All money raised by the "Misandry in Video Games" project will be going to charity.

29th July 2012

Link reblogged from I'll tumblr for ya with 92 notes

All money raised by the "Misandry in Video Games" project will be going to charity. →

There has also been some doubts regarding what will we do the money - I thought we made it pretty clear from the get-go, but some people seem to still having doubts about it! If we don’t hit our goal, our money goes back to the backers. If we (hopefully!) reach our goal, out of the money we raise a total of 4% will go to Indiegogo as per their terms of use. From the remaining 96%, whatever money is left unspent from the production/administrative will be going to the following causes to help with the great work they carry out:

25% - Prostate Cancer Foundation (http://www.pcf.org)
25% - Ovarian Cancer Research Fund (http://www.ocrf.org)
50% - Lungevity (http://www.lungevity.org)

‘Well’, you may ask, ‘How much money will go to production costs?’ - A well-calculated, yet non-official estimate yields that we’re going to use a whopping total of $0.00 for production/administrative costs. ‘But!’, you say now, ‘That means you’re not spending money at all on the project?’ You’re absolutely right! This is because it doesn’t cost us (and anyone, really) money to produce bona-fide web video episodes.

So, considering we don’t really need a lot of money to make videos, would you call this a fundraiser? I guess so!

That’s nice that they’re giving money to charity and all, but hoo boy is it ever spreading willful ignorance to say there is no cost associated with making web video content. Just because you choose to make something for free doesn’t mean the actual cost of it is free, especially if you’re considering the cost of labour (which a lot of people seem to think is “out of line” for some reason). Claiming that it is just contributes to the misinformed accusations that every other vlogger, web animator, webcomic artist, or really, content producer of any kind online has to put up with when they try to fundraise for a project.

Basically what it comes down to is 1) Just because you’re willing to do something for free doesn’t mean that sort of content actually is free to produce 2) Just because a veiwer might not have personally paid for content to be made, doesn’t mean no one did. A lot of premium content you find online was bankrolled by the channel associated with it (PA TV, Escapist if the escapist ever got around to paying people, Mondo, College Humor, Smosh, ect) 3) As the saying goes “Artists are their own worst enemies, there’s always someone willing to do it for less”. No matter how angry you are at a particular internet personality whose project may have seen an unexpected amount of support, saying things like “web videos don’t cost anyone anything to make” is doing nothing but throwing your content-producing peers who DO factor in things like equipment, studio space, software, labour, lawyers, licensing, and other such expenses under the bus.

Yeah, this. You know why I can’t make a living as a game designer, but can make enough to support two people as a network engineer? Because people think that creativity isn’t worth anything. A lot of my credits were literally work-for-free from back when I was young and naive enough to think that was the way into an industry I was young and naive enough to think was my calling.

I’m not a better network engineer than I am a game designer. I’m brilliant at both, thank you very much. And good game designers aren’t more common than good network engineers; neither is a common field, but the latter certainly includes many more people worldwide.

Part of the problem is that people look at game design (and most creative endeavors) as an “I could do that” sort of thing. They see games selling in the store and think they could put together something just as good. No one does this with network engineering, because the end result isn’t visible to them the way it is with creative works. They see super-popular Youtube videos and think they could be just as funny. And no one’s immune from this; there’s an episode of some VH1 show—I think it was I Love the 80s—where a sports commentator remarks about Weird Al’s corpus something like “I wish I could get paid to write silly songs for a living”. A man whose job is to talk about sports on TV for money thinks Weird Al has a cushy deal.

Creative works are also something of a calling for some people, and so they’ll do it “for free”. For a while. But you can’t make a living working “for free”, so these people burn out, drop out, or they move on to trying to get paid and a new crop of eager young fools (like myself in my twenties) jump in and undercut them.

Don’t work for free, kids. No one suggests that programmers, or mechanics, or nurses, or cops should “get their foot in the door” with free work. Get yourself a paid gig ASAP. By working for free you’re depressing your wages for the rest of your life, as well as everyone else who ever gets into your field.

And you there, who hasn’t done something like this but is just sure you could do it just as well and can’t understand why {insert famous person} gets money for it:

Fuck you. Do it. Then come back here and tell me how it went.

Edited to add: Hey, Misandry in Video Games guys? Just fuck you. Full stop.

Source: hokuto-ju-no-ken