I want to establish my comment in context: a) I was one of the people really angry last night, b) I'm a professional game developer who works in the online, continuous-content space.
The project and project description rubs me the wrong way for a couple of reasons: the lack of reference to the history and context of text-based roleplaying (which seems a huge lack if you're going to mention IF) and the sneering attitude towards the fan communities that built those games and communities.
By failing to mention the historical context of what the project is doing, the creators appear to be deliberately removing reference to fan-run, fan-created, and primarily (at least in recent history) female-dominated communities and games. This is not unusual in the game industry, as female-creations are seen as 'less than' male creations, and it has a long history in fandom going back to the Trekkie vs Trekker fan distinction. We, as a community, are reacting to a history of having our work 'male-washed' (as Tori says): repackaged and presented as a commercial product, eliminating credit for our work, the safe-space gift culture we've worked hard to maintain, and respect for us as creators.
Including fan-denegrating questions on the FAQ list ('slash and other *bad* content') further emphasizes the distinction between fan-creations as 'crazy female' territory and your project as 'serious game business', which feels, quite frankly, demeaning.
So, with that context, we look at the 18k price tag and think 'look, someone is going to take what we could do for free, and have done for free, and ask for a huge amount of money for it while disrespecting us and acting like we never existed.' Thus the anger.
Now, from a game developer standpoint, 18k is not very much money. Quite frankly, I think it's not enough money to do the project as outlined on Kickstarter, even if the project is starting with MOO or MUSH as a base (which is insane for several reasons, tbh). Creating the baseline content for a storytelling RPG involves hours and hours and hours of work-- I'd say six weeks of fulltime work for one person, with another person onboard to do the coding and possibly another to do admin work. It's certainly not enough money to develop and market something you want to be commercially successful. Possibly it's enough for a prototype that you take out to get more funding. Or maybe it's the amount of money you and your partners need to pay rent for two months while you dedicate your life to this, if that's the case, bill it as a fan project, embrace fandom, and call it what it is: a MU* with a better interface you hope to market to a wider audience, or a prototype.
Mostly, though, please don't fall into the sneering video game industry trap of putting down female fans. In this case, we're likely to be your playerbase, and we're thoughtful and aware of gender issues. We're also quite capable of mobilizing to create our own versions of tools when it turns out the creators of those tools don't support us. (Dreamwidth is one such project, actually.)
*My apologies if this is a bit disjointed, I'm actually dealing with a fire drill at work at the moment (per usual), but think this issue is important enough to respond immediately.
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Date: 2011-12-20 07:56 pm (UTC)The project and project description rubs me the wrong way for a couple of reasons: the lack of reference to the history and context of text-based roleplaying (which seems a huge lack if you're going to mention IF) and the sneering attitude towards the fan communities that built those games and communities.
By failing to mention the historical context of what the project is doing, the creators appear to be deliberately removing reference to fan-run, fan-created, and primarily (at least in recent history) female-dominated communities and games. This is not unusual in the game industry, as female-creations are seen as 'less than' male creations, and it has a long history in fandom going back to the Trekkie vs Trekker fan distinction. We, as a community, are reacting to a history of having our work 'male-washed' (as Tori says): repackaged and presented as a commercial product, eliminating credit for our work, the safe-space gift culture we've worked hard to maintain, and respect for us as creators.
Including fan-denegrating questions on the FAQ list ('slash and other *bad* content') further emphasizes the distinction between fan-creations as 'crazy female' territory and your project as 'serious game business', which feels, quite frankly, demeaning.
So, with that context, we look at the 18k price tag and think 'look, someone is going to take what we could do for free, and have done for free, and ask for a huge amount of money for it while disrespecting us and acting like we never existed.' Thus the anger.
Now, from a game developer standpoint, 18k is not very much money. Quite frankly, I think it's not enough money to do the project as outlined on Kickstarter, even if the project is starting with MOO or MUSH as a base (which is insane for several reasons, tbh). Creating the baseline content for a storytelling RPG involves hours and hours and hours of work-- I'd say six weeks of fulltime work for one person, with another person onboard to do the coding and possibly another to do admin work. It's certainly not enough money to develop and market something you want to be commercially successful. Possibly it's enough for a prototype that you take out to get more funding. Or maybe it's the amount of money you and your partners need to pay rent for two months while you dedicate your life to this, if that's the case, bill it as a fan project, embrace fandom, and call it what it is: a MU* with a better interface you hope to market to a wider audience, or a prototype.
Mostly, though, please don't fall into the sneering video game industry trap of putting down female fans. In this case, we're likely to be your playerbase, and we're thoughtful and aware of gender issues. We're also quite capable of mobilizing to create our own versions of tools when it turns out the creators of those tools don't support us. (Dreamwidth is one such project, actually.)
*My apologies if this is a bit disjointed, I'm actually dealing with a fire drill at work at the moment (per usual), but think this issue is important enough to respond immediately.