Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Conversation with The Fine Young Capitalists

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Oct. 21, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:50:56

A Conversation with The Fine Young Capitalists

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	Hello, everyone.
	I'm here with Matthew Rappard of the Fine Young Capitalists, and he'd like to talk to us about a few things.
	So, I thought I'd have a nice conversation with him and see what we can go over.
	The Fine Young Capitalists are a feminist game development group who recently tried to do a game jam for women to encourage women to get into the game industry, which was torpedoed by Zoe Quinn almost single-handedly.
	And I'm pretty sure that if you're familiar with GameMegate, you probably know who they are.
	So, hi, Matthew.
	Thanks for joining me.
	Hi.
	Yeah.
	We actually wanted to explain, because we haven't had a lot of time to discuss it, but we actually weren't surprised about what went on.
	We actually met with a PR person to say, what are we supposed to do if the internet finds out about what happened?
	Because that'll go a bit poorly for a couple people.
	But I just, I want to actually just explain the project a bit and go into some of the things that we did.
	And you can feel free to interrupt if I'm not clarifying things.
	Please.
	So in Canada, there are actually a lot of groups to give funding to people for various things.
	So for example, we have the Canadian Media Fund, which will pay for up to 50% of, say, a video game or a movie.
	And they're a non-profit.
	They're semi-owned by the government.
	But it's basically they take stock in the company.
	So they give you 50% of the money.
	They get 50% of the stock for that particular project.
	And then they use that money to then pay for other projects.
	So it's a way of trying to keep Canada competitive with the United States and other things.
	We have very good tax benefits that are the same thing.
	And there's various organizations.
	And one of the issues that we came up with is that because that money was so, because it's like basically free money, it was so competitive that a lot of groups that were disadvantaged were just completely unable to gain access to the funds unless they really played up their minority status.
	And this causes two effects.
	The first is that you see the same people over and over again, which is really bad for new stuff.
	And the second thing is that minorities are only really able to tell particular stories because only those stories are approved.
	And where we came in is they were really trying to determine if a project would be successful.
	And they were thinking about measuring if a project should receive funding.
	It wasn't the CMF, it was another group.
	But they were trying to determine if a project could just receive funding by the number of likes they got on Facebook.
	And I was like, that's horrible.
	In every way, we were just explaining to them that likes are only good for particular metrics.
	You can fake them.
	It seems like a system that's horribly open to abuse.
	Yeah.
	So we just said, the reason this project started was that we were like, let's just focus on a minority and let's just set the barrier of entry as low as can possibly be.
	So in the case of women, it was just like she has an idea for a game.
	She has to present it professionally, but she doesn't have to have any programming experience at all.
	And what we'll do is we'll pair her up with another women's group that has experience in the field.
	And they'll help her present the idea under the assumption that even if she doesn't win or even if we don't raise enough money, then she'll actually be able to present her idea and hopefully get financing somewhere else.
	And then the whole thing was, we'll put it online, the community will choose the best game.
	They'll pay for it, and then they'll partially own the game.
	They won't actually own stock in it, but they'll get profit participation.
	And then that money can then go to support all of these programs.
	And it becomes this thing about, why didn't you focus on education?
	And there's a couple reasons for that.
	But the first thing is that Google exists and people really love to explain these things.
	And there's this concept that women are unable to learn programming.
	And that makes no sense historically because the first programming language was created by a woman.
	And the word computer actually comes from a profession that was actually women-dominated.
	It was doing calculations.
	So that's why it's a digital computer.
	It used to be a person doing it.
	Now it's a digital unit.
	And that was mostly women.
	In fact, NASA, when they started digitizing everything, like when they started moving away from doing calculations on person, the person who used to check all the calculations was a black woman, if I remember correctly.
	So there's never been a problem with them being able to do the work.
	In fact, even now, if I reference Unlocking the Clubhouse, which is a book on MIT, which is about women in technology, women still are on the dean's list.
	Per capita, they're on the dean's list more than men.
	The main issue was that they didn't develop the skills, the soft skills, as we call them, to engage in startup culture and programming culture, which is a lot of self- Could you just specify what you mean by soft skills there?
	Soft skills are things like when people say, do you have leadership skills?
	It's things that are like a psychology-based thing that's usually learned by doing instead of a knowledge-based skill that you gain from a book.
	So the biggest thing that you need to do with programming is you need to be able to fail, then identify your mistakes, and then research how to fix it, and then move on.
	If someone is developing a game, I can confirm that is exactly how it works.
	And one of the things that happens is when men have problems with that, they'll be like, fuck this language, fuck this API.
	And when they succeed, they'll actually be like, I'm the kig of the world.
	Women as a group tend to actually invert that.
	So women see when the program is failing, they see it as a personal failing.
	And when there's an achievement, they tend to see it as like the support group and everything else they have.
	And this combined with gaming is so involved with learning computers.
	One of the quotes is like a computer science student spends his whole day programming and then goes home to play video games.
	That because video games aren't as popular with women, that also lowers it.
	And the last thing is that Mothers and fathers that have male children tend to let their male children basically run farther away before being called back than their female children.
	And that makes self, it makes it women have less access to self-directed study, like because their parents are worried about them getting hurt.
	And they don't develop these kinds of, these are all cultural things.
	None of them are basically biological ones.
	Just query one of those.
	They have less access to self-directed study because I take it you mean just experience in the world rather than book learning or something like that.
	No, no, that's the whole problem with it.
	If it's book learning, women are so much better at it.
	But it's like they're women, especially when it comes to grades, they're better, they tend to be focused on getting higher grades than the actual learning, while men are a bit more of the inverse.
	But it's more for like programming.
	It's like, I have a problem.
	What can I do?
	I can read a million books, or I can go and ask someone online who will probably swear at me.
	And if they're, and if, again, if you're the parents of a child, if it's a boy, you're more likely to let him do that, especially at a younger age, than you are to let your daughter hang around in internet chat rooms or on internet forums to get the information that she needs.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Why do you think that is then?
	We think that it's how we social position women.
	But the main thing is that, first of all, there's the blandest thing, which is that women, if they engage in a sexual relationship, they get pregnant.
	And that knocks, every level of culture has that.
	But it's that there's also this thing about damsel and discretress where you're trying to rescue women.
	And that's really common.
	And it's both an advantage and a disadvantage.
	So it's just like when there's a possibility of danger, because in our mind, society is so interested in actually rescuing a woman, that means that they're also willing to push danger onto her when she's not in that particular place.
	Could you clarify that last statement, please?
	Just give an example.
	Well, like, again, the internet access is a good one.
	But another good example is like, again, this whole thing about Gamergate is that you'll find that, like, as I say, tell the people, there's apparently three female developers in the entire world.
	If you follow Gamergate, there's three female developers in the entire world, and they're all famous for being harassed.
	And Brianna knows them all, doesn't she?
	Yeah.
	But it's just that that being the overwhelming thing, again, John Carmack, who made Doom, his first game is about killing, Wolfenstein is about killing Nazis.
	And then Doom is like this weird sort of hell infrastructure followed by Quake, which is getting horrible letters all of the time.
	But that has zero part of his history at all.
	He gets horrible letters all the time, do you say?
	Well, yeah, well, like, less so now, but like, when it was like the moral panic for video games is like one of the things when we're explaining to like the media why it subsists is like the video game audience is already bloodied.
	They've already fought multiple conflicts, everything in the media.
	So Doom, Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, Postal.
	They've fought these sort of media battles where the prevailing media opinion is against them, and they've sort of held their ground against it.
	But it's like, again, I am 100% sure that Carmack received tons and tons of angry and threatening emails.
	It just wasn't part of, it wasn't part of his narrative.
	Yeah, I'm sure that they probably got a lot of flack from the conservatives in the 90s.
	Yeah.
	Well, they were implemented in Columbine.
	Exactly.
	I just want to make it clear because people sometimes make this mistake.
	We are still arguing that women probably receive it more and they receive it more personally.
	And I'll get into those reasons later.
	It's just Carmack's been around for forever.
	And he's been at all of these major points where, again, like Doom, a good example is like Microsoft, Gabe Newell was actually the person who did it, like, did work to make Doom run on Windows because it was more popular than Windows.
	Like, more people were playing Doom than had, more people had Doom installed on their computer than Windows.
	I used to play Doom on DOS, actually.
	Yeah.
	That's exactly why.
	And it's just like, but he's, but again, like, if you ask, is John, if I was to, again, most people don't know him, but even the people that do, if I was to say, is he gay or is he not, most people wouldn't be able to even answer.
	He has a wife, but it's just like his personal experience is completely devoid in the medium.
	That's interesting.
	Yeah, I personally have no idea.
	I just love ID software's games.
	So John Carmack's a bit of the personal hero of mine.
	Yeah.
	So again, so like turning back to the point of kind of like why we were doing this project is exactly that.
	Women, the really gross simplification that I use is that if a man is to succeed in a relationship, it's best if he acts like he's successful in business.
	If a woman is to be successful in business, it's like she's supposed to act like she would if she was engaged in a relationship.
	Meaning that factors like how open she is, how relatable she is, what her political views are, what kind of people she hangs around with.
	This becomes really important and how beautiful she is, if you use the beauty, if we incorporate the beauty myth.
	But these are all sort of constructs that women need to have in business that men don't.
	Like, literally speaking, no one also knows what John Carmack's politics are on anything.
	And we found that this was really limiting in how they could kind of succeed professionally, which is why we have this ridiculous name, the fine young capitalists.
	That's a great name.
	We just said.
	Sorry, I didn't accept.
	We did.
	But we just said, like, I don't, they had to write who they were at the bottom, and we scrubbed that when the judges were reviewing the proposals.
	I didn't see a picture.
	I didn't even know their people didn't know their age.
	I didn't do the judging, but I contacted the people when we had the applicants.
	But at no point did we care about anything but their idea.
	And that was, it was really good for the judges because when you're doing things that are both genders, there's always this concept when it's called when they're not the master class.
	So when they're not a white male, when it's a woman, it's like, now I have to judge this differently because it's a woman.
	But when they're all women, it's like, oh, screw it.
	Now we're just going to judge which idea is the best.
	And for the judges, that was actually really freeing.
	And what we wanted to do was we really wanted to remove their personal experiences.
	We wanted to focus on their ideas, and we wanted to make it in a way that it could be resentable to gamers.
	And I'm going to explain that, and I'm going to reference the work that was actually out with Dagger and why they're talking about destroying the gamers' identity.
	And one of the issues that you have with capitalism is inevitably speaking, the masses win, because that's where the most money is.
	And this is why when you see in their papers, they talk about how do you subvert this.
	And my argument, their argument seems to be to destroy the gamer identity.
	And my argument is like, let's take what's really useful about that identity.
	They're really obsessively interested in things.
	They're really interested in discussing things at length online.
	And they're really willing to disperse information.
	So it's like that's why the people choose the game is so that they can argue over which game is better.
	And they can also get this idea of actually supporting a woman, even though it's against other women.
	But it's like, I like this person, I like this idea, I want to support this woman.
	I'm going to give her money to make her game.
	And, you know, hopefully I'll get a return on it that'll go to a charity I choose.
	And all of these are sort of constructs that we want to push men to support women because you're not supporting her because, again, it's just when you're in a business, there's no real reason to hire a person who's oppressed.
	It's like, it's not an asset that you can monetize.
	While if you're hiring this, if you've given money to this woman because you really liked her idea, and then another woman comes with an idea, and it's kind of interesting, then you have that experience already, and hopefully the second time will be easier.
	And that's why we talk about doing this over and over again to kind of ingrain that into the culture.
	And this is why we define ourselves as radical feminism because we're trying to radically change how people view women.
	In our case, we're trying to have people view them as investors and creators of projects and move away from the narrative of them being oppressed.
	And that's not because we don't believe the oppression happens.
	We just believe in a long-term goal, we can't just be giving women money because we feel sad.
	Because eventually we stop feeling sad.
	It's a bad business practice anyway to do something like that.
	Yeah.
	So, one of the things that happened, though, is again to this context of women actually, as I said, when they're in business, they're using the same skills that they would do in their developing relationship.
	The groups that supported women were very interested in creating large complicated groups.
	So, a group that actually is for, say, we're trying to teach women how to make video games.
	It's not uncommon then for them to have a board of like nine people, but then an operating budget of 5,000.
	So, that's a lot of bureaucracy and a small operating budget.
	And that kind of limits what you can do.
	You're artificially creating a bureaucracy.
	And then it's kind of like, why does that happen?
	Why doesn't the group just splinter?
	And what it is, is that, again, it's sort of like in high school, that the women like to be part of a big group, and they especially like to be the leader of a group, and they like to have this hierarchy with the concept that if I'm part of this group, I can eventually go up to this hierarchy.
	And what was very, very weird is that we sent out applications like, hey, you want to make a game, we'll pay for all the art, and you'll own the idea, and you can keep the proposal.
	We're just crazy.
	That's the form.
	We found that groups, like the members of groups that actually focus on women and technology, were less likely to engage than the general population, which we were always a little fussy about.
	And we think it's this, again, it's this whole social structure.
	And it gets sillier in that one of the groups, the largest one in Canada for just women in games, who also has this incredibly small operating budget, we had a person from a hedge fund.
	It was in, what do they call them?
	It's basically a hedge fund that hippies give money to.
	So it's like, we want to make sure that no one's being exploited.
	And we were just telling them, like, well, why don't you do this project where you're giving money to have a woman make a game?
	We can make sure that the game will be made, and it can be a great PR, like it could be a great PR thing for you guys, and you can give money.
	And we explained it to both the nonprofit group and the other group that how it would go is they would give between $50,000 and $100,000 to make the game.
	The investors group would get a third of the money.
	The non-profit would get a third of the profits.
	And then the creator and the production team would get a third.
	So each group would get a third.
	And so the investors group would be able to recoup their money.
	Getting 30% of her production for that amount is actually not that bad, especially with all the labor, like, because all the labor was really cheap.
	The production company would get points off the back, and they would be happy with it.
	And supposedly, this women group would be able to, A, do a major project to get women involved in gaming, but B, be able to get income to do future projects or to do future awareness things, whatever they want.
	And they were extremely against this.
	They really did not like using women in this way.
	I mean, is that really called using women?
	Isn't that just presenting an opportunity to women?
	They literally said, we do not want to engage in capitalism, which is actually what Diagra says.
	Well, if they're full Marxist, then they wouldn't.
	But we think a lot of it is, again, it's just like, how do you like, how do women's social positioning themselves?
	If it's for money, that's what I keep telling people.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, it has to be for money.
	We have to be hiring you because you make us money.
	Or else we'll go broke.
	And this is the only way the economy works.
	But they were very against that.
	And one of our big points that was there, and like Zoe dumped the email so we can talk about it, is like we specifically said, because we've done research, is that if we do this model, men are more likely to engage.
	Because not only do they get a game, but it's a production that they can do modding for that they can physically support instead of like supporting on an emotional level that we can actually do this.
	And we kind of said, you know, like, how would you get men to engage?
	I just remember she laughed in my face and then said no.
	And I was just like, well, that set the tone for the rest of this conversation.
	We should leave.
	And that's why we actually formed the group because originally we didn't, like, we literally just wanted to run the investment.
	And we most of what we were doing for it was to determine which women would get involved, which kind of media outlets to talk to, all of this kind of stuff, this knowledge that we could then monetize in normal business.
	Yeah, just a question then.
	What did they want you to do instead of the way you proposed?
	They always want to focus on education.
	And my argument against that is twofold.
	One, we find that in the video game field, there's a lot of unaccredited schools whose knowledge is difficult to determine.
	It's not the invest a community college is far more economical.
	And if you want accredited education, you should go to a university.
	And in Canada, our universities are half, the government pays half.
	So it's shitty, but it's not that shitty.
	But there was groups that were actually taking, like, they were focused on getting women in, like, they were like, we're women focused, and they were not accredited, so they didn't get money from the government.
	So your education was suspect, and you were paying about 50% more than you were for a computer science, like a year of a computer science degree.
	And they were teaching stuff like HTML and JavaScript skills.
	And as I explained to people, fundamentally, those are things you can learn online.
	And you should always engage online first.
	If you're having problems, like getting started, go to a community college class and pay a small amount of money and activate those services.
	But they were, again, I went to the school and it was all hipsters with laptops sitting around.
	And it was, you know, they had this woman with really hot pants on.
	And I was just like, this is the most different computer learning course that I've ever been to.
	And I don't think that, like, again, like, if you take a film degree, for example, like, that's not going to help you get into the industry.
	You're taking that mostly for the personal experience.
	And like, and you like learning about films.
	Like, that's not going to get you a job in the film industry.
	So I'm like, and I'm fine when people do that.
	And I'm fine when people do this course like that.
	But I get a little bit irritated when it's a women's, like they're advocating women to go into this course because this is the best way to educate them when it's like, I don't think in the long term this knowledge is as good as it could be.
	So that's kind of the first reason why we didn't want to focus on education.
	And the second thing is just the length of time that it requires.
	So if you're doing, let's say, a week-long workshop and you're, you know, let's say going into the business and you're competing with people who have four years of schooling as a minimum, that workshop is really great if you want to inspire people.
	That's not a good way to cause systemic change in an industry.
	You need to actually have people at a level where women are either in charge or in high-ranking positions and are able to make decisions.
	And making a game on your own, it's again, it's good socially, it's good for awareness, but it doesn't change the industry.
	Okay.
	One thing that's very interesting, actually.
	Sorry, there's a lot that I'm trying to pass there.
	Just to go through a few things that I note about this whole situation is how not Marxist you are.
	Yeah.
	Except that the game is open source and the art is licensed under Creative Commons.
	That doesn't mean you're not Marxist.
	That doesn't mean you're Marxist in any way.
	What I mean is you've got this.
	See, I'm not a feminist, but I'm very happy for people to say, we would like to give women opportunities to get into the gaming industry.
	And if I was to suggest a method of doing it, you did exactly the right thing.
	You did exactly how I would do it.
	Say, look, we're going to open the opportunity.
	So a female who wants to design games can pitch us an idea and people can vote on that idea.
	And, you know, or we choose it.
	I don't know how exactly you chose the best one there.
	And then we'll develop the game and she'll help us design it.
	And, you know, and then you'll produce a product that you can sell on the market.
	And you've not only produced a viable product, hopefully, you've also helped women get into the gaming industry on merit.
	Yeah, and I think that's a magnificent way of doing it.
	And I can see why they hated what you were doing.
	Okay.
	I'm going to explain this.
	And this is one of these points that when the feminists hear about it, they're like, oh shit, that's why.
	We come from disability study.
	So like some of our was getting people who have disabilities jobs.
	And one of the reasons why you get people who have disabilities jobs is so that they don't die.
	Meaning that if a person you has like a disability but doesn't have an occupation, their quality of life will actually decrease.
	It's not actually about them earning money, it's them not having a purpose in their life.
	So we're really focused on when you're in disability space, it's like literally telling people, you know, this guy has a mental disability, but I think you should get rid of the able-bodied person because he's just not doing as much work as this guy who has a mental disability.
	And then the business guy is like, you know what, you're right.
	But it becomes really important for us because, as I said, getting, again, it could even just be something about a person Basically, getting paralysis so that he's in a wheelchair, and him thinking that now I can't work anymore.
	It's like, no, you can.
	Samantha, she did most of the feminist stuff.
	She has cerebral palsy, so she's in a wheelchair as well.
	It's like, no, you can still contribute to society.
	We are going to make sure that you can contribute to society so society benefits and so that you feel better about yourself and have a better quality of life.
	And I know that that sounds like a little really weirdly emotional, and it's weird when you're talking about in women, but it's kind of the same thing.
	That when we say if you're giving women money not to make something or not to contribute to society, when you come from disability studies, it's like that actually causes people to die younger.
	Yeah, no, I actually think that that's completely true.
	I mean, if my mother used to work at a disabled home, actually, when I was a child, and sometimes after school, I'd have to just hang out there.
	So I actually got a lot of experience talking to these people.
	And one of the things that they didn't want was pity.
	You know, one of the things they absolutely did not want you to do is pity them and treat them differently.
	And a lot of them are very artistically minded because it was something that didn't involve physical effort, which obviously, if you're disabled, it may be a problem.
	So it was, you know, it's insulting to suggest that they shouldn't try to contribute because they're disabled, I find.
	Or at least that's what they seem to tell me when I was, I was only 13, so I might be remembering it wrong.
	But so I really do completely understand where you're coming from there.
	And that I completely agree with you.
	Yeah.
	But it's like, again, it gets very weird, but in Stumbling Upon Happiness, there's a book, and he references this wonderful study where it was senior citizens and they were divided into two groups.
	They were to be visited by students.
	And one group, they didn't get to choose the time when the students arrived.
	And the other group, their only difference was they got to choose what time the students would visit them.
	And they did this study, and the mortality rate of the people actually went down.
	Meaning, if they got to choose when the student arrived, they were less likely to die.
	And then the study ended and they ran out of money so that the students no longer visited these people.
	And then the mortality rate of the people who got to choose spiked considerably.
	So being unable to control your destiny or having that taken away from you has fundamental physiological effects on humans.
	You can see the matrix if you want to understand this because that's the thesis of that movie.
	Yeah, no, I completely agree.
	I imagine that depression really does have a major effect on life expectancy.
	Yeah.
	So this is kind of all of these things that we were talking about, but at the same token, we're kind of robbing, again, if you're kind of moving into the social space, and if you, like, one of the lines that we say is that of the people we talk to face-to-face, for every one person that wanted to submit an idea, two people wanted to be on our board when we talked to women.
	Okay.
	And it was just like, no, you don't.
	Like, it's all paperwork.
	It's like, we don't make any fun decisions.
	If you want to be a judge, that's fine.
	But if you don't want to be on our board and you don't want to be social, and that's kind of why when people, like, why are you so pissed off when they revealed your name at the beginning?
	It's like, my name doesn't appear on any of the website material because like on purpose, just so that when people say that, you know, they could be on the board, I could be like, my name's not on this, like, it's not about you, it's about the women.
	Like, don't use this to advance your own career.
	Let's not get into political fights.
	Let's just focus on it.
	And that's, again, in the space, it's really weird.
	So, do you want to tell people exactly what happened with Zoe Quinn?
	Because I'm actually not too sure of what the events were that did the bar.
	So, one of the things that we did do a soft launch of the project at one point, and we stopped it after a day because we got so many bad reactions.
	And we kind of reviewed about why they didn't like it.
	Like, we were taking applications at that point, and we just said, no, we won't take applications.
	Let's wait six weeks and try it again.
	And the biggest thing was at that point, we had a video that was all graphics.
	We had a wonderful woman talking about it.
	We had all of these feminist videos.
	And the thing they said was, like, I don't know, we kind of want to have a woman talking to the camera.
	So, I'm like, that's going to be expensive because all of our crew is in Columbia and we'll have to fly them up.
	And Samantha's in a wheelchair, and she's not, she's actually more of a feminist than a video game person.
	So, we were like, let's get somebody to run the face and the PR of the company.
	And that was Heather.
	So, we had actually gone and done a whole shoot with Heather, which, by the way, my favorite point about it is that, anyway, she does a lot of weird activism that no one has brought up at any point.
	But Heather was supposed to literally talk to the people.
	She was supposed to do all the social stuff.
	Me and the rest of the guys would handle the money.
	Lola would make the game, and we thought this was fine.
	And Heather tweeted out what we were doing, and that was picked up.
	She's from Vancouver.
	We actually paid to fly her down.
	And it got into the Vancouver community, and people were asking, who are these guys?
	And then Zoe said, basically, contact us by Twitter.
	And she said, I really have to, I'm really interested in your project.
	I want to ask you some questions.
	And we're like, and I remember I was, it was like February, so I was walking through like a snowstorm to return a wig.
	And I was just on my phone.
	And I'm like, sure, if you have questions, big media questions, email this address.
	Otherwise, you can ask them on Twitter.
	And she asked two questions.
	The first was why we thought the women should work for free.
	And the second was in the essay, she said, in the question, I can't remember the exact wording, but she said something about why are you policing people's transition points or something like that.
	And the first question I simply answered that they get 8% of the game and they get the art for free.
	And then for the other one, because she had used the word transition, and it clearly said on the website, if I self-identify as a woman, can I enter the contest?
	And I said, yes, you can enter the contest as long as you've transitioned before the beginning of the contest with the definition of the word trend, like you're not trans if you haven't transitioned.
	And she'd used the word transition in the sentence.
	So we assumed that she knew.
	So we wrote, it's to stop men from lying about it and to be inclusive to everybody.
	And I just want to do this one relevant point.
	8% of our applicants were men lying about being women.
	So it's like, it was a valid concern, and we'd done research and we found, especially for something that's so male-dominated, like some, he went, one guy, we found out right away.
	We're just like, how long is this going to go on for?
	But he like faked being a woman for like 10 emails.
	It was amazing.
	I mean, did he think he was going to get away with it?
	Totally.
	Okay, well, good try, mate.
	No, no, no.
	It was like, it happened.
	Like, there was a really funny way that we had of verifying it, but it was like, we could tell quite right away when they deliberately changed their profile.
	But it was just at that point, it was like the entire internet came to call that it's like, you're running an exploitive production and you're transphobic.
	And we like linked them to like the videos we did where Judith Butler, who's the leading queer theorist in the world, where we quote her and say that gender is a social construct.
	And we do a lot of this kind of information.
	And she just basically said that that was in some way, like, she said all of her videos were offensive.
	And you weren't that click, were you?
	Well, it was just like, like, I just remember, like, I like, I got sent the tweet out, and then I'm like, you've received the tweet.
	And I'm like, I almost never received tweets.
	And then I'm like, you've received 52 retweets.
	And I'm like, this is not what I was expecting.
	And we did engage with the groups.
	Like, we did explain.
	They were really annoying.
	Like, they, I never said my name.
	I gave the production company.
	So this is why I was pissed off because I tracked down my name to the production company.
	And then they started posting like the job applications that because everybody who worked on the production was paid.
	So it was like, we need a model.
	Our opening with the woman that we shot.
	We're like, we need a model, non-union, no nudity.
	Da-da-da-da-da.
	Please send a photo.
	I'm a producer.
	I think it said, I'm a producer.
	I'm allowed to be shallow.
	Because it was a modeling position.
	And they were like, oh, look at this sexist guy.
	He's doing that.
	I'm like, no, if it's a model, it's not sexist.
	They can't make anything sexist.
	Yeah.
	So like, and literally speaking, I remember like Samantha had no idea what to do.
	And she's like, I've got this person who's really good, who's really into the transgender community.
	She'll be able to help you.
	And I was like, a lawyer wrote this.
	Like, I don't think she'll be able to help us.
	But I literally remember telling Samantha, whatever you do, I'm not in a position.
	Don't have her just scream at me over the phone.
	And then as soon as she answered, she started screaming at me over the phone.
	And it went like, this is exactly the problem.
	This is exactly why we went with the lawyer to write the documentation.
	So this went on for a day, and we just like, we moved the submission deadline back a week.
	And I remember I was just like, who's on the Human Rights Council of Ontario?
	We got their number and we explained the situation.
	I remember she's just saying, like, I have no idea what these people have problems with.
	But you, she was one of the people who worked on the whatever the legal form is, but it was the one that allowed gays to be married in Ontario.
	And she was just like, I don't know what's going on here.
	And so we did that, and we just took a week.
	And a bunch of people from that conversation did give us crap for the rest of the week, but we didn't care.
	We finally launched the production, and it's like, okay, we're doing it.
	Let's send out a whole bunch of applications and stuff.
	Let's engage in the social media websites.
	And she had such a pull that it was like, oh, look, it's the transphobic exploited of people again.
	And I'm like, this is the wonderful way to do the discussion.
	And it's also complicated because it was a women's project already.
	So it's like the men who, the groups that don't like women don't like us, and the groups that really for women don't like us.
	And this was like, again, when you're receiving hate mails, I got a death threat.
	Like, literally, it was a huge, one of the guys left because it was literally like, again, we had already got flack from the feminists, from that feminist group that he was like, I'm not putting my name on this.
	You guys find the money somewhere else.
	That, like, it was just, it was a lot of that.
	And what we basically said is, here's the deal: arguing online is helping no one.
	Let's deal with journalists now.
	And what happened is, like, A, it's a little bit hard to sell a project when your Twitter feed is like, this is an exploited project.
	So we kind of engage with journalists with the question of like, what did we do wrong?
	And then they'd be like, oh, well, this is my perfect time to educate you.
	And then we'd explain what we did.
	And then they'd be like, I'm not particularly sure, but if this group doesn't like you, then we're not going to cover you.
	One of which sent it in an email, which was great.
	Wow, that's a lot of pull.
	That's a hell of a lot of influence they have.
	We don't, what we think about, like, this is really common in the sphere, though, but it's more that like why Gamergate's going on is as a profession, like people will, as your profession becomes something that people will do for free, the politics in it get like infinitely more complicated.
	So like the politics of actors, the politics of musicians are really complicated because the like they again, like everybody would do it if they could for free.
	While like the politics of say repairing a refrigerator are like non-existent.
	Because you need certification, you need da-da-da-da.
	So the gaming journalist thing, it's like people like think, although one time she definitely did, but people think that it's because she's like personally telling everybody and it's not.
	It's just that, oh, this person doesn't like it.
	I'm not going to risk my reputation on supporting them, even if they're providing empirical data.
	And even during Gamergate, one of the journalists I loved, I love this.
	He was on Twitter and he was just spouting all the stuff that was wrong.
	And we sent him an I got Autobotic, he was basically saying me and Autobotica, like, we're the same company.
	And then I had Autobotica send them an email that says, We're not, we'll give you financial records that prove this, and we'll have the lawyer sign a sworn statement.
	And he's like, by sending me this email, this is harassment.
	And we're like, yeah, I was like, this is awesome.
	Jesus Christ, these people.
	No, there was another journalist that I love that called us up.
	And she was like, there was a whole bunch of stuff that went wrong in that conversation.
	But my first little favorite point was she was like, we'll tell 4chan what you are, and then they'll want their money back.
	And I'm like, what?
	Like, you'll tell them that I'm an awesome person and women?
	We've been pushing that message pretty hard.
	I think they know.
	Yeah, I think that the people on 4chan who have probably now moved to 8chan are pretty savvy.
	I think that they know what they were getting themselves into.
	And there's some side things.
	So the other issue was from an indie perspective, we were giving them de facto collateral from a crowdsourcing thing.
	And that got people a little bit nervous as well.
	So like, again, this is like, I'm not going to knock Uber.
	Uber is a nice company.
	But like, or DoubleFine.
	But both Double Fine and Uber are like, their model is now, we'll develop a game to the point where it can be crowdsourced.
	And then we'll use that money to fund development.
	And that's, I know this sounds really awful as I have to say it from a capitalist perspective.
	But from a capitalist perspective, that seems like cheating.
	If people are investing in your production at that stage, like if they're pre-buy, if they're doing a pre-buy, I'm like, that's okay.
	If they're giving thousands of dollars, then it's like they should get some sort of return on that.
	And the big issue here is in Canada is because I know, because I'm actually dealing with these people, is we know that certain projects in Canada are just being like, well, no, this will succeed, but let's add an extra $500,000 to the budget by running it as a crowdsourcing project first.
	So Corner Gas would be a good example.
	It's a Canadian show, and they ran an Indiegogo campaign to get a movie made for it.
	And I just looked at that, and I'm like, the chance of that movie not making its money back was like 5%.
	And now it's like 1%.
	So it's like, you can't take all of the risk out of it by exploiting fans.
	And our concept for this one, even though we're taking money, is that at least we're giving you de facto collateral.
	That we're allowing, we're not personally, I'm not profiting at all, but the profits aren't going to us.
	The majority of it is going to charities that the community chooses.
	And again, again, this is even a gendered thing, but in the indie scene, you see a lot of people kind of monetizing themselves based less on I'm creating a project and more I'm an artist and you should be like give me money because I'm an awesome person yeah I think everyone's seen that on Patreon Sorry, go on.
	The reason we're against that is that it actually pushes people into heteronormative roles, or it pushes like meaning that it pushes people into roles that the community likes and that society likes, even if it's a subsection of society.
	And you just don't allow people who are on the edges and are at most risk to benefit from it.
	And that sounds really weird, but it's like women actually do better for tech crowdsourcing than men do.
	Women are about twice as likely to succeed.
	Sorry, can you just define tech crowdsourcing?
	If you do for, say, Kickstarter, it was from New York Times, did it.
	It was if you do Kickstarter, if you do all of the projects that are in their technology category, if you break them down into women and men, women are about twice as likely to get their project funded than it is for a man's project.
	Okay, can you how do you think that relates to the concept of oppression of women?
	What we are okay, again, the radical feminists can always spin this around, but we think it's because they give them money because they feel guilty and they feel like that they aren't investing in them.
	They're supporting them because this person is in a disadvantaged position.
	She's able to spin a narrative and she's able to make it about herself and not her project.
	So like I'm developing this technology thing because I'm so amazing and I'm trying to change the world and that's why I need to make self-rolling dice or something like that.
	While again, from a man's perspective, you know, he can kind of walk out and, you know, I haven't washed and fuck you all.
	But look, they're dice that roll on their own.
	And like society as a whole will be like, man, I'll totally buy those dice.
	Just to clarify here, because I'm not from Canada and I'm not a feminist, so this is all outside of my experience.
	But I mean, would you consider that the oppression of that woman then?
	No, what we consider that is we consider that poor social positioning because it's not a long-term strategy for her to be a like that's that is what they're doing.
	They're like doing Kickstarters repeatedly.
	And I'm like, that's not a good way to do stable economic growth.
	Agreed.
	Agreed.
	That's the concern.
	Like it's it's we don't can like again, it's it's like she's getting something, then it's not oppression.
	And I'm like, no, you are completely right there.
	But it's bad social media.
	Yeah, no, it's bad social positioning and it's not a long-term plan.
	Because inevitably speaking, as you move more people into the space, there's more competition.
	There's less women making money.
	Well, conversely, if she's making a production that returns revenue, then she can expand her business and hire more people and then grow the economy.
	Yeah, totally agree.
	I think, yeah.
	Okay, that's interesting.
	Do you want to is there anything else you want to add to that?
	Because I've got some questions, but they're more about your worldview, because I just like to try and get people to explain what they think and why they think it.
	Can I just go on about Naomi Klein for a second?
	So why we think the Gamergate thing happened.
	Okay, so Naomi Klein wrote this book called The Shock Doctrine, which is very popular in the circles that a lot of the reporters are in.
	It's kind of a book on kind of investigative journalists, very anti-corporation and very counterculture.
	And she describes what's called the shock doctrine.
	Let me see if I can get his name out.
	It's named after Milton Friedman, and it's actually named after the CIA torture techniques from the Kubar counter intelligence interrogation technique book.
	And basically, what it is, is for the torture, it was you remove all stimuli from a person.
	So you put over a hood on their head so they can't see and they can't hear.
	And then you pull it off and then usually engage in something that distorts their perception.
	And this is a way of making people submit very quickly.
	And this is what the CIA does, and this is why waterboarding and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da horrible intense interrogation.
	That this is the book that kind of came up with the techniques to do it.
	Now, what Naomi Wolf does is she translates that and she uses it in from like a government sense.
	That government will latch on to a tragedy and then they'll use that tragedy to sort of push through legislation that would normally never have public support.
	And this is a means of sort of engaging in rapid cultural change by taking an event that gets people shocked, controlling the narrative immediately, pushing all of this information out, and then causing large changes in the culture, usually for the benefit of a small number of corporations.
	And she'll suicide Katrina, 9-11, da-da-da-da.
	Any of your listeners will know exactly the Patriot Act in reaction to 9-11 would be a reaction to shock.
	So what we think is they have always in the actual journalists, so the people who are writing, they're actually losing viewership.
	And they're losing it because it's the same kind of reason why in advertising you don't explain the product, you kind of give an emotional why McDonald's theme is like, I'm loving it.
	Like that says nothing about the quality of their food, but it's like you have an emotional reaction to their food.
	Their food invokes pleasure, thus by purchasing it, you will get pleasure.
	Why this goes to reviewers is people like Total Biscuit who aren't really giving a review or Yahtzee who are giving, not even giving a real review, they're just talking about their emotional attachment to the work and they're monetizing their personality in the review space.
	That's really successful in a video format and that's where you're seeing the audience shift to.
	So the journalists have been trying to do that.
	They've been trying to inject more emotion and more personality into their reviews as a way of kind of keeping the readership that they have.
	So what we think is, and basically the super hardcore gamer audience, the tastemakers, they don't particularly like that because they're overly focused on games, but the biggest issue is they're overly focused on detail.
	So, if you give a really broad explanation and you don't do an obscene amount of fact-checking, which reporters are known not to do, you tend to end up with all of your comments being people who are picking apart things that you've said.
	So, what they were trying, again, from the writing on the wall and how they're moving it, and this is why Polygon's hiring a new editor and whatnot, is they're trying to move away from just video games, but like gaming and culture in general, because that increases their number of viewers, it has people return more often, and it allows them to monetize themselves.
	So, I think when this Zoe Quinn thing happened with the conspiracy, they were like, this we can use, they may have never used this word, but they're like, this is like a shock.
	Let all of us produce this, all of us will produce these documents at the same time.
	We'll immediately control the narrative, and we'll be able to then migrate the audience to be more acceptable to this journalistic view, which will allow us to monetize ourselves more.
	And I think, and also cover some of the details that have been put out.
	So, it's like, let's take advantage of this shock.
	And the biggest thing about shocks is it's like all rules are gone, but for both sides.
	So, the concept was, was that, you know, all the rules are gone for us.
	We can talk to our audience this way, and we can then reshape them into something else.
	And the audience was literally like, all rules are off.
	Let's go after your sponsors.
	Let's go after everything because you just declared all rules are off and tried to remove a cultural identity, which historically has always been associated with good things.
	Sorry, I actually dropped briefly.
	We are talking about the game journalists declaring gamers dead here, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I agree that that was probably the Rubicon for them.
	The die was cast, and it was an absurd thing to do.
	I can't imagine any other industry doing the same thing.
	But it's just, it's been this sort of thing, like when we describe Gamergate to the sociologists, we don't say it's even about journalist integrity.
	We say it's about before we had sort of a fact-based media, meaning like if you have to fly to Vietnam and they give you a paper and you read it, you can objectively just present that information.
	And because of like this, let's say in the 70s, because the means of communication were so slow, they had to read the newspaper, then that would then be picked up on the TV, that actually giving people unique information was monetizable.
	Like, we've got a scoop.
	This is something that we can use to monetize.
	Right now, especially in the video game sphere, where you're mostly processing press releases, you're entirely editorial.
	Everything becomes editorial.
	Like, the press release is available to the audience.
	So, the audience has exactly the same information that you have.
	So, what you're doing is you're editorializing and you're putting that in context.
	And when we look at Gamergate, we look at it more as a population of readers rising up against the people who are editing their content and just the people who are editing their content not acknowledging that their opinion is not is one of many that are right.
	Yeah.
	I've got a few points to make on this subject, actually.
	Okay.
	If you don't mind.
	One of the things that I've found dealing with these people is that they are incredibly subjective.
	And they believe that if their opinion, their subjective view on things is true to them, then they consider that to be almost an absolute truth.
	They consider the fact that they've had this opinion to be true, and it is true that they had that opinion.
	And so from this point on, they take that as read that that opinion and that experience must have at least some importance to it, which I don't really agree that it does.
	Otherwise, insane people are in exactly the same boat.
	This comes from, like, again, this politics involved in their business, but it's like for them to gain access to exclusive information, they have to pretend that they're the shit.
	Yeah.
	So having their opinions being embedded in their personality makes them basically more of a character and more of a get for people who are trying to get them to cover them.
	Yeah, but the thing with that is, I mean, I grew up reading like PC Gamer and stuff like that.
	Yeah.
	And I couldn't name a single person whose work I read.
	And it didn't matter because while, I mean, it's been years since I've read them, so I might be completely wrong when I say this.
	But what I remember is that the reviews would generally be quite objective for most of the review.
	And so they'd say, you know, this game is a first-person shooter, blah, blah, blah.
	But you'll probably already know that from the screenshots.
	It's got however many levels, you know, just go over the basic information.
	But then they would tell you of their experience on how the game performed.
	So they would say, it's very smooth.
	It's, you know, this is hypothetical.
	But, you know, it's very smooth.
	The multiplayer was very slick.
	It worked, you know, with no problems.
	Or if the reverse that was buggy and kept dropping or whatever, you know, they tell you about their experiences with it, but they wouldn't be telling you how they feel about it.
	They would just be reporting events.
	And then at the end of the review, they'd probably, you know, it probably give a paragraph or two saying, personally, I found, you know, I'm a big fan of first-person shooters, so I found this game to be excellent, or I, you know, something like that.
	They'd give a little subjective bit at the end because, you know, they knew the sort of audience that they were talking to, gamers, and what really they actually wanted to know from a player standpoint.
	And they'll say, you know, I really enjoyed playing this game.
	It was a lot of fun.
	Or I just found this game boring, you know.
	And it was a little nod at the end, you know, it was a little subjective bit at the end, but it wasn't a hit piece on the game.
	And I think that pretty much every reader would have just looked at that and gone, yeah, okay, well, the rest of it sounds like it's got what I want, so I'll check it out anyway, you know.
	Yeah.
	What we think that has to do is mostly how information was distributed at that point.
	So one of the nice things about PC Gamer was like it had exclusive access to information and there was a limited amount of writing in the space.
	So what PC Gamer was literally trying to do was approach the largest audience that it could and because it had like a semi-monopoly, like not a real monopoly, but you know they had access, they would have access to this information that a regular person wouldn't.
	Then they were able to monetize that information well, and that's completely what they were doing, was completely right.
	My issue now is is that, again with youtube, with people pushing their information out through social networks and especially like the let's players, like the convention system, so it's like we'll release information to the breast press at conventions, but we'll also release it, the same information, to our fans at conventions.
	What that means is they don't have a monopoly on their information and because people like facts become less important than the emotional content, a la why advertising works.
	It's just that they got their market ripped away from them um, and they're trying to get it back.
	I think who is who's trying to get it back to?
	Journalists are just just to confirm.
	Um okay, I think that now I can only I can only speak for myself here, but I think, for me personally and as a as someone who considers themselves a gamer yeah, I think there seems to be a bit of a fundamental um misapprehension from the people who would describe themselves as pro-social justice.
	Um, they are very authoritarian and they seem to be remarkably anti-individualist, and the reason, the reason that their writing bothers me is they presume to tell me what I should think and feel.
	Yes, this I i'm not.
	I'm not accusing you of doing this or anything.
	No no no um, I i'm just just just describing my experience.
	And so if you watch Total Biscuits reviews uh, and let's plays and things like that he and Angry Joe's good for this as well he, he doesn't tell me how I should feel.
	He tells me how he felt and he tells me how he if at best, at best, when he's not saying about, in fact, he's not really even telling me how he feels he's really telling me what his experience of it was in in a in an event based sort of way, because fundamentally, as a gamer, I don't give a fuck how Angry Joe feels about it.
	I don't, I don't care how Biscuit feels about it.
	I care how i'm going to feel about it when i'm playing it.
	Am I going to have fun?
	And I know the sort of things that I personally will file will find fun, and so I want people to tell me the bits that they did find fun because they might also be bits that I found fun and I want them to Tell me what bits that they have problems with, but at no point are they telling me how I will feel about things.
	They're just telling me the bits that they personally encountered that were of no's, you know?
	Yeah, and I and I know it sounds like a really subtle difference.
	And I think that they really, the journalists, they really don't understand why there's a problem.
	Yeah, no, and that's that's because you're only half of their audience.
	Um, meaning that like Total Biscuit and the YouTubers and the smaller blogs that don't that are using like aggregated revenue like ad generators, they don't have to deal with companies that they're buying ads from.
	And let me also define that.
	They also don't have to deal with game manufacturers that have to send them review copies.
	So a good example is Total Biscuit.
	Like Sony tried to ban one of his videos and then they eventually brought it back.
	But he was just like, was it Sony?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think, no, it was Sega or something.
	Total Biscuit.
	He was just like, screw you guys, boycott.
	Like, I ain't doing videos on any of your stuff over this crap.
	And a good example is Angry Joe.
	Like, Angry Joe never hits the embargo date because he does all of this silly stuff.
	And that doesn't mean his reviews aren't interesting to watch.
	They're just not released in a timely manner.
	And so if you're like, Angry Joe, we're not going to give you a copy of our, you're not going to get a pre-release copy of this game.
	And Angry Joe's like, I don't really care.
	I monetize myself completely differently.
	And or even like the Let's Players, which are the worst ones for this, like they'll take one game when it comes out and they'll monetize it over like two weeks.
	They're able to do that because if the game, if they don't kind of play ball with the PR companies and the game companies, there's not really like they're not out on their asses.
	The journalists, on the other hand, can.
	And if there's anything that PR is about, it's groupthink.
	Yes, yes.
	Do you mind if we total biscuit is actually listening to this?
	So I'd just like to give him a bit of a shout out and say, I hope you're feeling better, man.
	And it's quite an honor to have you because I'm a big fan.
	And in fact, this is very interesting because I watch his videos and that's the thing.
	It's all about the way they feel, isn't it?
	I mean, it's nice to hear one of my favorite reviews of his was the one about Space Marine, where he was obviously trying to remain detached and objective from the game.
	But I'm a huge 40k fan, and I was watching the video almost cheering as he was getting into it.
	I know I shouldn't have done, but the thing is, I completely understood why he was getting into that game.
	It looked fucking awesome.
	No, but as a I'm not really bothered how he feels or how other people feel about things.
	It's more about what I'm going to take away from it as a gamer.
	Sorry, but yeah, that's actually.
	Yeah, no, and that's and that's like that's the problem is that it's actually much more effective.
	So like even though you're probably getting less objective information out of a YouTuber Let's Play than you would over a full review, the viewer not only gets more out of it, but seems to derive more pleasure from it.
	And that's like, it's very problematic when you're dealing with old media because you have to maintain those relations.
	Just to interrupt that, actually, I think that, and again, this is just talking from my own personal experience as someone who's pretty much always considered himself a gamer.
	Watching someone play a game actually gives you an awful lot of objective information.
	Yes.
	I mean, that's what a lot of the time.
	When I was a kid, I used to go around friends' houses, and a lot of games back then weren't multiplayer, or you just didn't have the option.
	And so it was more about you could see how they would interact with the game, and you would be able to see what you could personally do to interact with the game.
	I mean, like Total Biscuits just said in the chat, you don't have to rely on the person talking to give you that information.
	That's exactly the point.
	Because when I was watching, I was thinking, God, I'd be better than him at this game.
	Well, it's scopophilia is the word that we use.
	It's the pleasure of watching.
	And it's that there is actually, you're deriving pleasure from somebody else's experience.
	No, no, well, no, no, sorry.
	You're also completely right that you get more information from it.
	But the main thing you also have to understand from a journalistic perspective is what you want people to do is repeatedly come back to you.
	And one of the issues why, like, I mentioned this in one of our Tumblr posts, and this is why the journalistic reviews, they're harping on particular points so that the information is more likely to spread virally.
	And people are more likely to push this to people in their circles to get more viewership.
	And keep in mind, I'm 100% sure that at none of the major publications that they've ever had an explicit meeting where this is all laid out.
	It's just this is sort of the push and the pull that you'll get in the industry.
	And my thing is that everything you're saying is right.
	You're getting more information by watching it.
	I'm also right.
	There's an emotional connection there.
	It's kind of like when cameras were invented, when cameras were invented.
	It's like, I really love portrait paintings, but these pictures are so much easier.
	And I really like portrait painters.
	I'd really like it if all the portrait painters kept their job, but fuck, are these pictures easier?
	Yeah.
	I was actually, I was doing a photography degree when Polaroid was going under, and it was just the same sort of thing.
	It was just like, we don't want Polaroid to die.
	There's everything about this media we love.
	But holy fuck, is this digital images so much easier for so much stuff?
	And that's why, again, there seems to be so much bitterness in this Gamergate battle is a lot of what the journalists are doing is they're doing everything right.
	They're just, the media landscape is changing and they're being sucked.
	A lot of their money is being sucked out.
	And this is before the boycotts.
	This is just...
	Yeah.
	I think that they...
	I think we're looking at two different industries.
	I think that we're absolutely looking at two different industries and two different mindsets.
	Because, I mean, for me, it was them trying to push the term player.
	It seems far more like a passive consumption.
	Like, I'm a movie watcher, you know.
	And I am.
	I go for the same.
	I watch the film and I say, hey, that was a nice film.
	I don't even try and predict the ending of films when I'm watching a film.
	And a lot of my friends do.
	And I think that's the difference.
	To them, I'm a filthy casual.
	They're hardcore movie buffs.
	And honestly, the social justice gaming press seem exactly like that to me with games.
	They seem to want to allow games to dictate down from on high the experience the player should have.
	And I really want to just grab them and say, no, that's exactly the opposite reason to why I play games.
	I play games because I want to beat the game.
	It's about me, not the game.
	Yeah, I can explain that a bit if you please.
	Okay, so there's a debate.
	Just give me one second.
	Yeah, it's Ludology versus Neurootology debate in video game studies.
	Okay.
	So just to explain to the audience, it's basically one thing says that we should look at video games like a narrative experience.
	So very similar to a book or a film.
	And the Ludology version is like, no, this is completely different media with completely different rules.
	And we should develop ideas and constructs to actually analyze it like that.
	Now, one of the problems with the narratology debate is that it blends very well into other forms of media criticism, including film criticism and just other media criticism.
	And almost all film and media criticism involves quite a bit of feminism.
	And that's, as a feminist, there's nothing wrong with that.
	It's just it happens when you have these larger sociological things.
	And one of the things that that does is it makes the existing literature, which they're using to build their case, having a passive participant is how that literature was written.
	Video games are really the first interactive storytelling system that's reached mainstream culture, with the possible exception of choose your own adventure books.
	So it's really what it's a matter of we have all of this existing academia.
	Let's force the medium into that existing academia instead of creating our own and creating new ones for it.
	And eventually we will develop those techniques.
	I just think that the narratology, their part of the debate, is sort of hampering a lot of that.
	And that's also why a lot of, again, a lot of the debates you hear about how playing these games changes like a person's view of the world or a person's experience of the world are based upon existing things from media constructs that were in their academia.
	Right, okay.
	Now that's actually, that kind of touches on something I'd like to briefly talk about, if you don't mind.
	Do you think that these people can really separate fantasy from reality?
	What the players or the people actually talking about it?
	The people saying that video games are going to increase violence and all that sort of thing.
	Okay, so to explain, this is the public danger trick.
	Okay, so public health issue trick.
	So one of the things that this happens with pornography.
	So some feminists don't like pornography.
	Some feminists make pornography.
	It's important to understand that both Sarah Palin and what's her name? Sasha Gray both identify as feminists.
	So there's a big spectrum of what's actually under the banner.
	But when they were dealing with pornography, it was like, we don't like this pornography because of X, Y, and Z.
	And then the basic response is, guess what?
	For the purpose of the debate, X, Y, Z is perfectly true.
	But freedom of speech overranks all of that.
	Go screw yourself.
	And like that became a common debating practice.
	Like, I will believe, I will acknowledge all of your points.
	Free speech trumps them all.
	So there was a shift to the public health issue.
	And this is why you saw in the 60s, 70s, 80s, like it's been going on forever, that you'll find that when people are exposed to particular media, it causes psychological damage that causes them to see the world differently.
	And what that's doing is that's proposing this issue as a public health issue, which allows you to override this, the freedom of speech.
	And you can't cough a bulla on the people, spit a bulla on the people, sorry, and say that it's a freedom of speech issue.
	And that's kind of how you see the narrative going.
	And my issue with that is that, like, my big issue is if video games are teaching men to be sexist, then why aren't they teaching men to be violent?
	And why aren't they teaching people to be violent?
	And the violence argument, if you have like X number of scenes of sexism after you spent the last hour shooting people in the head, it's difficult to argue that the violence wouldn't have more of a contributing factor.
	And there is very limited evidence of that.
	And the majority of the evidence that happens, because men do actually get more sexist views in the laboratory after you show them pornographic images.
	But the conception is that if they're allowed to ejaculate, then it goes away.
	I can believe it's a biological imperative there.
	Yeah.
	And it just kind of comes in that areas where men are able to receive sexual release, like around strip clubs, there tends to be a greater level of sexual violence, but around like theaters where like places where people can men can ejaculate, there is less of it or like significantly less.
	So it's really the sort of thing that needs studies for it.
	Any idiot could have predicted this.
	No, it's important.
	Again, it's like there was one that showed that like when particular like again, like is rape a power thing or is it a crime of opportunity or all of these sort of things are important to understand when you're doing public policy.
	And they are important when you're trying to reduce sexual violence.
	But the issue is here is as I said, if I say everything that a feminist theoretician says is completely true, that this is warping people's minds, then why isn't the violence warping people's minds?
	And I've never had that argument.
	And I think that argument won't be made because as soon as you make the violence argument, it's an all the gamers, all the people who play games, that's a battle that we've already fought multiple times.
	And that will have much more of an emotional reaction.
	Honestly, I'm worried that you're I'm I'm worried about the use of statistics because one thing that statistics do is dehumanize people and It doesn't get people's opinions, it doesn't ask them why they do anything,
	it just says how many of these things happened and so I mean one of the things that I think I find personally most offensive by all this is the the accusation that if if I it all comes down to a quote from Aristotle, it's the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.
	Yes.
	This is the same for almost anything.
	I have committed some terrible atrocities in video games and yet I spend all my time on the internet moralizing.
	So I am personally capable of separating fancy from reality because frankly anything that happens in a video game isn't real.
	So you can not take it seriously.
	You don't have to worry about the effects of it.
	There are no consequences.
	And you know, I think almost everyone knows that it's fantasy.
	It's not real.
	You know, when I'm watching a saw movie, I don't go and phone the police afterwards going, Jesus, there was this terrible thing I saw.
	It's awful.
	I'm really worried.
	Frankly, I'm worried about how other people are going to react to it.
	And it's this, it really seems to be kind of connected to this excessive use of statistics.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's really becoming absurd.
	Of course people don't become sexist from seeing naked women in video games or violent from pretending to shoot people in video games.
	Sorry.
	This is a very weird argument, but it's going to agree with you, but probably in a way you don't want.
	That from someone who works in television and film, we know that doing product placement in a television show and a film show is an excellent way to make people like products.
	Okay?
	So this is why it's, you know, Bond's particular car is such a big deal.
	Every means of like embedding ads in video games, it's been tried multiple times.
	The retention is horrible.
	And we actually think it's because of the way that people are approaching the medium.
	And this is why that debate is so important.
	That we actually think that there's actually a level in front, that when you are actually watching something, you are actually more affected by it than when you're playing a game.
	I've got a point that I think is important to make there.
	Bond's car was a great example.
	I've seen plenty of Bond movies, and I've got zero interest in cars.
	So no matter what car is in a Bond movie, it makes no difference to me.
	But they're nice cars that they put in Bond movies.
	And so I think it's probably more about exposure to people who are just interested in that sort of thing rather than I do understand that studies do show that if, for example, like with Coke and Pepsi, if they're more exposed to Pepsi in more favorable ways, then people are more likely to buy Pepsi.
	But do you see what I'm saying?
	I know.
	I see what I like when you start to get involved with ads, which I even worked very briefly for tobacco manufacturer, that is getting very close to both evil and mind control.
	But my issue is that for the Bond movie, like for movies, you are you tend to actually suspend so much belief that the characters' actions, like what products they choose, keep in mind the majority of that though is just making them aware of the product.
	You're completely right.
	The majority of them is just making them aware of the product.
	But they're actually more likely to have a pleasurable view of the product.
	But as I said, in video games, like the hardcore gun guys, yeah, and that makes sense because they're spending hours and hours and hours shooting in a game and they'd want that in their real life.
	But if you're trying to push any other product into it, it's got a very low retention rate and it's not that good finance.
	It's not a good rate of return.
	And generally speaking, if a bunch of people in a boardroom have said, we're not making money off of it because it's not working, it's not working.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	And that's kind of my thing.
	But it's like, again, for movies, it's less that I was never sexist.
	And now that I am sexist, it's that you'll find that things move closer for both, like for everybody, things move closer to the norm.
	Like based upon scenes, because people mimic the characters that they've seen.
	But there isn't too many shows where a person's engaging in sexual violence and everybody's like, good on you.
	You're amazing.
	That's kind of my problem with the mainstream media's portrayal of Gamergate, actually.
	Yeah, Charlie Brooker recently said that there was a group of maniacs who were against women in video games.
	And I was fucking furious.
	I was absolutely furious.
	He's not an idiot.
	I can't believe he'd write that.
	Well, I think it's just that, like, our main thing, like, we talk about, I talked about this a couple times, but I'm like, men have to have a way of supporting women and they have to have a way of engaging with women in business that isn't protecting them.
	Because it's crappy for both people for him to just be this knight that's constantly protecting women.
	And the main way to do that is to simply give them more exposure to women in the actual industry and find out that women are actually people instead of these very odd constructs that they're continually presented by.
	And like, you'll find this, it's kind of weird.
	Like, I know in academia, they did an analysis of like women who actually took like super advanced math classes, which is rare.
	Most of the people who take those are men.
	And they asked the women like how they felt being in the class.
	And like, and the women did feel like there was this undercurrent that they didn't belong, but they said that it didn't always, that the people in the class were very supportive of them.
	Well, again, part of that is the people who take super advanced math classes.
	But it's just, again, from our sort of thing, with the people who are supporting the fine young capitalists, they seem honestly interested in the women's ideas.
	They seem honestly interested in supporting women.
	They just haven't really been presented with a way of doing that in the past, which isn't some sort of ideological thing.
	So again, one of the women workers, when I was explaining listen and believe to them, I'm like, well, what did they actually do?
	Like, how is that actually manifest in society?
	And I'm like, we're unsure.
	But it's like, if you already believed women, like, what are you adding, which as the majority of people do, the majority of people believe in the harassment,
	they just don't degree it's at the level that they I can do a larger explanation of this, but one of the big issues we're having, this, most of these studies come from people really hate it when studies that are in third world countries are actually applied to their country.
	But in countries that have like violent rape problems, so sub-Saharan Africa, certain countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, it's very important to get your messaging right.
	And one of the issues that happen with awareness campaigns is if you do awareness campaigns about like all women are worried because they can be raped by men all the time or like this is a common occurrence.
	What actually happens is the amount of rapes increase.
	Like the gen, sorry, we just refer to it as gender violence.
	But the rate of gender violence increases because in the culture, like they're hearing all these extreme cases and suddenly these smaller cases, so like somebody grabbing a woman's chest or engaging in sexual intercourse where she isn't specifically saying no,
	like these kind of actions, if you're talking about like these extreme factors are so common, then suddenly these smaller ones become more socially acceptable and then the culture doesn't self-censor.
	And you end up with this problem that suddenly awareness actually makes the problem worse.
	And what you're always supposed to specify it is that real men don't engage in these activities, that men are supportive, that men risk, that real men respect women, that these are the objectives, that you're attaching positive traits to men into basically reducing gender violence.
	And one of the big issues that we're having with this campaign is it's all like the internet is horrible.
	All of the men there are horrible.
	And there's these death threats all the time.
	And the majority of the oppression that a woman will experience in the workplace is not death threats.
	The majority of it is microaggression.
	So just not being given the ability to make decisions, having decisions made for her, having her opinion talked over.
	And these are things that can be discussed.
	And it's a long discussion.
	And if we would discuss them, we'd be arguing a lot.
	But all of that's gone.
	Like, if you just focus on that these death threats are the issue.
	Like, suddenly all of those other issues the women were having are being wiped are wiped away and you're investing significant resource.
	Like again, there's been this kind of push to invest resources and I'm like, there's not much, like the FBI is investigating like these this is not the best use of resources to solve an Isemic problem.
	And if we focus on the key problems of these individuals, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't put the FBI on them.
	It doesn't mean that we shouldn't put the police on them.
	But if we're raising resources so that everybody gets FBI and police to follow them whenever they get a letter from some sort of incompetent person, then that's a lot of resources and that doesn't address the systemic problem, which is I think that overexposing these things really, I think you touched on this.
	It basically co-ops the narrative to be about these individuals.
	And like you say, that's not the issue.
	Obviously, no one supports death threats or anything like that.
	But it's personifying the issue.
	Yeah, and that's not helpful.
	And I honestly think that people like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, they do that on purpose.
	I think they knowingly attempt to kind of co-opt the narrative, as it were.
	Well, I wish they weren't all like their revenue wasn't dependent upon that.
	Like one of my arguments, one of my arguments with Anita Sarkeesian is if you do the math, theoretically, for every dollar that she makes in donations, there's two or three dollars that it'll be giving to her critics.
	Like overall, like if you can't count all of her critics that are being supported.
	And I'm like, that's probably not the best way to do if you want to create a stemic.
	Again, I don't feel that awareness works.
	That's my biggest issue.
	I feel that awareness is part of a campaign.
	You obviously have to make people aware of what the issue is.
	But if you're entirely focused on awareness and you aren't giving a really nuanced message, then you have the possibility of making the problem worse.
	But more important, you just don't address the systemic issues.
	Also, you're reinforcing the people who want to cause a fuss and gain attention.
	If you set a death threat, oh, the consequences of your actions will be everywhere, all the time.
	And you normalize death threats and you normally, yeah, like there's a lot of negative effects.
	Well, it's just if a person, inevitably speaking, a person's setting a death threat for attention, taking all of your angry tweets and doing a presentation about them, we were like, okay, that's an interesting thesis.
	But there's been a lot of, like, again, I want to make sure that I don't want to erase the fact that there is gender issues and there is violence.
	Like, these are, believe it or not, me and Somers, we've never talked, of course, but like how she addresses problems.
	We sometimes argue with her, argue with her writings on certain things.
	But she covered about how rape culture on campus and how it diverts money from low-income areas where it's more prevalent and the police are less likely to take it seriously.
	So you end up focusing resources on lower-risk individuals at the expense of higher risk individuals for political gain.
	And it's like that I'm all about raising money for the issues, but this isn't a good solution for an Isemic problem.
	If I recall correctly, the police did say that Anita Sarkeesian's University of Utah threat was not credible, and there was no actual threat there.
	Yeah.
	And yet, it's been such a fixture of the mainstream media coverage that I really worry that it's just going to encourage other people who, like you say, they just want attention.
	They just want to see their actions validated.
	And anyone can fire off a stupid email that is a threat, even whether they're going to follow through or not, obviously.
	And it'll just keep corrupting the narrative, effectively.
	But she always has the option of not doing any event.
	She shouldn't be required to.
	My big issue was that how they were spinning it as an open carry issue.
	And her writer is a Democratic, and he's a social hacker.
	And when I saw that, I'm like, if they're using this incident to push a political agenda for open carry in that state, if they started spinning that narrative, I would have been so angry.
	And they did it a bit, and then they backed off.
	So, I mean, maybe she was like, I feel like she could have been.
	I just feel, again, I feel like I still, like, I'm reading about Atheism Plus and I don't quite understand it, but I understand, you know, but I understand where anger comes from when you have one social issue and then you use that base to kind of move it into another.
	So when Brianna Wu was talking about making all sites like are required to log the IP of all users, I was just like, that's a very large issue that I don't think, you know, that's a much larger issue than you think.
	And I don't think you want to use this particular movement to push that particular issue for the benefit of the other privacy issues and women in technology.
	Like, it's just like, don't mix those together.
	They're very volatile and even worse when combined.
	It's a bit of a mess at the moment, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	But that's what the media thrives on.
	We're not at all surprised that we're not being picked up because our narrative is so wonky.
	And it's not like the, you know, inevitably speaking, when most people debate, all of the arguments are already there.
	They're just playing the arguments in a different order.
	And Chomsky actually talked about this, about how it's just like, it's pointless for me to do television interviews because no one understands what I'm talking about and I can't speak in between commercials.
	But it was true.
	And it's just like, if you want to have this sort of conflict, where, as I said, you can go in, you can know the players and you can know the arguments beforehand, that's actually really good for television.
	It's really bad, though, when you're trying to solve systemic issues in a society.
	And theoretically, that's what we were trying to do.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Well, should we wrap this up by talking about the winner of your campaign?
	That'd be nice.
	So, yeah, that's Danielle.
	It was really funny because Autobotica is all Macs.
	And we actually, the first expense or the biggest expense that we've actually paid is actually getting her a Mac and an iPad.
	I was just like, how do you not own either of these things?
	So she could test her game.
	What is the game?
	Tell us about the game and what it's called, how it plays, all that sort of thing.
	Her game's called Afterlife Empire, and it's kind of like a simulator game.
	So you're building a haunted house, and you're having people kind of go through the haunted house and be scared.
	And the ghost who inhabits the haunted house has to do that to exist.
	And as you scare people, they give you resources to expand your haunted house.
	So it's kind of like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Dungeon Keeper Theme Hospital.
	Yeah, those kind of games, but it's much more based upon building up.
	So there'll probably be some scenarios as sort of a side thing, but it'll be something that you can kind of build your own haunted house and find the best way to scare the people who enter it.
	Okay, that's cool.
	How does the player actually scare people then?
	What there are is as people enter the house, they kind of have different phobias.
	Or the AI people come into the house and they've got tickling phobia associated with them.
	And then there's particular traps, which are, say, like a bathtub that'll have a shark coming out of it.
	When that'll be one of the traps that you can activate, or just like skeletons in a closet coming out, or any of these sort of traps.
	And what you're doing as the ghost is you're basically causing people to either be attracted or repelled from certain areas.
	So they get separated and they each go into their particular traps.
	And you're trying to avoid people who have, say, like a heart condition who may die from being sent to certain traps, while at the same token, people who are, again, have a phobia of, say, spiders walking into a closet that's all full of spiders.
	And you're just sort of making rooms and each in these rooms have these kind of traps that you're trying to navigate people to.
	Right, that's a cool idea.
	That's very interesting.
	I noticed on the Indiegogo page, it says it mentions an emphasis on interpersonal relationships.
	Yeah, what this, like, again, we knew this was going to happen.
	But you've, no, no, no, not here, but when people submitted ideas, that women tend, like, her main thing is she wants to make it so that the characters aren't defined by specific roles.
	That, meaning that when we were talking to her at the beginning, we were going to say, like, there's a cheerleader, and the cheerleader gets extra scared when there's a football player around.
	And that's kind of like one of the kind of positionings in the game.
	And she said, no, I really don't feel like the characters should have traits based upon their appearance.
	So right now, it's that the characters are assigned the traits and their actual appearance don't control that.
	And she wants to make sure that there's a wide range of characters represented outside the normal spec, like what would be considered the mainstream characters.
	So she'd like it if there's a trans character, and she'd like that if there's a couple like counterculture characters in it.
	And our line has basically been, it's your game.
	Let's just set the budget and make sure it's there.
	And I found that interesting because that came up on a lot of the proposals that women are very interested in making sure that those stories are told.
	And again, it's her game and the community's money, so we're trying to make sure that happens.
	Yeah, I think that's a very original idea.
	And I'm really interested to see.
	When is it out?
	It's probably going to be like another five or six months because it's like her first game, and games take a while.
	So we've got a bunch of the simulations down so that you can kind of make a haunted house, but a lot of the tiles aren't there.
	And we're just making it so that users can mod it and making it there.
	We want it to be kind of a teaching tool.
	So like instead of making a game, you can modify this game.
	And we're just making sure that things are accessible to people.
	Like, that you can actually, that the modding is at least easy enough to understand that people without a lot of programming experience can...
	Okay, I'm not sure, but you might have cut out there.
	Or I might be deaf.
	Either way.
	Do-do-do!
	Now my little thing's going up and down, so I'm okay, let's check my sound to make sure my earphones didn't pop out.
	Yeah, he's just missing.
	I think that's actually an excellent place to leave it.
	So again, And you can go to the FINE YON Capitalist to see the game.
	We'll be releasing a website that's just after Life Empire that'll have all of the updates to our fans and our backers.
	Lola's going to do a video and she's going to explain her experience and what's going out, and that'll probably be released in the next week.

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