If everyone is right and this is a scam, or is possibly violating the Kickstarter TOS, why hasn't anything been done yet?
Because Kickstarter doesn't give a fuck. They have an increasingly poor record of sticking to their own TOS and a worse record doing any vetting whatsoever. For a company that depends on trust and accountability to keep people pledging (which is where they get their revenue from), they sure do a shitty job of making sure people feel a sense of trust and accountability. I have said this repeatedly in the last six months -- if they don't make a greater investment in the vetting process and work more to curate their content, they are ultimately going to fail -- no matter how many success stories there are.
And, additionally, because they're letting the mom skate on the "well, this isn't a fund your life project, it's a make-an-rpg for people project!" technicality rather than face the wrath of the internet. When she emailed them about it, they actually said "it qualifies as a project, because people are funding a game" (riiight). Of course, my understanding is that the latest news is they are possibly going to use the $25k to send 20 other kids to the same camp or something. This is even weirder, because that sort of makes this a charity, right? Charities are not allowed on Kickstarter. Additionally, if you are not getting 21 RPGs out of this, then how does this still fit within the parameters of the project and the parameters of Kickstarter's TOS? Why not do away with the smokejob and just say "okay, we give up, you can do fund-my-life and charity stuff and instead of an RPG for everyone, we're going to let this project just be about sending 21 kids to camp"?
I think less of Kickstarter for making the decision they did (basically, ignoring that what they're raising money for is tuition to summer camp and not the trinket/token RPG that they'll be making over a period of like two days at the camp -- and therefore violating their TOS that everyone else who doesn't play to the little-kid/sexism thing has to adhere to), but I understand why they did. I said they would, from the beginning. The downside to letting this slide is they might lose five people who won't chip in on any projects ever again. The downside to sticking the TOS to them is suddenly becoming the most evil company on the internet and being labeled as sexists and misogynists and child-haters ruining a little girl's dream.
The concern of skeptics is not helped by the fact that /r/mensrights (ugh) got hold of this story and then began to bombard the comments on the Kickstarter page with their paranoid drivel, either. It took the tone from a bunch of concerned people politely saying "while this seems like a great idea on the surface, I am not sure if this crosses the line for what projects are allowed here or only straddles it and the lack of any video of actual people behind the project makes me wonder if this is a scam and the whole self-promotion of non-project-related-things is weird" to a bunch of people posting dozens of times in a bunch of volatile "feminazi double standard man-hating durp durp durp" bullshit. It was like if you were having a polite political discussion with friends in a Denny's when Alex Jones and all of his InfoWars religious crazies stumbled in, jammed themselves into the booth with you and started talking about gold, heirloom seeds, and the sign of the beast . . . . and now everyone in Denny's is looking at YOU like YOU'RE a fucking asshole.
I think it seems obvious to any observer what was going on here and what the mother was manipulatively playing with and to. Regardless of their financial status and the real or imagined interest the child has, this was mostly about promoting mom's own women-oriented crowd-funding website. She did a ridiculous amount of spamming and promoting for something that only needed $800, after all. It's easy to get attacked and labeled for making such a statement, but the truth is that many who questioned this whole thing (in much the same way they would or have questioned other fishy-smelling kickstarter projects in the past) would have loved for this to be absolutely legitimate with no fishy stuff going on and no mom-advertising-her-crap and none of this extraneous garbage. Even I initially chipped in money, before I started digging around and didn't feel right putting my money in their hands, for any reason.
Really, the only thing one needs to show in contrast to this -- to demonstrate how the mother orchestrated and manipulated the entire thing and the current controversies to their benefit in a very gross way -- is to observe the Kickstarter of another little girl and her mom. This girl is the same age. One that was running concurrently with this one (launched a few days earlier, in fact). It's for some equipment to improve the quality of the claymation videos the daughter makes -- currently stuck with an iPhone for recording and a flimsy cardboard empty pasta box for a tripod. They made a nice short video showing the work she already does and neither the video or the project content ever brings up evil terrible men, sexism, misogyny, being a trophy wife of Donald Trump and Larry King, selling girl-power beer-cozeys or tee-shirts and mouse-pads from the mom's company nor do they spam news outlets with press releases or spam twitter with appeals to Ellen DeGeneres on behalf of a little girl, trampled upon by vile brothers.
The controversial project with all the spam, pimping mom's own products as rewards, exploiting social issues, and labeling anyone who questions whether the project qualifies under kickstarter TOS or whether the project is even real (since it has a lot of traits shared with previously uncovered actual Kickstarter scams) as "haters" and "misogynists" . . . . has raised around $25,000. The project for the little girl just politely asking for help to make more claymation videos which she'll then give people as their rewards with no fishiness or grossness involved in the whole thing? With even more funding time under their belt, they've gone just over $1,000. They've met their goal (and yes, I contributed -- even though I'm clearly a horrible chauvinist yadda yadda yadda), but I can't help but feel super disgusted at the discrepancies between how people rush to be manipulated by a business woman running one child's kickstarter, while all but ignoring the other child's. Same ages. Similar projects (one gets some videos and the other gets a largely out-of-box RPG).
I think that discrepancy says it all.
(And I won't even bother going into how absurd it is that there's some company out there charging like $1,500 for a five day "technology camp" that -- from what I've read of a previous attendee -- consists of two or three days of regular camp stuff followed by two days of making an RPG in RPG Maker. It seems like this should be a free or $200 course taught by volunteers at the local community center during the summer.)
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