Let us turn now to Mighty No. 9, a Kickstarted spiritual successor to the Mega Man franchise, that even has Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune involved. This week the makers of the game introduced their backer community to the game’s newly hired community manager, Dina Abou Karam, as one of the Mighty Numbers, just like all of their backers, with some fan art she’d done of a female version of the game’s titular main character Beck, the Mighty No. 9. This may seem obvious to you, but it will become important in a moment: the update was clear that this “female Beck” was simply fan art, or, as might be implied from the framing, Karam drawing herself as Beck.
Some members of the Mighty No. 9 backer community took this to mean that Dina was a corrupting feminist influence on the game, delved into her personal life, and demanded that she be fired and that they be given refunds. From Gameranx:
Finding fault with her presentation, these persons decided to pry into Dina’s personal life by combing through her Twitter account for other transgressions against the human race, and found that she had written tweets supportive of feminism and linked to one of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos. In a similar case, her being initially hired as a community manager and artist became tantamount to BioWare’s employment of Jennifer Hepler as a writer for the Dragon Age games—sometimes dubbed as the “cancer that is killing BioWare.”
Kickstarter does not, in the vast majority of cases, allow refunds: the company’s policy is that you’re choosing to trust the project creators with your money, so once you’ve handed it over, their participation is over. However, as a recent rash of “kicktrolling” has shown, it is fairly easy (or at least doable) to get your credit card company to reverse the charge, even after you have received backer rewards.
Without access to the backer forums, it’s unclear how numerous Karam’s detractors are, but Comcept, the game studio behind Mighty No. 9, felt forced to make a statement in response to accusations that she holds “biased views towards social justice in favor of women and transgendered LBGT community members,” that since being hired she has altered or will alter significantly the content of the game to follow a “feminist” agenda, and that she slept her way into the job because her boyfriend also works at Comcept. Naturally no such parallel investigation was made to see if there were other qualified Comcept employees had a friendship with another employee before being hired.
Comcept actually sat down and responded to questions like: “Will the community manager be creating their own robots and levels and programming, or changing the game in any way, from what the core creative team wants?!” The answer, of course, is no, because that’s not what a community manager does, and were they to try they would probably eventually be fired for annoying the dev and concept teams.