You are a monster.

...Now that you mention it, neither have I.

She seems immature and confrontational. So do some of her critics but they're not employees representing the company, just bozos on the web.

I have no problem with a female main character of any race (How is a female mega-man stand in different from Samus?), but good god is the design in that link ugly. Like some kind of hideous caricature. She doesn't seem to be good at community management OR visual design, and those deficits seem like much bigger issues regarding her suitability for her position than her sex.

I MERELY HOLD UP A MIRROR TO THE FACE OF HUMANITY.

Isn't there supposed to be a female character you can play as through co op? I think she may be getting her own short single player levels as well. It's been a long time since I looked at the kickstarter page, but I seem to remember reading something about that being stretch goals.

Edit: Okay, I looked and the female character's name is call and she is playable through an online co op challenge mode. She will also have a short single player campaign. It's not exactly what the person in question was asking for, but it's something I suppose.

Neither have i.......

This is just a case of people reacting without thinking, a.k.a. wednesday on the internet.

I've never played Mega Man and I backed this project with (in hindsight) a stupidly high amount of money. Now this thread has reminded me of that stupidity and that the project is probably going to go bad at some point.

Let's ask ourselves this. Why, in all walks of life, do people get hired to do a job? Expertise, experience, skill. As well as other determining factors like personality and cultural fit. Age, sex or race do not play a part into the hiring process (under law) so let's not muddy the waters with those factors in this discussion either. This is simply the case of a person being under-qualified for a job getting hired purely because of the connections they hold.

Now, why do people have a 'right' to be justly 'outraged'? Because money. People put money (and faith) into a project under the guise of something that now has become less true. That Keiji Inafune and his 'all star' veteran dev team, at the time of the Kickstarter completion, were solely going to be designing and developing the game. They signed off on that and it's with that experience people put trust in this project. Now someone without that is seemingly going to be designing some aspects of the game. Again this comes down to expertise, why are they afforded with this task? Because they have created fan-art does not mean they have the design sensibilities to design elements inside of a game.

If we want to get more granular and specific to the role at hand - Community Management. As a Community Manager you cannot be unfamiliar with the product you a representing, that is fact. It's a splinter of PR but centered towards your most hardcore of fanbases, the community and the people who take the time to post in your forums. Let's take any online multiplayer gaming community, when an update comes out and it adjusts the balance of the game you want the Community Manager to know what they're talking about so they can field any questions and talk in depth on the thought processes behind the changes as well as note any concerns by the community and use language that is understanding and sincere. With this I would say having some sort of affinity towards the legacy of the games series you represent is vitally important as Mighty No. 9 is to most is the continuation of that series. If the community sense any sort of sway in vision that may endanger what was outlined in the Kickstarter pitch and this can be attributed to a person with a lack of experience then I think they have a right to voice their concerns.

TL;DR - Connections and networking are all fine and dandy to get your foot in the door but once you are there you should have the expertise and experience to be fully capable in the role you signed up for, you can't have the first without the other, for any job no matter what sex you are.

I'm really seeing a lot of parallels between this and Tom Hulett's illustrious career at Konami. I can't blame fans for being hypersensitive to this sort of thing since it happens all the time. Some weird person somehow finds a position of higher influence in a game project who doesn't really share the core goals of the original creators or the fans and everything starts to spiral out of control from there. I don't think it's completely unwarranted for fans to treat these people like interlopers when they do tangibly harm the products they are attached to, and when it's so hard to find games that aren't severely compromised creatively these days. I mean it's too early to really tell with this lady, but I don't blame the backers for their trepidation either.

I should just throw this out there, but I was introduced to my current job through my brother, and have been introduced to a new job opportunity through my aunt. I dont consider myself lazy or undeserving of the opportunities I get, but "nepotism" is sort of a fact of life. I'm not casting a judgment over this entire situation based on what I just said, only that I dont feel as incensed as some about that one part of the story.

Today in "What people SAY they're mad about" versus "What they're obviously ACTUALLY mad about"...

She's a community manager, not the director of the game. Man, fuck the internet, I'm gonna unplug.

Without pointing fingers, I can see this creating a lot of instability for the development team and the backers. Comcept needs to quickly address these issues, and (though not a lot of hope in this) the community/backers need to keep their heads on a swivel. It's just some unpleasant things, nothing to change the entire project.

The internet sucks.

The most hilarious part of this is that Comcept already has all their Kickstarter money. All the impotent rage and butthurt by these entitled manchildren gives me plenty of lulz.

Hiring someone to fill a position they appear to be grossly underqualifed simply because they have a personal relationship with a team member seems like a perfectly valid issue to voice concern over.

Gamers are fickle. We're naturally suspicious of outsiders for a variety of reasons. I think the biggest one is that the stigma of liking video games has only worn off in the last few years. Suddenly you have a bunch of people coming into this hip and trendy hobby that quite frankly didn't belong here. They've been trying to change the values and etiquette of the subculture to something more palatable to their tastes. These are the things that happen when a subculture becomes gentrified. A lot of gamers don't want that to happen because if it does they don't belong anywhere (again). This friction with outsiders has a lot to do with personal identity and I think this is going to happen every time someone who doesn't belong forces their way in.

Some people are going to say "oh it's because she's a woman!" as if that's the sole cause for any anger, ever. It's not. Everyone has to go through an integration period before being accepted as a member of a subculture. It happens everywhere, with every hobby, with everybody. You have to prove to those around you that you do belong here. That happens to everyone whether it's the high school jock (me) or the nerdy intellectual or the drama student who is entirely way too into Sylvia Plath. There's a period in integration where you're more or less tested by a community and if you pass, you're accepted as one of us. That's all there is to it, really. What we're witnessing with this Mighty No. 9 shenanigans is another person who doesn't fit into the community, has failed the integration test, and yet has a job that most would murder for. Fans of Mega Man (and gamers in general) are going to be resentful of that. I don't think that's going to change until the subculture is entirely gentrified.

Long story short while I don't care for Mega Man I can see quite easily why that particular community would be concerned about this woman's involvement. Not because she has a vagina, but because her ideas and ideology run counter to what the Mega Man community wants from this game they have paid for. They see her as a threat to this one-in-a-million chance to get a true Mega Man game and they don't want her politics or personal beliefs to fuck it all up. Do I think Inafune is that stupid? No, not really. He's actually pretty smart and he knows his audience. Do I think that Comcept could have gotten out in front of this and done better damage control? You're goddamn right.

In these situations first impression reactions like this are the most annoying thing and perpetuate the stereotype.

'Internet angry at something' +'person targeted is a woman' = 'Internet misogynists are at it again.' It's just a self fulfilling prophecy if you don't take the time to research the situation and just jump to your own preconceived conclusions. Now I'm not saying there aren't people out there exploiting this situation to voice their 'women stay in the kitchen' opinion but that isn't the meat of this story and you're blinded by your own prejudices of 'internetism' if you think otherwise. Isn't that what you wrote a TedX talk about @patrickklepek?

@viking_funeral: Fantastic post. You laid out the facts and your presented them as neutrally as you could. You basically laid bare the heart of this conflict and of every one of these conflicts arising in the game industry these days: Everyone is at fault. This community manager person did a horrible job of presenting herself as a person who cared about her new job and the backers overreacted (surprise) and got way too aggressive. I feel like this sort of call and response behavior is becoming increasingly common. Someone makes a little misstep and then the internet responds with absolute vitriol which then either inspires a counter-movement against the internet hate or a poorly worded and rash response from the original individual which only inspires more conflict. Good to hear that she seems to have at least owned up to her faults and is making steps in the right direction.

Ugh, that community is super gross. If I was running that kickstarter I would just say "fine, fuck you, no more Mighty No. 9 and we're keeping your money."

I I care about social issues and I care about my time. And I don't have enough time to look at or care about the beliefs of everyone involved in producing all of the products that I use. Sure there is a line that companies can cross and I don't buy their products anymore, but I don't have the energy to sit and worry about what everybody thinks or believes when it comes to a medium that is so collaborative as video games. There are people that work on every game ever that I would probably find despicable. So if the community manager is someone I don't like or agree with, so what? I may participate less in the community, but that is not going to affect my core enjoyment of the game. And even if the person got to change the direction and make the game a huge joke/departure of what you were expecting, you can't make that decision until after you play it. When you Kickstart something, you need to throw that money on the table and be prepared that you might just get nothing in return. Enjoy the results if you do get an awesome experience out of it.

This doesn't seem to be the best start to the new job as community manager.

Once again collectively responses have managed to pick apart every permutation and so you get the full gamut of making an issue out of this from its most in innocent to hateful. A second layer is added on top where now people are reacting to the initial reaction and so on. The issue here is that hostility is derivative of assumptions about identity and a mountain of exclusionary and ignorant things being the own around which has all but rendered any minor issues, which are really non-issues, irrelevant in light of another huge wave of emotionally charged Internet backlash. Is there something to talk about with the community manager not being a mega-fan? Maybe but as soon as any anti-feminist or like chip on shoulder got rolling, it was all over and now it's just people piling on and projecting all their hang ups in a mob.

"She just doesn't have the proper experience" is the gamer's dog-whistle code for "because she's a woman." Dudes are upset because a community manager, essentially a glorified PR rep, is going to redesign the game because she suggested that you have the option of playing as a woman in their stupid cartoon game? YEAH NO UNDERLYING ISSUES THERE AT ALL NOPE

I wonder how many of the kids attacking this woman and the maker of Depression Quest worship Christopher Hitchens like a god.

@razielcuts: I read the arguments against her and I still think it's essentially just angry internet misogyny. Either that or you all are so insane as to think that someone needs to be a fan of something in order to do good work. Go look through the history of creative projects and you'll find countless examples of people who did fantastic work in a franchise they were never a fan of. Instead of digging through people's past for silly things they might have said once give them a chance based on their current and future actions. Maybe this lady will do a fantastic job if just given the chance. Maybe she wont and she'll leave without the harassment.

What does a community manager actually do? Please don't say "manage the community."

A couple years ago, Adam Boyes got in contact with me (when he was at Beefy Media) about consulting on some Mega Man Xbox Live avatar items because I had the most wiki points on the Giant Bomb Mega Man franchise page. It didn't end up working out but I was totally ready to do it.

I have never played a Mega Man game.

This is the best thing. You have made me very happy.

hey op, thanks for the info, was wondering what people were all rustled about.

i gotta say guys, i'm super glad we're all entitled to, and able to express our opinions, but this is a total fart in the wind compared to the rest of the controversial moments this year. let's try our best to excise the extremist reactions, ad hominem, and posts full of rage this site occasionally harbors.

full disclosure, i'm a backer, pretty excited for the game. strongly don't care about this!

Dont care about who makes this game, i just want it to be good. And to me it doesnt seem like she was saying anything bad. Its just an idea/opinion. And it wasnt voiced in an unreasonable way. Not at all like the response it got, wich is very unreasonable.

You better be fucking certain that nobody else at that company does fit the loose qualifiers like "not a Mega Man player." No, this is all a simple fucking guise to be typical internet assholes. I'm not even talking about the whole sexism thing that is very fucking clearly happening here, but just the way people are being total dicks to a stranger. Even in whatever pathetic MRM world you live in, where you feel like your penis shrinks a tiny bit each time a woman makes a video game, you don't have to be an asshole when it happens.

Jesus, the lack of perspective in those people. You know how much pull a fucking community manager has on a product? A percent of a percent of a percent. Your job is to wade into the fucking human filth that is Gamers on the Internet and make sure they aren't stabbing each other with knives. Maybe you collect some data the devs want and send it their way. That's it.

She's a glorified forum admin. Fucking... calm down. She has about as much effect on the direction of Inafude's game as I do.

Anyone who thinks nepotism in the hiring of a community manager for a Kickstarter-funded indie game developer is a serious problem is insane. Being a Mega Man fan or not is also irrelevant to the job. Way to go, Gamer/"Men's rights" Outrage Machine. You have succeeded in making us all look like idiots yet again.

Well this is a sad situation. Here's a couple of thoughts -

Comcept is the team behind Ninja Gaiden Z, a game up there with Suda 51's work as being some of the most sexually juvenile shit in the games industry. If they have someone on the team to try to counterbalance that then good on them.

Community Manager is one of the lowest tiers on the development team. Are they expecting Comcept to hire some artistic master as a CM? She doesn't have a lot of experience. That is why she is not the lead artist. Everyone has to start somewhere. I don't know how old she is, but maybe she is a bit too young to have played the original Mega Man games? They came out in the mid-eighties so if she was born then she probably wouldn't have started playing the series until the SNES days which could explain why she has only played the X games. That is just speculation on my part of course, but if she is in an entry level position I would imagine (or at least hope) she is no older than her late 20's which would make her birth year sometime in the late 80's.

I guess part of the problem is that none of the Mega Man games up until the PS1 games probably had a budget of more than $250,000 and I doubt any of the PS1 games had a budget above $750,000. This is important because even if they hired every person who worked on every classic Mega Man game they would probably still need more people to develop a $4 million game. They are going to have to add new talent and that new talent is likely going to have been born too late to play the original NES Mega Man games.

This is dumb. She's a community manager, what kind of power over the product do people think she has? I'm a backer, and read her introductory letter(which was pretty bad), but I wasn't aware that this was a thing. Thanks for laying out the facts, though.

Whatever to the playing as a female thing too. Mighty No. 9 is gonna be at least partially made by the guys who did Mega Man Zero and ZX, right? You had a choice of two characters of different genders in either ZX or ZX2, and I don't remember it impacting the game in any significant way other than that in ZX2 you would run into your character from the previous game if you chose the protagonist of the opposite gender.

@hatking: I am certain that there is another person working on Mighty No. 9 that has not played a Mega Man game in his or her life or familiar with the franchise prior to taking a job at the Comcept. While being a fan of the product or similar products shows the employer a future passion for the job, it (usually) is not the sole determinant in getting a job. Determinants may include having the core skills necessary, experience, and being able to successfully apply them similar environments. I bet that woman went through a hiring process like everybody else and got picked because she seems like the most competent person for the given job, and not solely because she knew somebody at the company. The backers angry at this situation are being petty and some are leveraging the situation for sexist agendas.

In short, you usually do not have to be familiar with similar products or brands to get a job and Kickstarter backers are making mountains out of molehills while possibly being sexist.

Not about how you get the job, its about how well you do your job.

I don't care who the community manager is because I will probably never come into contact with them. I will look in on the forums once in every 6 months just hoping that the game comes out in reasonable time and doesn't suck. So this is really stupid.

What I want to know is why Comcept don't seem to have made it clear they can hire whoever they want, that they know what they're doing and there is no problem. Leaving it hanging just attracts the attention of tedious games 'journalists'.

Ok here we go again.

One side - "Internet people are asshole, sexist people, bad people and they should be ashamed to think what they think!!!! Sexist PIG Sexist PIG Sexist PIG!!"

The other side - "How come Inafune is not doing EVERYTHING in this project himself? How come they have to hire other people to do PR work? How come she got a job at her BF company?(Connection is how the world works!) Feminist BULLSHIT, Feminist BULLSHIT Feminist BULLSHIT!!"

Did I get all that right? ok I will be over here playing Tearaway.

The complaining backers are being irrational and overreacting to nothing, for sure, though it seems a bit much to lump them all into sexist territory. But fuck, what do I know. I just got here.

Where's my Megaman game?

Don't really want to address any potential sexism, but here are a few of my thoughts on the situation.

1: Nepotism is such a part of the working world that it doesn't even really need to be addressed. The only thing that matters is if they can do the job or not. I don't think I've seen anything to suggest that the person in question cannot do that job. Companies are free to hire who they want. If they can't do the job, that's a different story. But seriously, the idea of "it's not what you know, but who you know" may sound bad on its face, but in practice it isn't bad at all. Unless you have a habit of biting anyone who comes within 10 feet of your desk, you are going to meet people just by existing in the working world. Those people who you meet can very well be your key to the next adventure. Its not really a big deal as long as they can do the job.

2: Sometimes I notice that some people will imply fandom is a requirement for working on games. This cannot be further from the truth. You do not need to be a fan of any kind of game to work on any other game. People learn. We learned. It happens.

In fact, you don't even need to be a fan of games to be successful in the gaming business. That can actually be a big strength, because fans will sometimes get too close to their work and cloud their judgement. Sometimes a more objective head can make a better choice. Obviously this isn't a hard rule or anything. Its a matter of strengths and weaknesses, as an invested fan will usually bring reverence and a personal touch to a project. But the point is, again, it really doesn't matter where someone comes from, the question is can they do the job? Is the game good? That's really all that matters.

3 (Edit): Also, I'm the frickin' principle engineer on my game and I barely have any influence over the design. I do not think we have to worry about the community manger having too much influence :)

@thegorilla: I actually don't have any dog in this fight, I've found Mega Man games enjoyable in the past and was glad to see 'another one of those' for the success story it was - Keiji Inafune going back to his roots and having creative control over a project that hardcore fans have been clamouring for, in the same themes and trappings as an original Mega Man type game. I didn't back the project so I didn't sign on to anything with the hope of any outcome.

I guess the main reason I latched onto this is because I'm kind've tired of people (Patrick, among others) simply sweeping legitimate concerns under the carpet of 'Shut up, you internet sexists are the worst' when really theres more here than that. If it were purely the case of 'Woman who has unrelated personal views gets hired as Community Manager, internet flips their shit' then yeah, I'd be all behind saying 'Fuck those guys' but that simply is not the case, maybe for some but not for me.

I don't buy the conspiracy theorists ’She’ll push her feminist agenda on the game’ argument either (you'd have to be pretty tin foiled hat to think that). Why would people be all that bothered if that were to happen anyway, in this game particularly. I don’t think anything would change if Beck was a male or female, I doubt the story will be all that gripping that his gender will play a role either way or the gameplay would change because of it (why would it?). At the end of the day Beck's main characteristic is that he's a robot and as such can upgrade his abilities.

I kind've see the ‘anti-feminist/women' issue as an unfortunate scapegoat argument for a reaction to the outrage really.

I'm getting really sick of certain "journalists" crying sexism whenever a female happens to be involved. Find some new material, that ship has sailed.