The Fine Young Capitalists

History

The Fine Young Capitalists is a radical feminist group founded by Matthew Rappard and based in Toronto. In an interview with APGNation, Rappard said that the mission of the group was to create media with underrepresented labor and demographics for funding non-profit organizations. Rappard noted that the inspiration for the group was the prevalence of underused game ideas due to a lack of interest from business communities, and the financial cost of hiring experienced developers to develop an idea for a video game. The group was also skeptical of education-only projects, opining that these projects could not result in finished video games. They noted that the lack of interest of game development or programming by women mostly comes from socialization, saying that women were in no way less capable than men in computing fields. The group accepts donations from people of any background.

Projects

The group's first project was an initiative to increase the involvement of women in the video games industry, in which anyone who identified as a woman prior to the start of the contest was eligible to submit a proposal for a video game. Five nominees were selected and the nominee who received the most crowd-funding would have their game produced and distributed. The winner would receive eight percent of the profits, with another eight percent going towards future contests, ten percent going to the production company, and the remainder donated to charity.

The winner of the contest was Afterlife Empire, designed and written by Danielle Maiorino, who worked with an all-female team from Bogota, Colombia-based developer Autobótika to create the game. The game was approved through the Greenlight system on the Steam video game service in late April 2015, allowing it to be included on the Steam storefront. It was originally scheduled to be released on August 14, 2015, but was later delayed due to bug concerns. The game was finally released August 21, 2015.

Another project pursued by TFYC is SNless, which concerns the representation of minority groups in science fiction. SNless is a contest in which submitters who identify racially as black before August 12, 2014 propose a black character design. The five winning entries will be reproduced in a graphic novel, which will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

In collaboration with a charity set up by pornographic actress Mercedes Carrera, TFYC administered a scholarship for people looking to work in the STEM fields. An Indiegogo campaign was set up along with a porn stream dubbed "The View of Sex" to help fund the scholarship. Carrera chose to collaborate with TFYC after a planned charity porn stream with The AbleGamers Foundation failed to pan out. The campaign managed to raise over $11,000 on Indiegogo with an additional amount of over $3,000 from the adult web cam show hosted by Carrera, half of the latter being in tips and the other half in matching donations from Webcams.com. Applications for the scholarship ended on March 15, 2015, and the winner of the scholarship, Jordan Newton, was announced in April 2015.

Involvement in Gamergate controversy

After independent game developer Zoë Quinn learned of the women's game design contest, she spoke out against TFYC on Twitter, saying that she disliked their stance on transgender people, and thought that the women involved would be working without being paid. The game design contest was also accused of being exploitative towards women and transphobic, which resulted in TFYC receiving harassment and having some of its personal information posted publicly without consent. TFYC made a statement in response reiterating that while the winner would receive a portion of the profits, most would go to charity, and that all rights would remain with the women who submitted proposals. They also clarified that their transgender policy only required submitters to have identified as female prior to the contest as a means to prevent men from lying about their gender identity in order to participate.

Social media attention remained negative and TFYC found itself losing financial support and struggling to gain media coverage due to the criticism, with many major video gaming websites avoiding TFYC. One business partner, who was planning to contribute $10,000 dollars, left the project, because he did not want the rest of his work to be referred to as transphobic. After a delay to review the inclusiveness of their policies, TFYC decided not to change the wording and opened the project up to submissions on March 28, 2014.

After the Gamergate controversy began in August 2014, the details of TFYC's earlier dispute with Quinn over the women's game design contest became one subject of discussion. Users of the site 4chan who were critical of Quinn began providing significant financial backing for the women in video games production project on Indiegogo. During the group's fundraising efforts, TFYC's Indiegogo account was hacked and the campaign was briefly shut down. Media suggested the hacking incident could have been retaliation from critics of TFYC for alleged hacking incidents targeting Quinn and her supporters.

After some 4chan users told TFYC that they wanted the group's promotional videos to talk about female game developers, TFYC released a video on Roberta Williams and her influential role in the early gaming industry. Later, TFYC also released videos on Corrinne Yu and Anna Kipnis.

After 4chan users donated over US$5,000 to the Indiegogo campaign, they were allowed to create a character who would appear in the winning game. The character created by 4chan, named Vivian James (meant to sound similar to "video games"), was designed to appear like an ordinary female gamer. The donations did not stop after the creation of Vivian, amassing over US$23,000 total in funds for the group. Erik Kain of Forbes described Vivian as an “every-girl of sorts, and maybe not what you’d expect from 4chan". Vivian James met some criticism, mainly for the character's association with 4chan. Allegra Ringo of Vice called Vivian James "a character masquerading as a feminist icon for the express purpose of spiting feminists". Allum Bokhari of TechCrunch, in turn, described her as "an entirely ordinary, non-idealized female role model". The 15-second opening cinematic of Afterlife Empire featured a still image of the Vivian James character and a shoutout to GamerGate.

TFYC later lowered the monetary requirement for donors to create a character to US$2,000, and announced that Reddit was also eligible to create a character. The character inspired by Reddit is named Gilda Mars, but some Reddit users have disputed whether the character is actually what they wanted.

The group's decision to work with 4chan prompted criticism due to the alleged involvement of 4chan users in harassment of Quinn and feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian. TFYC responded to this criticism by stating social justice movements that would not let people take part in a project because they participated at 4chan were, by definition, oppressing them. Users saw a show of support for a feminist cause against Quinn and her supporters as something that could benefit their public image. David Auerbach said "It’s a good cause, and doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still doing the right thing." TFYC responded to criticism of its association with Gamergate and alleged harassment of Quinn by offering to sell Vivian James T-shirts with profits going to iFred, a charity Quinn was supporting. Later, the group was reported to have resolved its disagreement with Quinn, though founder Matthew Rappard later told an interviewer at APGNation that their agreement never went through.