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Separating art from the artist
December 2012. That's the last time I listened to a Lostprophets song. They were never my favorite band, but a few tracks were in my regular rotation until that month, when The Guardian broke the news that the band's frontman, Ian Watkins, had been charged with child sex offenses. As the terrible nature of his crimes slowly unraveled, I came to associate every drum, every chord, every lyric, with the horrors I had read about. The question -- can you detangle creativity from its creator? -- is an old one. It's often argued that we should judge a work on its own; that to tie it into an author's views or politics is wrong. But I've always struggled to separate the two. Recently, that struggle was brought into sharp focus. Since July, I've put 71 hours into the sci-fi colony simulation game RimWorld. It is far from perfect, and aspects have frustrated me, but as a whole, I deeply enjoyed it. Until, that is, an article, a response and a few tweets made me stop playing. It started when Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an article by Claudia Lo, an academic and journalist, titled "How RimWorld's Code Defines Strict Gender Roles." In it, she pulls apart the game's underlying code to reveal issues with how its relationships function. Lo claims that, rather than being realistic or neutral, the game is imbued with the beliefs of its developer, Tynan Sylvester. Bisexual men don't exist in RimWorld, and all women are either bisexual or gay, she said. There are also issues with how women and men react to romantic advances, and how colonists perceive disabilities. Sylvester has disputed almost all of the claims, both publicly via a Reddit post and through an interview with Engadget.
Crowdfund Bookie, October 2013: Two is greater than 58
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the week and produces pretty charts for you to look at. The month of October saw 172,360 people pledge $7,361,713 towards 42 successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo video game projects. To put that in perspective, that's 4,833 more project backers than the past three months combined. As discussed in our September quarterly report, some high-earning games serve as extreme samples in a month's data set. October was no different, as Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9 lured in $3,845,170 thanks to 67,226 backers. What's more, both Shantae: Half-Genie Hero and Hyper Light Drifter combined to account for 42,708 backers, which means these three projects had enough backers to match the number of funders in August and September combined, a two-month period that saw 58 successful projects. All three games fit into the action genre this month as well, which accounts for that category's high numbers. Without those three projects, the other four action games would have combined for only $113,876. October also saw some of the first Canada-based developers take advantage of Kickstarter's expansion to the country, which began in September. Eight projects came from Canadian developers, three of which were among the top six earning games for the month: RimWorld, The Long Dark and River City Ransom: Underground. The eight games accounted for 11.16 percent of the overall picture for the month ($821,411), so it'll be interesting to watch for the impact Kickstarter's expansion has on our crowdfunding trends. The funding platform will open up to Australia and New Zealand-based creators on November 13, as well. Head past the break for the month's breakdown by genre as well as the list of October's top five earners.
Crowdfund Bookie: Story generator RimWorld earns $257K
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the week and produces pretty charts for you to look at. This week in crowdfunding, the Kickstarter projects for RimWorld, Cosmic Star Heroine, Pulsar: Lost Colony, HuniePop, Universum: War Front, Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville, Spark Rising and Monster Stacker as well as the Indiegogo campaigns for Sword of the Stars: Ground Pounders and Beyond Eyes came to a close. RimWorld, a top-down, tactical game with an AI "story generator" earned the most money ($257,152) and had the highest number of funders of the week, with 9,498 people funding the project. Flex-funded, sci-fi strategy game Sword of the Stars: Ground Pounders had the highest average pledge per person rate of the group ($75.84). Check out the week's results and our pretty charts after the break.
