A charity event to promote women in gaming is the victim of a complete media blackout from the gaming press And other stories.

A charity event to promote women in gaming is the victim of a complete media blackout [and harassment] from the gaming press

https://archive.ph/Ive8O all the links are live. and it was written by by Maxwell_Adams

The Fine Young Capitalists (I’ll call them TFYC) are running a game jam with the goals of encouraging women to join the gaming industry, producing a game, and donating to charity. They have taken ideas from women about cool games they’d like to make, produced five pitches, produced concept art, and are now asking for votes to determine which of these games will be made.

The woman who has their idea selected will be placed it the role of Producer, and recieve an 8% cut of the proceeds. TFYC’s own production staff will produce the game over 6 months. Most of the money goes to charity.

Over the past week, TFYC has received thousands of dollars in donations from 4chan. I’ll repeat that. A charity event to promote women in the gaming industry has recieved thousands of dollars in donations from 4CHAN. Does this sound interesting yet? Newsworthy, even?

On February 28th, TFYC was attacked. The were doxxed, banned from twitter, and their server was hit with a DDOS attack. They have recovered from this and are still pushing the event forward, despite losing $10,000 cash out of pocket when their sponsors backed out.

Interested in seeing evidence of this? You can do your own research on the February 28th attack on The Fine Young Capitalists. I was able to dig up this information after deploying my marginal Twitter skills.

Scroll down to about 7 pm EST and work your way up to watch everything unfold. You will see the tweets from Zoe Quinn (@zoequinnzel) and Maya Kramer (@legobutts) as they discover and discuss the FYC game jam.

6:59: @legobutts discovers TFYC

7:09: @zoequinnzel demonstrates a massive failure in reading comprehension

7:18: @zoequinnzel decides she is ‘skeeved out’

7:19: @legobutts notices her followers are all talking about this

7:28: @zoequinnzel decides to contact TFYC

7:30: @zoequinnzel contacts TFYC

7:32: @TFYCapitalists offers to schedule an interview

7:32: @legobutts retweets a post by @aerox47 showing a screencap of the facebook page of an FYC organizer, doxxing them

7:33: @zoequinnzel notices that the FYC website has crashed under the DDOS attack she triggered

7:34: @zoequinnzel begins asking questions

You can see that, at 7:38 and 7:39, @TFYCapitalists posted a couple answers. They were unable to participate in the conversation after this point because their twitter account was banned. Everyone else carried on making fun of TFYC.

7:48: @zoequinnzel wishes should could talk to TFYC a bit more

11:26: TFYC sarcastically thanks @legobutt for pointing out the flaws in his facebook privacy settings.

The facebook screencap (which has since been deleted) showed a post from december asking for an actress who could ‘sound smart’ to come in. These videos were produced when they hired that actress.

It didn’t stop there.

May: TFYC was unable to get any journalists to cover them.

Even as work proceeded and concept art was being produced, they still couldn’t get any attention.

July: They resorted to paying for press releases, to little effect.

August: Quinngate explodes. TFYC finally gets some attention. The original post has been replaced by a soundcloud link where you can hear the whole story.

No gaming website will report on any of this. They will not even acknowledge the existence of this charity game jam. People who are aware of this situation have been trying to reach gaming journalists through comments sections, twitter, or anything else. I can only imagine what their inboxes look like as requests to run the TFYC story come in.

The media blackout continues on every gaming site. There are a few non-gaming sites that have run the story, though. They all have something in common: when they report on the February 28th attack, there is a conspicuous absence fact checking or investigation of any kind.

Let’s look at all 6 of these articles.

Cinemablend ran this story on the FYC Game Jam. Here’s their explanation for the attack directed at TFYC on Feburary 28th:

Sadly, the original campaign was derailed and shutdown. I can openly say that The Fine Young Capitalists are back up and running after incurring several hack attacks and additional shutdown attempts by detractors. The iron will of those supporting the project refuse to let it die.

“I can openly say…”. Writers don’t include a phrase like that unless a gag order is involved.

When Vice Media ran a story on the charity event, they wrote this:

To add fuel (irrelevant fuel, but fuel nonetheless) to the fire, a Reddit user claimed that Quinn purposely sabotaged a female-centric “game jam,” sponsored by feminist group The Fine Young Capitalists, in order to promote her own female-centric game jam, Rebel Jam. Needless to say, this is not the kind of event that 4chan’s gaming community would get excited about. But they’d developed a taste for blood, and they saw an opportunity to make Quinn look bad…

The reddit user in question was SillySladar, one of the main organizers of the event.

The comments section on that article is being heavily moderated. It used to look like this.

When Techcrunch ran their article, they were deliberately vague.

This attack was not one of hackers looking to take on Indiegogo as a whole, but was related to a specific online controversy between gamers and their supporters which TFYC was involved in. The narrative involves Zoe Quinn, the game developer who was reportedly sexually harassed. Further details came out after news about her story hit that put her claims into question.

That has led to an ongoing mini-war between the two sides in this matter, which 4chan has also been involved in.

You can find an identical strategy in the piece on Slate.com

When I hear that 4chan gamers raised $13,000 for the project, I thought, “Fantastic!” Some people will say that male gamers are just doing it out of spite, that the only reason you’re donating to women in gaming is because the organizers of the campaign don’t like Zoe Quinn either (they allege she sabotaged their project). Let them think that.

Again, a simple link to knowyourmeme.com and no research or fact checking of any kind.

The article on TheMarySue is deliberately vague:

In addition to a near-constant stream of death and rape threats, Quinn has also been accused (along with Sarkeesian) of sabotaging a crowdfunding campaign for a female-centric game jam hosted by The Fine Young Capitalists because of… reasons.

And a new article up on Gameranx is just trying as hard as they can to make this a story about women being oppressed:

A quick look at the comments of their supporters shows a major recurring theme, that major gaming sites have not provided coverage of The Fine Young Capitalists, and that is a fair point. They deserve to be reported on, and they deserve to scrutinised, just like Sarkeesian deserves the right to critique video games.

Nobody will discuss or investigate the attack on TFYC from February 28th. No gaming website will report the existence of the FYC Game Jam at all.

On August 29th, The Fine Young Capitalists posted their truce with Zoe Quinn.

Regarding our grievances with Zoe Quinn, an associate of hers, posted my Facebook information. Zoe did not add any information to the post, nor did she post my phone number or email. The subsequent death threat I received via email was not orchestrated by Zoe. Nor was the DDOSing of our website or the banning of us from Twitter. She was simply the most famous voice in a choir of people that did not understand the project.

Zoe Quinn has posted her own response to everything that’s happening.

Regarding the claim that I doxxed and destroyed The Fine Young Capitalists, that is also incorrect. … I know that when things kick up online it can be hard to sort out who did what, but aside from their own statement, there is zero evidence of this. What I did do was be critical of some of their policies on twitter, because as someone who has taught women game design and created programs to help them get started making their first games I get really passionate about this stuff. We have different approaches but share the same wish to get women involved with game development, and I wish them the best of luck in accomplishing that.

Still, no gaming websites are mentioning, or even acknowledging the existence of the FYC game jam. Nobody anywhere is to mention that a small indie dev community attacked a charity game jam. Not a single gaming site is willing to touch this. As the media blackout goes on, a charity organization that needs donations is being denied the attention they need in order to be successful.

Let it be clear that this is not a gender issue. The MRAs and the SJWs can have the biggest, most pointless twitter war they feel like having. It really doesn’t matter. TFYC is working to promote women in the gaming industry, working to provide money to cancer research, and working to keep their own operation running while everyone who should be supporting them works against them in the most harmful way possible.

So yeah.

let’s also remmber the trans members of crash override that were over worked and expolited by the same “victim”.

To support the games.

see the following.

[embed]Afterlife Empire on Steam Hey, you just died. But don't worry! All the major religions were wrong! Instead of ascending to a new plane of…store.steampowered.com

and this game has a trans main character but was omitted from the gaming press and memory holed… because that would upset their narrative. of ‘games bad’ despite 4 chan donating to make these games a reality.

[embed]Aerannis on Steam Aerannis is a mission-based stealth action game set in a world of conspiracy and full of action and assassinations.store.steampowered.com

I just want to set the record straight.

[embed]On Apologizing for Getting Punched in The Face. So apparently we got an article written about us, I'd link to it, but that would only encourage more traffic which…thefineyoungcapitalists.tumblr.com

“On Apologizing for Getting Punched in The Face.

So apparently we got an article written about us, I’d link to it, but that would only encourage more traffic which would cause people to write more hit pieces. And the next time I’m not going to be angry enough to write a funny response.

So the problem with considering women as being equal is you’re not impressed by them just being women. I vividly remember one of the contestants for TFYC saying into the phone “I never thought I’d be able to make a game,” hoping for an emotional reaction and me saying to myself “Why the fuck would she think that.”

Women aren’t special, making a video game isn’t some big thing that’s never been done by one before. Roberta Williams made like 10 of them, most of them were pretty good and I’m pretty sure she didn’t wake up look in the mirror and say “Look how awesome I am for breaking gender barriers.” She made games, they were awesome and they sold for money.

Zoe Quinn didn’t understand this project, she decided to send some followers our way, one of them doxxed me she retweeted it, one of them sent a death threat, tons of them called me transphobic and the majority said the project was exploitive. It costed me some money, a friend and a sponsor. She fucked up, I’ve been treated worst, I rarely think about it anymore. My greatest sin seems to be not pretending it didn’t happen.

It happened, she didn’t know what she was doing. Apparently she’s not an omniscient god sent from heaven to purge the earth from heathen gamers. She’s just some woman that wants to get people to make games. We wrote the statement/peace treaty with her specifically so that she could go to PAX and point to it if anyone asked how we felt about her. And I told Samantha just before pushing it to the webpage “I feel like I’m apologizing for getting punched in the face,” she laughed we posted it.

You don’t know Lola’s she a woman, you don’t know Giovana she’s a woman. Samantha, Laura, all of them have worked really hard on this project. All of them have jobs, all of them are confident and none of them wants to be treated as a victim. The entire article was a hit piece on their work. And if we were to play the victim card, the majority of the crew is Latino, and Samantha has Cerebral Palsy so we win the oppression Olympics. We don’t bring it up cause it’s irrelevant for their work. But technically the author did make fun of a cripple. (I specifically asked Samantha and she said we could use that wording.)

They’ve done excellent work, and you don’t give a single care to their struggles, because they’re not famous. The article was never about misogyny, or harassment, but about one guy trying to white knight his way into getting with the cool kids. And guess what, he fucked it up.

I know reading this doesn’t give that warm fuzzy feeling, like when you’re looking at a young girl attending school for the first time. Zoe’s not a child, women aren’t children, and treating them equally means treating them like adults. To my backers, please shut up about that woman. To the journalists that are covering these proceedings, please remember that’s she a person, not a god, and in our case, she fucked up.

I did get an email from gameranx it just went to spam. Thankfully none of the questions were relevant to the inaccuracies in the article so I will address them here.

1) Given TFYC’s goal of promoting women within gaming, what is your position on your supporters who have been engaged in the harassment and abuse of women within with game media and development?

Your reader base is gamers and they also have been painted with the same brush as harassers and abusers of women. I think it would be a great statement if you returned your ad revenue for the last month.

2) What is your reaction to TFYC’s initiatives to promote women game designers being used as ammunition in the continued attacks on Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian?

Anita Sarkeesian isn’t a game designer, unless you’re referring to another one I haven’t heard from. I ran a streaming sessions where people could discuss Anita’s work and answered peoples questions to remove some of the anger. And I wrote a long statement with the help of Zoe Quinn to explain that we were no longer angry at her. I have no idea why my supporters would use me against them. That would be like saying giving women money for their game is oppressing them.

3) In light of your objectives and the manner in which you are being used as part of ongoing abuse campaigns, do you intend to issue a rebuke of online harassment, such as the one seen in the recent open letter from game developers?

Yes, to all my backers that are harassing people online, stop. To all the game designers that support the women gameranx has mentioned out of some sense of guilt, I absolve you of that guilt. Now go and actually do something to get more women involved in games.

**613 notes** Sep 3rd, 2014

On — “I have never been a member of the communist party.”

We’ve said this line on three separate occasions and I’m going to explain why, and also why we put up the stupid petition, sign it here. During 1950’s there was something call the Red Scare, which is also referred to as McCarthyism. After America ended the Second World War with the dropping of the atomic bomb, almost immediately America went into a cold war against multiple communist countries. And it became apparent that the USSR had hundreds of spies deep in the American government.

And the government started putting into place ridiculous policies.

In March 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835, creating the “Federal Employees Loyalty Program” establishing political-loyalty review boards who determined the “Americanism” of Federal Government employees, and recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union, as well as some suspected of being “Un-American”.

In 1958, it was estimated that roughly one out of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some sort of loyalty review. Once a person lost a job due to an unfavorable loyalty review, it could be very difficult to find other employment. “A man is ruined everywhere and forever,” in the words of the chairman of President Truman’s Loyalty Review Board. “No responsible employer would be likely to take a chance in giving him a job.

People were brought in front of congress and were interrogated on these issues for real or imaginary crimes. And these policy was used by the RIGHT against left leading policies and as a means to decrease civil liberties and increase the surveillance state. Minorities were targeted, LGBT individuals were targeted, every minority was affected. But the larger issue was how ludicrous ineffective it was, many of the people that were using these policies to arrest and gain sensitive information were themselves soviet spies already in the government.

These polices attacked various media creators, writers for Hollywood were interrogated and lost their job, the red scare was in part responsible for the wide spread approval of the book “The Seduction of the Innocent,” which said that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. To totally affect our culture arguably for the worst.

When I saw a writer from supposedly the most progressive video game site, advocating in a sidewise manner that people should sign this petition it completely set me off. This is dumb this stupid, there is no #GamerGate party, there is no need to create a list of member for the sole purpose of punishing them, and there is no reason for a person who coined a phrase to have to deal with this stupidity. This is the dumbest I’ve seen in this whole debate, not because it’s the worst thing, but it’s being done by a supposed journalist who should know better.

So you know, for all the journalists reading this could you start fucking writing article about women in the game industry that focuses on their content. Because being oppressed isn’t a selling point when someone is putting down 10 dollars.

On not “News” and Why Gamergate sustains.

One of the problems with the Web 2.0 world is how it’s affected what news is covered. Before the Internet revolution, “News” was as the name described news. The newspaper and the nightly news were your only window into getting the events of the next day. If you didn’t read it, world-changing events might silently pass you by.

And it, well sort of, grounded in the culture in a certain groups of events. Newspapers, like video games, are one of those things where the first one costs half a million, and the second one cost pennies to make. You could be a consumer for pennies, but to print your own was an undertaking. This gave the mainstream press incredible control over what was discussed. 20 years ago today regular people were legitimately discussing the Mir Space Station, for two reasons, one it was a big deal at the time, and two because the “news” was covering it.

There was still gossip of course. Who was sleeping with whom in your community was a popular topic of discussion even among those who didn’t read the paper. The newspaper did have an entire sections devoted to printing the press releases of the stars of course, as well as the “leaked” information from their publicists. But the media was focused on facts, even if they weren’t completely true.

One of the untold stories of the time concerned Entertainment Tonight. ET was relatively unsuccessful at its start. The ad sales were easy but the viewers were poor. When the series began, it focused on what movies were being released, who was in them, and where you could watch or listen to the content. It was more of an on air review of the latest media trends, than a gossip blog. The apparently mythical objective review there has been so much discussion about.

When Entertainment Tonight really started becoming profitable was when they moved away from being reviews, to being a news show. Suddenly those press releases became breaking news, breaking news that warranted interviews with the celebrities involved, or their publicists, or eventually people who were just tangentially related to the issue at hand. The assumption before was that viewers would see through this manufactured drama, but results showed that while many did they were more likely to discuss it with others. Giving sensationalized information was actually better as it not only attracted attention but also discussion, much of which was refuting the points made. All this discussion good or bad made it must watch television.

Howard Stern once said words to the effect of, the people who like my show listen to it once, the people who hate my show listen to it twice so they know where to get offended. In the rating of a show there is no column marked, viewed ironically.

What history forgets is the way the Internet started out. The Internet was more or less a free printing press when it began. If you look at the early net, you actually saw people concentrating on technical news, world news and events (As well as a massive amount of pornography.) The first online publication were surprisingly respectable, almost to counter the assumption by the public at large they weren’t. But just like Entertainment Tonight, they all slowly moved away from covering information objectively and instead focused on the emotions of the issue. Before, discussion on a news story was free advertising, but online with comment threads, message forums, referral links, and online ads it was a way of making money. It’s telling that Reddit, “The front page of the Internet” in not a news site, but merely a means of commenting and organizing existing news.

We’ve been tracking various websites that discuss events around TFYC, /r/GamerGhazi inevitably has more comments and more interaction with us than /r/KotakuInAction. KotakuInAction normally approves of what we are doing and nothing ruins a conversation more than approval. While at the same time GamerGhazi has tons of points to discuss, a surprisingly high number which aren’t true. When we discuss the issue with Anti-GamerGate “journalists” (A term we use only because it’s clear they have a bias), everything becomes about emotion and drama. No Anti-GamerGate reporter has ever asked us about feminism, in fact the only interviews where people have asked us to STOP talking about feminism were clearly Anti-Gamergate.

What fuels the fires of GamerGate is the outrage against it. Just like with Howard Stern people have more or less quit their job, to watch it not once but twice so they know exactly where to be offended, which fuels the other side anger. Commenting on the news shouldn’t make the news. But so much of the GamerGate discussion is not on what happened but what someone said about something that may have happened. @radicalbytes has less followers than we do but he’s retweeted more by his “enemies” than his followers, so he’s much more visible. Crash Override Network has 22 articles not because it’s news, or because of journalistic corruption, but because it drives traffic, and people want to add their own opinion by repeating what others have said.

I regret that in the end the main limiting factor of TFYC might actually be that we don’t fight enough to make enemies with the minorities we are trying to help, and too much time working with them to make the world a better placeI think it’s a sad message when that’s the best way to survive in the current media space is to hate everyone. We don’t know what to say, because all people in social justice want to do is talk about them selves.

But then again, in the current media space I might be saying all of this for attention.

P.S. Boingboing stop linking to articles about us that have no facts in them

So yeah. If you want to still believe that Gamergate and gamers are toxic. sure. it’s not like that doesn’t have truth to it.

There are people that are now bitter and have prejudices simply because of the knife in their back because of a corrupting self-righteous, neo-liberal bs that was very illiberal in practice… only to be very scared of any change.

But it’s because of the knives in our back. And how I, as a minority, was seen to be hateful against myself.

But mean while, we’re not the ones who sent bomb threats.

[embed]Gamergate Administrative Policy Procedures - Anti-War - Bureau Personnel - Civil Rights - Counterterrorism - Foreign…vault.fbi.gov

[embed]Bomb Threat Disrupts SPJ Airplay #GamerGate Debate Event at SPJ conference on one year anniversary of GamerGate continued despite the threat.reason.com

But there’s no shortage of misinformation

[embed]

and if we’re going to talk about toxicity. let’s talk about all of it!

An apology and repairing the damage would be GREAT.

All the people claiming to be for social justice telling a cancer sufferer to die.

And some how falsely accusing the anti-Trump John bain as being part of a “hate movement”?

The pro social justice people were and are racist.

trivialize rape when they see fit…

Even having blood on their hands.

[embed]

And then the fascists of now

And now when the censorship was exposed… with the same rhetoric of Jack Thompson being abused by the RIGHT WING NUT JOBS of Collective shout…

And now you get yoru stuff censored.

WE TRIED TO WARN YOU ALL.

Social justice is really imporaint and trans rights are human rights.

But the reason people are still hesitant is because… ya’ll lost your damn minds.

to the pont you harass people off the net.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/JyIBH

same gross rhetoric.

And then you resurect a corpse to blame anything and everything on it.

to the point This con artist made a fake harsssment form. with a non-existent Email and web address… and some how think men actually talk like this.

Where people giving death threats were defended.

Where the “Antis” were just … dishonest as hell.

calling people pedos for a drawn, fictiona, grown woman with exagerated proportions. WHAT THE HELL?

Just to keep the sex harassment and the coverup of such harassment at Activision-Blizzard a secret for the better part of a decade just to release it as a book … so he could profit instead of get the victims help and report on it when it was happening.

Just so he could have the inside Track on the most popular studio ever. the same studio that Censored their own games and joke lines, replaced a woman with a bowl of fruit, while all this was going on.

nice idea.

oh wait.

Media literacy is dead.

All because the indie game awards had stocks in Polytron, The company behind FEZ, and Naython Grayson couldn’t keep it in his pants. as an assigned female at birth committed sexual abuse against their then partner, Eron Gonji.

These are people that decide what content is “problematic” or icky and needs to be removed and what jokes can and cannot be said?

That’s not compassion, that’s control!

[embed]

I’ll admit. i say very terrible things to people. I’m not a good person.

But at least i didn't lead to fascists taking power.