So, I chipped in for that Mighty No. 9 thing that's supposed to be the spiritual successor to Mega Man. From what I've heard though, it's fallen on tough times almost right out of the gate. Here's a video summary:
Long story short: girl who is a feminist gets on the team for Mighty No, 9, girl says she's designing robots for the game, backers flip the fuck out.
Beefier and more relevant summary: this girl, named "Dina", has entered the fold of the Mighty No. 9 development team as both a community manager and as an artist. She is very much a feminist, which I think is fine, though the legions of backers that populate the game forums seemed quite sceptical. Within a day of her hiring, these backers picked apart her twitter account and found a number of reasons why she shouldn't be on the job, the most glaring of which is that she has never played a Mega Man game. Other issues include an apparent lie to the community pertaining to this lack of experience (lying is a big no-no as a community manager), as well as abundant claims that she only got the job via nepotism (some of her friends and her boyfriend also work on the dev team, admitted by Dina herself). One of her tweets stated that she's also be designing "robot masters" for Mighty No. 9, which caused most of the community to foam at the mouth.
This recent article says that one of the Mighty No. 9 team's higher-ups addressed the issue; it smells of the basic professional talk that's merely meant to calm the masses down, but what really caught my eye is that the person who made this article - not the forum post in the article, I mean the article itself - seems to believe that these people are using the nepotism and lack of experience as excuses to attack Dina just because she's female.
Now, what do I think of all this? Well, first of all I think the backers need to damn well cool their jets: the "Mark" dev team worker who made the professional post thing is likely absolutely right in that Dina won't horribly twist the project into something unrecognizable just because she's a feminist. She's merely a community manager, and the most she can do pertaining to the actual game is design a couple of robot bosses - who gives a hoot if they're female? The things people are afraid she'll change are the characters and things that have already been well-established during the Kickstarter, which quite frankly isn't going to happen - and if Dina does think it will happen, then she clearly has no grasp of game design as a business.
It's not all sunshine and roses for Dina though, as the issues of lying to the community, having no experience with the franchise Mighty No. 9 is based off of, and the fully possible nepotism are huge red flags. It's not helping her case that she addressed exactly none of these issues herself, which is what she is supposed to be doing as a community manager. The kicker though is that the poster of the linked article thinks that these are all just "smokescreen" to mask that no one wants a girl on the project. Newsflash: there are already women on the project and there have been women on the project since day one. These things he seems to think are meaningless are actually the entire reason why people think Dina should be kicked out.
...At least, that's what I'd like to think. After taking the time to browse through some of the mountains upon mountains of slander at Dina's expense, I was dismayed to see that most of it was, in fact, about the feminism thing. My faith in humanity is already dead and buried, but the sheer stupidity of people at times still manages to grind my gears regardless; it really seems like most of the backers have latched onto the most immature reason to attack Dina.
Okay. On the one hand, a little unease is to be expected out of any big undertaking like this, but to have it all blow up in Dina's face because of a couple tweet slip-ups hardly seems fair. On the other hand, Mighty No. 9 is a pretty ambitious project that a lot of people donated for, and someone with no game design experience of familiarity with the previous franchise should have no place whatsoever in the dev team; a community manager, sure, but not the dev team. I personally think Dina has overstepped her boundaries a bit, but to see this all happen more because of some dumb feminism slander instead of the much more pressing issues does make me feel some sympathy for the poor girl, though given that she outright lied to a million people, she didn't garner that much sympathy.
Does anyone else have thoughts on this? I've probably just vomited out another rant onto Contro again, but I thought it was worth discussing.
Edited by SL the Pyro, 17 December 2013 - 05:18 AM.