Back in the year 1999, a trio of game designers created a title called Sissyfight 2000. It was a turn-based strategy game that reproduced the antics of “sissyfighting” by girls on a school playground. Now three members of the original team are launching a Kickstarter project to fund an online remake, which they will then post as an open-source title.

At the same time, they hope to create a conversation around the game’s evidently “sexist” characterizations of girl fighting. Sissyfight 2000 was groundbreaking as a social game when it was created by a team of Word.com online magazine staff. The question is whether today’s Internet community is ready to understand the message behind Sissyfight and whether it’s sexist or not.

The original team included Eric Zimmerman, Marisa Bowe, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Yoshi Sodeoka, Jason Mohr, and Naomi Clark. Zimmerman, Bhatnagar, and Clark are reuniting to create the Kickstarter, which aims to raise $20,000.  The art work of Henry Darger and Edward Gorey inspired the project’s visual style.

The team plans to bring back the game with indie game site Venus Patrol, which will have a new arcade section. The original Sissyfight 2000 went offline years ago. Instead of developing a sequel, the team decided to bring the original multiplayer game back for everyone to play online. It will be available for free and open source, so anyone can create their own version of Sissyfight.

I participated in a playtest of the game, and it was spectacularly fun. The player tries to dominate the playground in a duel with five others. Each becomes a bratty little girl who has to deal with bullies, tattle-tales, and shifting friend allegiances. It sheds light “on a different kind of schoolyard violence — the emotion and social violence of the Mean Girls variety.” The original game was built in Adobe’s Shockwave and was pretty plain in its animation.

The goal of the game is to reduce the self-esteem points (the little hearts) of your opponents. When one or two girls are left, they win. With each turn, every player picks a single action without knowing what move everyone else has selected. You can “scratch” another player for one point of damage. You can “tease,” which is twice as effective as a scratch, as long as two or more girls tease the same target. A “grab” does no damage but interrupts your target’s action. A “tattle” is a powerful attack that does three damage points to everyone, but if two players tattle at the same time, then only the tattlers get in trouble. You can only tattle twice in a game. You can “lick your lolly” and get two self-esteem points back. But you can only do that three times per match. Lastly, you can “cower,” which defends you from grabs and scratches.

I actually won three matches and lost a couple as well. I found that my fellow players were quite aggressive, so I let them slug it out while I cowered or stepped back from the action. Then, when they had expended their efforts, I stepped in with a powerful “tease” attack. I found that I could take my rivals off-guard. But the same strategy never worked twice, and players could overtly collude with each other through the chat system. They could also launch verbal feints by doing the opposite of what they said they were going to do.

In many ways, Sissyfight was ahead of its time, a social game before social-networking games became popular. Chatting with other players is an important part of the strategy. In fact, Sissyfight has been used to teach game design students for nearly a decade in college courses, workshops, and the Game Developers Workshop. Zimmerman, one of the original designers, has been an active member of the indie game development community, and he later became the founder of Gamelab, the company that developed the hit title Diner Dash (for PlayFirst).

All of your team members are potential enemies or allies.

The developer plans to use the Kickstarter money to recode the game to make it playable under today’s browsers. Bhatnagar, the original programmer, will head the recoding effort. He is now a media artist who exhibits around the world. His sound sculpture will be exhibited this year at the Palais de Tokyo Museum in Paris and at the Tinguely Museum in Basel. Clark, based in New York, has worked on games with companies like Lego, Gamelab, and Fresh Planet. Zimmerman is on the faculty at the NYU Game Center and is an independent game designer.

Now, the intentional sexism of the game bothered me. I felt like I would never show this game to my daughters, who probably wouldn’t understand the intentional irony in the sexism. If a game looks sexist and plays sexist, then it must be sexist, right? I complained to Zimmerman that the game hadn’t kept up with the times and that it was wrong not to have boys fighting like sissies, as they are perfectly capable of doing so on the playground.

Zimmerman replied, “This is a great question. In fact, Sissyfight [which he spells SiSSYFiGHT] has an intentional gender imbalance. It is a conscious intervention into the culture of games — at least it was in the late 90s, and it still feels like an interesting statement today. Sissyfight is very much a feminist video game — in that it consciously grapples with ideas around the social construction of gender. I wrote about some of this in Rules of Play — how Sissyfight creates a kind of female identity which is neither princess-to-be-rescued nor action-hero-in-tight-shorts.”

In the FAQ for the game, the team acknowledges that a game where the goal is to “bully and humiliate other girls” seems a little wrong. It is intended for adults to reflect back on “adolescent struggles with dark humor, morbid nostalgia, and maybe a touch of vengeful revisionism.” It also depicts the aforementioned emotional violence.

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Female game developers have had a roller-coaster year, with issues of sexism, diversity, and media bias coming into focus in a sharper way than ever before. On Wednesday, those veteran women developers let a lot of emotion loose in a session entitled 1ReasonToBe at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. The response wasn’t outrage. It was a standing ovation.

The session included pioneering developers as well as newcomers: Brenda Romero (also previously Brenda Brathwaite, best known for Wizardry 8), Robin Hunicke (the executive producer of game-of-the-year-winner Journey and co-founder of game startup Funomena), Leigh Alexander (a game journalist for Gamasutra), Kim McAuliffe (game designer at Microsoft Game Studios), Elizabeth Sampat (a game designer at Storm8), and Mattie Brice (a game critic and consultant, pictured right). The panel was part of an advocacy track focusing on issues about working in the business. In past years, it might have been poorly attended.

But with the Internet magnifying debates on sexism in games, the issue has become more heated and passionate, and it is on everyone’s radar this year (see this related story on gender issues), said Kate Edwards, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association, in an interview.

“My feeling with that is that the issue’s time has come,” Edwards said. “It’s something that needs to be discussed rather than just dismissed. I’m glad, also, that we’re seeing a diversity of opinion, especially among women.”

The panel wasn’t just about griping. Each woman cracked some jokes and tried to inspire others to take up game development as a career.

Each of the women on the panel told personal stories about getting started in the male-dominated video game business. They were all very different people, and they didn’t line up with exactly the same kind of feminist viewpoints. In that way, they encouraged a diversity of views on the subject of how women can best succeed.

Hunicke said her path into games started early, when as a student she was identified as gifted. She did well in a variety of subjects in math, science, and arts. She found it hard to decide what to focus on for a career and began to embrace computers because it could combine her interests in all subjects. After a stint in artificial intelligence, she gravitated to game design and started attending GDC in 1999. She joined EA in 2005 and went to work on The Sims 2. She became a lead designer on MySims and helped create Boom Blox on the Wii. Then she joined Thatgamecompany and became executive producer on Journey. She left recently to co-found her own game studio.

Hunicke didn’t relate a horror story. But she did say how small things annoyed her. A cab driver discovered she was a game designer and then said, “You’re a nerd? Well, then you’re the hottest damn nerd I’ve ever seen.”

It’s a sore point because Hunicke was recently “recognized” as one of the 40 hottest women in technology. She would rather be known for her accomplishments, not her looks.

“I am sick of people choosing for me before we even have a conversation,” she said. “It’s insulting because I am a curious person, but I don’t want to be a curiosity.”

That’s why she participated in the #1ReasonToBe women in gaming movement that began on Twitter. She wants women to help each other and everyone to make the games industry achieve better diversity.

“I don’t want to sound harsh, but this is a Yoda thing. You are working actively to broaden participation in our industry, or you are in the way,” Hunicke said.

Exactly how to battle sexism is up for discussion. Hunicke said people should organize, evangelize, and catalyze. The latter means starting your own company when corporate barriers arise. With the indie revival, it’s getting easier to do that in games, but women chief executive officers are still rare. At the other end of the spectrum, Hunicke said she wanted the kids of today to become the game developers of tomorrow.

“Thank you for speaking for me and others like me,” said one woman in the audience.

Alexander at Gamasutra said that she pays attention to the issue of sexism in games because “any problems in the game development ecosystem comes through to the product.” The result can be bad games, sexist characters, and sexist game marketing. Those problems hurt the industry’s overall sales and limit its ability to appeal to more people. She noted that the debate about feminism has created a big conflict point on the Internet, with outbursts of outrage and backlash against the outrage. Internet culture hasn’t been encouraging empathy.

Alexander said she would use her “megaphone” to make a positive contribution. She said that she doesn’t see overt sexism in the form of guys who are jerks that often, but she notes that the jerk thrives in an environment where sexism is more subtle. She knows there are “booth babes at [the Electronic Entertainment Expo],” the scantily clad women who are used to market games to gamer dudes. But the subtle issues bug her, too.

Kim McAuliffe (pictured left), a game designer at Microsoft, said she didn’t have horror stories to tell. She grew up in the 1980s playing games such as Street Fighter. She became a programmer and an artist and eventually joined a game company in 2005.

As for horror stories, she said, “Not everybody has gone through that.” But what has bothered her throughout her career is the “assumption that the player is always male.” Too often, she has heard things like “girls aren’t our target audience.” She hasn’t always wanted to work on games where you “shot other humans,” but she hasn’t always had the choice.

“Minecraft came along and showed us the gaming audience is way more diverse,” she said. “It is no longer the small subset of hardcore players.”

At Microsoft, she worked on a National Geographic motion-sensing Kinect game for the Xbox 360. She felt good that it was a game where everyone, including girls, are empowered to play.

“Let’s make girls expected as players,” she said. “They will naturally grow up to be part of the industry.”

Elizabeth Sampat, a game designer at Storm8, asked the audience for permission to curse. She got it. And she dropped a lot of F-bombs. She got into the industry designing tabletop role-playing games in her spare time “while raising two kids on food stamps.” She brought up a lot of the “advice” she and others have received over the years about how to fit into the workplace as a woman.

“Don’t be a slob, but don’t dress too sloppy or you will be branded as a fake geek girl,” she said, satirizing the “sound advice” she got.

Mattie Brice, a game critic and game designer, said she started blogging 18 months ago about women and minorities in games. She found that in order to find games with characters that looked like her, she had to start creating games herself. She said she has gotten rape threats, death threats, and had her blog hacked with pornographic images.

At some point, Alexander said she would love her work as a journalist to be judged in a gender-neutral way, but inevitably arguments about what she writes spill into the gender domain. Eventually, she said, “I want to be less of a pundit, more of a good listener.” But as for the “nerd bros” who view the games business as their own domain, she said, “This is everyone’s games industry now, and so they better get used to it.”

Brenda Romero (pictured right) married the equally famous Doom co-creator John Romero. Under the name Brenda Brathwaite, she has been making role-playing game for decades, but she is sometimes introduced as the “wife of John Romero.” She said the E3 booth babes still bug her, and she has been trying for years to get the Entertainment Software Association to get rid of them. In 2006, E3 show management issued a policy to limit booth babes, but it hasn’t enforced that policy, and the booth babes have come back.

At E3, she said, the booth babes are so ubiquitous that it creates a “sexually charged atmosphere.” She said, “It felt like walking through a construction site. Why do I feel this way? I founded this fucking industry, you motherfuckers. I felt like I was receiving a lot of gazes I didn’t want to receive.”

Romero said that she was touched recently when her daughter gave her a card that said one of the best things she could hope for was to make a video game with her mother. Her daughter is the highest level (85) in World of Warcraft, and she is on her school’s honor roll. That card gave Romero a lot of joy. But as long as the booth babes at E3 make all women feel “gazed upon,” Romero said she can’t take her own daughter to visit the show. After she finished her comments, the crowd gave a standing ovation.

“I want her to feel safe there and not gazed upon,” she said. “That is all I am asking.”

[Update: Romero tweeted this morning: I resign as co-chair of the IGDA Women in Games SIG effective immediately. #1ReasonWhy. It is evidently related to the IGDA's sponsorship of a party where scantily clad women appeared.]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: SendGrid is now under DDOS attack

BREAKING: SendGrid has now fired Adria Richards

Update Mar 27: Adria Richards’ statement

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two allegedly began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The other developer, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was fired by PlayHaven for the incident (PlayHaven confirmed this today). He posted about what happened from his perspective on Hacker News and denied that any sexual comments were made about forking:

While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery, the highest form being implementation, and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo.” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.

He added that, in his opinion, this was not a fair fight. And that as a result of Richards’ tweet, he — a father of three — was fired from his job:

My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.

Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl, saying she took the comments for as long as she could, but when she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a stand for her and all the women who have not considered technology as a career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”

As the conversation violated PyCon’s rules of conduct, and as she was personally offended, she decided to make the developers’ behavior public. As a result of her tweets, PyCon staff talked to her, identified the men, and escorted them out of the room. Within days, apparently, one of the developers lost his job — although there is now a Care2 online petition asking PlayHaven to give “the mistreated employee their job back.”

The upshot?

A storm of opinion and controversy has erupted on Richards’ blog and Twitter accounts about whether her actions were appropriate or not, and much of it has turned misogynistic and nasty. Developers and others, both male and female, have expressed differing opinions, with some supporting Richards and others condemning her for being too harsh. One has even posted a 10-minute video on Tumblr attacking her. A Pastebin record of the incident from the developers’ perspective is currently a top-four link on Hacker News.

One woman developer, @snipeyhead, went so far as to say that Richards’ actions actually make things worse for women:

@sandys1 Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech

— snipe ツ (@snipeyhead) March 21, 2013

While standing by her actions, Richards has tweeted that she did not think the developer should lose his job. It’s fairly clear that getting him fired was not her intention. And it’s also pretty obvious that the PyCon code of conduct, which presumably all attendees had the opportunity at least glance at and agree to, prohibits conversations like the one the developers were engaged in:

All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.

Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference without a refund at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.

Still, it’s a tough situation for the developer in question — and perhaps for other developers who must now be concerned about their language and conduct not only in the office but away from the job. Perhaps that’s a good thing, to a certain extent, but it’s also a chilling effect and a limitation on the idea freedom of speech (even though the 1st Amendment only protects against government censorship).

Which freedom, by the way, Richards has used to publicly made sexual references in a joking manner herself, just a few days prior to this incident:

@skwashd you should put something in your pants next time…like a bunch of socks inside one…large…sock.TSA agent faint

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 14, 2013

I’ve tried to reach out to Richards via Twitter but have not heard back. Likely, she’s not checking her Twitter messages, as many of them appear to be insulting … or even criminal, with one going so far as to threaten rape and another so vile that I cannot embed it here that essentially threatens both rape and murder. (I’ve flagged that tweet for Twitter to consider and hopefully remove, by the way, and you might wish to do the same.) A Ruby on Rails developer forwarded it to me, who added a very sad note:

I can’t imagine my daughter wanting to get into an industry that has these sorts of things happen. So evil.

VentureBeat will continue to try to get a comment from Richards.

SendGrid, too, has been drawn into the conversation, with some male developers I’ve spoken to (who do not want to be named) saying that they’re less likely to use SendGrid as a result. Richards tweeted that SendGrid did support her, however.

There’s no neat knot to tie up on this one. Essentially, too many men and women in America — and in technology — have different ideas about what is appropriate and what is not. There’s no question that women face huge challenges in technology, and there’s also no question that the Twitter and blog comment response from the wider community has gone way over the top.

Frankly, it would be great to bring Richards and the now-unemployed developer together to discuss what has happened and how we can move forward from here. If you’re him, please contact me about this issue.

photo credit: Liam Wilde via photopin cc

Hey, smart person! Just so you know, GoDaddy thinks of you as a social miscreant with horrible fashion sense and a body of unsurpassed physical awkwardness.

We’ve known for eons that GoDaddy thinks of women as wordless manequins with logo-boobs. That the company treats its spokesmodels like RealDolls is a fact as generally acknowledged as it is odious. Lest you think this is one of our trademark feminist rants, don’t worry. We wouldn’t waste our word count and your time on a topic so tired.

What bothers us more about GoDaddy’s Super Bowl spot is its denigration of smart people.

Check it out:

First point of irony: The “smart side” that GoDaddy seems to be implicating as generally undesirable? Those are most likely to be some of their biggest customers. You know, the people who build and maintain websites.

Second point of irony: The “sexy side” of GoDaddy that model Bar Refaeli represents? We’re having trouble figuring out what the “sexy side” of web hosting actually is. It’s not sexy; it’s utilitarian. It has nothing to do with looks or models or kissing or sex or boobs or weird cultural associations between our bodies and our brains. It’s just. Freaking. Web hosting. No one ever wanted web hosting to be sexy, GoDaddy.

This high school dichotomy GoDaddy perpetuates — the one wherein all conventionally hot people are vain sex idiots and all smart people are ugly (or all ugly people are smart) — demeans us all, the homely, the brilliant, the beautiful, the not-so-smart, and the alliances we all make during our lives and careers with others of varying hotness and intelligence.

But do let’s remember, GoDaddy is only perpetuating, not creating, this paradigm. Take a look at the whole “fake nerd girl” rants, memes, and assorted Tumblr-based backlashes: We expect our pretty girls to be dumb and our smart men to be ugly (and angry).

Honestly, it’s a paradigm I’ve come to love to hate. Every time I scrape myself out of my pajamas and put on a pair of fake eyelashes, my perceived IQ goes down at least 40 points. And as a devoted troll, I have had a lot of fun with that.

But for every time I’ve used the stereotype to my advantage, there are dozens more where it’s been used against me with much greater damage. (Again, see “fake nerd girl” Internet poop-storm.)

The best thing to do, then, is to carefully examine our own minds for traces of these prejudices. Is your smart friend dating a hot person? Are you assuming the hot person is less smart? Did you assume that nerdy-looking guy was smart or socially awkward just because he had a neckbeard and hipster-thick glasses? Be vigilant, my friends. Nerds of all genders, races, orientations, ages, and body types need to band together to ward off unfounded societal assumptions about ourselves and one another.

In conclusion, sod off, GoDaddy. You’ve long been a joke among advertisers and technologists alike. Your tactics suck, your stereotypes are completely unfair and unrealistic, and no one is laughing.

Have a GoDaddy account? If you’ve had more than enough logo-boobs-and-SOPA-supporting bullcrap for one lifetime, may we suggest getting away from the creepers who run that joint?

Here’s a detailed post on migrating off GoDaddy with little or no site downtime. There’s also a good LifeHacker post on taking your business elsewhere, and here’s a good Forbes article with five reasons to ditch GoDaddy and how to go about doing it.

The game industry is still living in compressed time. It went through more gyrations and disruptions in a year than it usually does in a generation. The revolution in games is on our doorstep, but several of the big companies trying to start it have failed to execute. They proved that ambition alone isn’t enough to take on the status quo.

But traditional game makers can’t be too smug. We saw the bankruptcy of THQ and the weakening of many of the strongest video game franchises. Social, mobile, and online forces will continue to reshape the business in the coming year, but nobody was free of trouble.

The good news is that the number of gamers continues to soar (past a billion), and, sometime soon, somebody is going to hit a phenomenal home run. That is why that, in spite of some phenomenal crash landings, entrepreneurs and investors are still going big with new game startups. Those startups aren’t raising as much money as they once did, but the entrepreneurs running them still have fire in their bellies.

We’ve gone back through the archives of GamesBeat for the past year and dug up the stories that made the biggest impact. Here’s our list of the biggest game stories of 2012.

1. Zynga goes into a free fall

In tandem with Facebook’s disappointing initial public offering, Zynga missed its second quarter earnings targets. Demand for its games weakened, and the company’s stock price tanked 40 percent in a day. It never recovered during the year, and the toll was felt by every gaming company. In the third quarter, the results were disappointing again.

The problem for game startups is that Zynga’s value fell by 75 percent, crushing down the values of similar companies in both the public stock and private markets. Game company valuations plummeted, and it is no surprise that the pace of investments slowed in the latter part of 2012. Zynga tried to claw its way back up to recapture the glory days of its IPO. It launched a spate of new titles like FarmVille 2 and moved into mid-core games via acquisition. But the payoff isn’t clear just yet.

2. Mobile goes big

Zynga tried to move into mobile in a big way, but so did everybody else. The migration was huge, since many believed that smartphones and tablets would replace consoles. Rovio’s Angry Birds soared past a billion downloads, and the franchise took off in new directions with Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars, not to mention a whole line of new Hasbro toys. Social game companies like Kabam successfully diversified beyond Facebook and invaded mobile — its Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North turned out to be the No. 1 grossing app on the Apple App Store. About 86 percent of Flash game developers expanded into mobile. Like King.com, most of them tested their titles on the web and Facebook and then moved the successful games over to mobile.

By the third quarter, mobile-game startups accounted for 42 percent of all investments in the industry and 22 percent of the transaction value, according to Digi-Capital. That meant that mobile game investments were popular, but they were also smaller since mobile-game studios are still relatively small.

But the mobile market wasn’t easy. Indie game makers could make it big, but they often needed help. Mobile marketers tried everything the could to get their products noticed, but Apple had to crack down on the methods that weren’t good for consumers. Still, mobile promised to be huge. In the U.S., 44 percent of people were playing mobile games. And mobile became the fastest growing segment in games.

3. Kickstarter launches a crowdfunding revolution

While Zynga’s crash hurt funding, developers found a new fountain of money in their own fans. Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions tapped the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to fund a new adventure game. It raised more than $1 million on its first day and wound up raking in $3.3 million in 30 days by March 13. Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment jumped on the opportunity and raised nearly $3 million for Wasteland 2, a sequel that no traditional game publishers would touch. Jordan Weisman’s Harebrained Schemes raised $1.8 million for Shadowrun Returns. Kickstarters for a variety of other games such as Obsidian, Leisure Suit Larry, Pitfall, and others also took off, creating a revival for mid-sized game development studios.

Soon enough, crowdfunding wasn’t just a way to run around the gatekeeper publishers. It was an agent of disruption, giving more creators control over their destinies at a time when larger game companies had become risk averse. Ouya proved that as it raised $8.3 million for its Android-based video game console.

And Kickstarter wasn’t the only show in town. Gamesplanet Lab launched its own crowdfunding effort for games. Gambitious focused on raising crowdfunding and seed investment for game studios. And Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen took off in part through web-based donation system.

4. Nintendo’s kicks off the new generation

Nintendo’s run with the motion-sensing Wii was phenomenal, with more than 98 million units sold to date. But for the past couple of years, sales have lagged and Nintendo finally got a replacement console on the market with the launch of the Wii U on Nov. 18. Nintendo aimed to disrupt gaming again by incorporating tablets and asymmetrical gameplay into its new console. It initially sold out, with more than 400,000 units sold in its first week. But that doesn’t look so good in the context of some serious new competition. Apple’s new iPhones and iPad tablets routinely sell more than 2 million or 3 million units on opening weekend. Nintendo executives put on brave faces, but critics have been bearish on the Wii U throughout the past year. Those critics, such as our own GamesBeat editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu, point out a number of weaknesses in the console, such as the lack of a killer app. Analysts expect it to sell out for the holidays, but the questions is how long it will keep selling for. So far, the Wii U hasn’t set the world on fire.

5. OnLive’s collapse

No company held more promise than OnLive, which came on the scene in 2009 with a plan that astonished everyone. OnLive’s “cloud gaming” solution would allow people with low-end computers to play high-end games that were processed in a remote data center and then streamed as videos to the players’ screens. The cloud would allow players to log into their games from anywhere and play as long as they had a good Internet connection. OnLive beat its milestones and surprised the skeptics, launching its service in 2010. It came up with a lot of improvements, but it lost a number of big game publishers such as Electronic Arts as rivals such as Gaikai came on the scene. OnLive’s membership base grew slowly, and it had a tough time competing against free-to-play online games.

So the company kept raising money at a high valuation to keep the lights on. By 2012, the company had burned through more than $200 million in funding. It had more than 200 employees but failed to break even. It hit the wall in August, running out of money. An investor bought the company and ousted founder Steve Perlman. The company went through a bankruptcy alternative and lost many of its employees. It is trying for a comeback but in a much reduced state.

Perlman has moved on to his wireless broadband startup, but his failure to warn people about the collapse was unpopular with employees. This fall sent a shock wave through the cloud-gaming industry, and it was a case of a solid company racing too far ahead of its own revenues until it shattered its own dream.

6. Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios falls apart, forcing him to auction off his bloody sock

Curt Schilling was a baseball hero who pitched his team to a 2004 World Series victory with a wounded foot. After he retired, he started 38 Studios, a game startup with the audacious goal of creating a massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing world that could challenge Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. He poured more than $50 million of his own money into Project Copernicus, and he hired comic artist star Todd McFarlane and fantasy novelist R.A. Salvatore. It was the ultimate bet on the MMO business. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Schilling took $75 million in loans from Rhode Island in exchange for moving his company there from Massachusetts. But the company’s first game, Kingdoms of Amalur, was a mediocre success, and it ran out of money in June. It laid off more than 300 people abruptly and then filed for bankruptcy. Schilling had to auction off most of his property, including his bloody sock. Instead of killing off WoW, 38 Studios became a cautionary tale for states that provided rich incentives to risky startups.

7. Social casino games take off

Everybody loves a bubble. Speculation that online gambling might be legalized led to a feeding frenzy in the adjacent market of non-real-money social casino games, where people spent money on virtual goods but couldn’t cash their winnings out. Games such as Zynga Poker had taken off over the past five years. But when the Justice Department ruled in December that online gambling could be legal, the floodgates opened. IGT paid $500 million in January for Double Down Interactive, a social gaming company with only 70 employees. After that jackpot, the speculators moved in. Dozens of new startups received funding for their social casino and sports betting games. Analysts report that social casino games will generate $1.6 billion in revenue this year, and that will steadily grow over the next several years. Betable has cut deals with five social casino game companies to convert their titles into real-money gambling games. Zynga’s crash took some of the air out of this bubble, but many are still betting that online gambling will give a big boost to the social casino game companies and visa versa. Zynga itself is betting big on online gambling, and so is Facebook. Will the bubble pop in 2013, or will the marriage of social casino games and online gambling pay off?

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Like Emperor Julius Caesar, BritRuby was brought down by white males and the Ides of March.

Scheduled for March 15 and 16th of 2013, this event which planned to bring together members of the global Ruby on Rails community for a summit in Manchester, England , is now canceled.

The intent was to hold a two-day conference with 500 developers and 20 speakers. A post on the company’s web page announcing the cancellation focuses on making apologies, rather than the details of the decision, and makes a few vague references to issues of race and gender equality.

“The Ruby community has been battling with issues of race and gender equality,” the post said .”We at BritRuby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things?”

A foray into the Twitter-verse revealed negative commentary because the speaker line up was entirely comprised of white males. The organizational team responded to these comments by saying they could not find qualified speakers outside the realm of white male. Debate ensued surrounding issues of discrimination, sexism and racism in the technology community, and whether it is better to have a “token female” or people without strong English abilities speaker, simply to diversify the attendees.

The decision to cancel the entire event seems dramatic, considering it its based primarily on a few negative tweets. Now, no-one of any background will be able to benefit from the events’ intention, which was to “to encourage Ruby developers to unite and create a community, which would allow such to network, exchange ideas and provoke innovation for the future of Ruby. We wanted to encourage jobs and allow companies the opportunity to meet the community and primarily boost the UK developer industry.”

It is quite a blow, for a startup economy that is just starting to take off. Perhaps the founders of BritRuby should pivot and hold an all-female hackathon. Than for BritRuby 2014, they may have a better chance.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Siri, the iPhone 4S’s virtual assistant, has a puzzling new glitch — one with significant moral and political overtones.

If you ask Siri to direct you to a Planned Parenthood, you get the results you’d expect. But if you ask for an abortion clinic more generally, Siri will not return any results, even if they’re available. In some cases, Siri will even return results for “crisis pregnancy centers” that counsel women against abortions.

Similarly, if you simply say, “Siri, I need an abortion,” Siri will respond that there are no abortion clinics nearby, even if the opposite is true and even though Siri clearly understands your intent and language. And its response proves Siri knows the term “abortion clinic.”

Siri was able to tell us that there were four Planned Parenthood locations near our downtown San Francisco location. However, when we specifically asked for abortion information, we were told nothing was available.

We decided to test a range of related queries, starting with emergency contraception. Siri drew a natural-language-processing blank when it came to Plan B, the brand name for the commonly available emergency contraception pill. Apparently not having the data to interpret the phrase “Plan B” as a brand name, it returned other local businesses containing similar words or phrases.

When we asked for the product with a more general term, emergency contraception, Siri recommended nearby emergency rooms — irrelevant, but better than nothing, we suppose.

When we point-blank asked for “the morning-after pill,” as it is also commonly called, Siri replied with, “Ok,” and “Is that so?” but did not offer any retailers or directions. (Judgey much?)

Moving to the proactive side of the equation, Siri was able to tell us the location of drugstores where we could buy condoms. But when we asked for birth control pills, Siri said nothing was available nearby.

While it’s not in our purview to offer bald-faced speculations on the reasons for these discrepancies, VentureBeat CTO Chris Peri’s professional opinion is that the supposed glitch is actually “purposeful programming.”

Peri elaborated, “Given how well Siri interprets other requests, and that Google and Bing will give you the proper responses when doing a search, and [that Siri] offers [anti-abortion] CPC sites… this has to have been something placed in the code or taught to Siri by someone(s). If this is the case, then we have a problem here.”

While Apple has been known to hand down judgements on moral issues such as pornography, we’re not certain Siri is taking any sides on a particular moral battleground. After all, it’ll still find you an escort service if you ask for a prostitute.

We’ve reached out to Apple for clarification and will update you, dear readers, as soon as more information is available.

[The Abortioneers via Gizmodo]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Many fans of The Social Network, the new movie about the founding of Facebook, have one big problem with the film — its shabby treatment of women. See, for example, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s appearance on The Colbert Report, where news-comedian host Colbert asks why most of the movie’s female characters are “high, or drunk, or fucking guys in the bathroom. Why are there are no other women of any substance in the movie?”

Sorkin wrote a defense of his screenplay’s female characters over the weekend, which was picked up today on entertainment sites like The AV Club. Responding to a review and a subsequent comment on the blog of television writer Ken Levine, Sorkin basically said that if The Social Network feels sexist, it’s because Harvard men are sexist. Especially the founders of Facebook:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80′s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

And this very disturbing attitude toward women isn’t just confined to the guys who can’t get dates.

I didn’t invent the “F–k Truck”, it’s real–and the men (boys) at the final clubs think it’s what they deserve for being who they are. (It’s only fair to note that the women–bussed in from other schools for the “hot” parties, wait on line to get on that bus without anyone pointing guns at their heads.)

These women–whether it’s the girls who are happy to take their clothes off and dance for the boys or Eduardo [Saverin]‘s psycho-girlfriend are real. I mean REALLY real.

It’s not clear how broadly Sorkin is damning the “nerds” when he talks about a “very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people” (others have complained about Silicon Valley’s antipathy towards women) but he definitely includes Mark Zuckerberg and the early Facebook team in that circle, at least as they were circa 2004. And, it looks like there’s some fairness to that argument — the scathing blog post that Zuckerberg wrote declaring an ex-girlfriend a “bitch” has been confirmed elsewhere, including David Kirkpatrick’s more favorable book The Facebook Effect, and there’s no denying that the founding team was a boy’s club.

The main riposte to this argument is that The Social Network includes the insane, gold-digging characters but leaves out Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriends, including his long-time relationship with Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg may only have restarted his relationship with Chan after the movie’s timeframe (Kirkpatrick implies that it was sometime in 2006), but the existence of that relationship still undercuts the movie’s portrayal of Zuckerberg as someone driven by the fact that he can’t get girls. (I’d argue that the less the movie focuses on that motivation, the more compelling and complex it seems.)

And Zuckerberg and other early Facebook employees have disputed the movie’s version of the facts. Of course, they own substantial stakes in Facebook, which could in theory give them a motivation other than correcting the record for criticizing the movie.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

(Editor’s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.)

I find the preponderance of males in VC an annoying and stubborn phenomenon.  When I first entered the start-up game as an entrepreneur in the mid 1990s, I didn’t think much of the “VC gender gap” as there were plenty of women executives around.  In fact, between one-third and one-half of the executive teams at my two start-ups (Open Market and Upromise) were women.

As the father of a capable, ambitious daughter, perhaps I’m over-sensitive to the issue, but since becoming a VC seven years ago, I find it amazing that only 5-10 percent of the VC industry is made up of women.  Only 25 percent of all VC partnerships have a single women partner and only 7 to 8 percent have more than one women partner.

Anecdotally, even fewer women are “management company GPs” as opposed to “employee GPs” – in other words, true owners of VC funds as opposed to deal partners.  What other major industry remains 90 to 95 percent male-dominated?  What’s the deal?

An outstanding Kauffman Institute study, “Gateways of Venture Growth”, analyzes this issue and comes up with some thoughtful, but unsurprising, conclusions.  They point out that the industry remains very clubby, and the lack of female role models creates a self-perpetuating cycle. Professor Myra Hart of Harvard Business School writes, “Women trying to launch or further careers as VCs have fewer first-degree connections with those (men) in positions to hire or promote them.”

Another issue that holds women VCs back is the fact that the academic backgrounds of VCs tend to be in technical areas – such as computer science, engineering and biotechnology – where, again, females are in the minority.

In talking to my women VC friends, they reinforced these two major issues, but held out some cause for optimism going forward.

Irena Goldenberg of Highland Capital in Europe (and formerly an associate with us at Flybridge Capital before she went to HBS and then Geneva), believes there are more female VCs in life sciences as the medical field has a higher ratio of women to men then, say, engineering.  Our senior associate, Robin Lockwood, told me she thinks VC profiles simply lags entrepreneur’s profiles.  As more women entrepreneurs emerge, more women will become VCs.

Here’s a thought-provoking observation that an anonymous woman pointed out to me (and please do not accuse me of channeling Larry Summers on this – I’m just passing along what I heard): She believes the VC industry is male-dominated because men are more wired to take risks than women.  Gambling, she points out, is more popular amongst men than women.  Thus, risk-taking with capital is more likely to be comfortable for men than women.

Some women have been able to break out as strong investors and industry leaders. In my informal survey, a few experienced women VCs stood out as strong role models: Venetia Kontogouris at Trident Capital, Annie Lamont at Oak, Patricia Nakache at Trinity and Nancy Schoendorf from Mohr Davidow.

I guess when you have a clubby, tightly-woven, self-perpetuating network, it’s hard for women to break in.  It’s a stubborn phenomenon, but I hope we can figure out how to correct it.  Otherwise, our industry is tragically losing out on 50 percent of the world’s best talent.