public communication is stuff that feminists would find objectionable. (Personally, I'm not bothered by some of the TFYC stuff Zoe finds problematic such as
this, and feel the UofT study on spatial skills means that we should be making videogames part of the standard curriculum, but others do feel uncomfortable with this "male and female brains aren't identical" talk). So...are TFYC feminist? Overall I think they do have some feminist goals and ideas, but as an organization the message they send is sometimes mixed. Will we ever find out who the winning contestant is for their competition? They've given her the option to remain anonymous, and given how closely they're connected to gamergate...she might choose to take that option, so...future still uncertain. Will we ever see a game out of this crowd-funded project? Who knows with crowd funding, although the lack of transparency is not encouraging.
