Emma Clarkson and Brianna Wu

Emma Clarkson is an American game developer. Clarkson described the challenges of working with conservative transgender activist Brianna Wu on a local game festival and on Wu’s game Revolution 60.

Background

Emma A. Clarkson earned a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College in 2006.

Clarkson has worked in marketing, community management, and strategy for EvesAddiction.com, Outthink, GameStop, MySEMexperts, Metaversal Studios, Stomp Games, and Boston Festival of Indie Games. Clarkson has been a producer for Outact, Ghost Story Games, DraftKings, Fire Hose Games, GSN Games, Game Taco, Epic Games, and Look North World.

Work with Brianna Wu

Clarkson and Wu worked together on Boston Festival of Indie Games (BFIG), and Clarkson was contracted by Wu’s company Giant Spacekat to work on Revolution 60. In 2015, Clarkson described those experiences on Twitter:

Today I have joined an exclusive club of women game developers both supported and blocked by Brianna Wu. [screencap]
Good thing Bri & I aren’t working on BFIG together this year again so I won’t have to do all the work she decides not to do this time around
If Brianna Wu ever hires you to do work & you quit the contract bc it’s going past the agreed date, watch out, she’ll lie that she fired you
I also wouldn’t recommend appointing Brianna Wu to manage anything that requires any actual work on her behalf if you expect to get it done
If you want someone who will say the same stuff about GamerGate over and over and over again at your college or university then get in touch I guess
The people who work for Brianna Wu are super-talented. It bugged me a lot when I saw her sell them & their work short for her own gains.
I am really glad to know them and to see them going on to do bigger and better things than working for Giant Spacekat.

Twitter user PixelMetal posted: “@emdroid I was in the booth directly next to Rev60 at 2014 BFIG. I don’t remember seeing anyone other than Frank Wu.” Clarkson replied:

That’s because Brianna was off doing important interviews and terrorizing our volunteers who were attempting to do their jobs @PixelMetal
If only I wasn’t #BlockedByBrianna (LOL) I would ask her why she credits only herself as the dev on Revolution 60 pic.twitter.com/GzzCljDRf7 [image of Revolution 60 Steam listing with Wu listed as sole developer]
Pretty sure I know multiple people who contributed in huge ways as the Giant Spacekat team… Wonder what happened there

Emma Clarkson’s 2015 comments on working with Brianna Wu.

A GamerGate troll asked Clarkson about Wu’s “Natalie O’Brien” claims, “Are you the person she claimed to have hired to block people on Twitter for her because she wanted to work on the game?”

Clarkson responded: “definitely not, LOL. I actually doubt the veracity of that claim TBH.”

On April 10, 2015, Clarkson responded to a reddit thread about the dispute:

Hey hey everybody. the last few days have been interesting! just wanted to share a few fun facts and updates:

I can still see Brianna’s tweets because as a former social media/community manager I am wise in the ways of Tweetdeck and it makes it laughably easy to still view the tweets of people who block you. I want to reiterate that she absolutely did not ever fire me, I quit on my own terms and she was like “totally understandable, I wish you the best!”. Not sure if she means to be referring to me when discussing firing in the past and having her team make unanimous decisions about who to hire but if she is referring to me it is NOT TRUTH.

I have gotten zero negative feedback other than glancing at Imgur comments where people without context think I’m being unprofessional. I personally disagree but see why they might think that. Shrug!

I have gotten quite a lot of DMs with big support from prominent game industry peeps thanking me for speaking out. If some of them did not fear very real backlash from the darker corners of GG hangouts they might be inclined to speak out more often. They see the “me me me” attitude as detrimental to helping real victims.

I am super super happily employed at a studio that does not give a crap about Twitter dramz so I’m really not concerned about job backlash or anything like that, but I also want it known that I am not a petty rejected indie dev or something. I worked very successfully as a contractor for many indie clients (as well as non game industry clients) for awhile between full-time game studio jobs. Much of my work came from client referrals and I’ve never had a client other than Brianna that didn’t work out, so, shrug again. My professional contacts told me immediately that she had told them she fired me, warning me to do damage control and protect my reputation. Luckily people who know what’s up already know me and my work and aren’t lulled by BS.

So yeah. Twitter has been a fun/weird thing the last few days. I’m not pro-GG or anything but I just want my industry to not be dominated by loud people with way more influence than they deserve to have.

After an Inc. profile of Wu included this passage:

But one of Wu’s friends in the gaming industry has suggested that her story may be more complicated than she lets on–that as bad as the situation has been for Wu, she “wasn’t dragged” into it. “She taunted Gamergate for weeks,” this woman continued, who asked that her name be withheld. “She baited them, and then they finally came after her, which is exactly what she wanted them to do.”

On May 31, 2015, Clarkson posted: “Yes it is extremely believable to me that that is what happened.”

Clarkson added: “Rev 60 was funded primarily with Frank Wu’s big pharma salary. It should be obvious at this point to anyone who listens to her talk about her life. This of course makes anyone giving money to her through that embarrassing hashtag the ultimate chump.”

In response to a 2015 speech Wu gave titled “Nine Ways to Stop Hurting and Start Helping Women in Tech,” Clarkson posted:

I watched the extended version of this talk earlier today and I have to say it pissed me off a whole lot and here are the reasons why:

she compares women in tech both to cancer patients and ALZHEIMER’S SUFFERERS in how they should be treated

she claims her cofounder upon finding out she was pregnant was “immediately fired the next day” by the “AAA game developer” where she was working. I am not totally certain but am about 90% sure I know the company she’s talking about (if I’m right, I worked there until it shut down) and I have a feeling this is a straight-up lie to be honest.

she is SO RUDE to the people asking questions. funny story, I went to a presentation she gave to a “women in games” group before she was GamerGate-famous and asked her a question about what she thought about something and instead of answering it she just goes “what do YOU think?” and I was like umm you’re the one giving the presentation here, genius…

she says “fustrating”. In other talks she says this word like maybe 10 times throughout. I know this is petty but I can’t deal with it and I wish someone would tell her there’s another R in that word.

the takeaway I would like to offer is that when you see her doing these talks, whether it’s an old one like this one or a new one like the one from last weekend, take literally everything she says with a large heaping of grains of salt.

On May 1, 2016, Clarkson posted: “most of the women who worked on rev60 don’t work for gsk anymore. they have moved on to much better prospects.”

References

Whitford, David (April 2015). Brianna Wu vs. the Gamergate Troll Army. Inc. http://www.inc.com/magazine/201504/david-whitford/gamergate-why-would-anyone-want-to-kill-brianna-wu.html

“HoskStation” (July 27, 2016). Additional Evidence That Giant Spacekat is a Scam Artist. Medium https://medium.com/@HoskStation/additional-evidence-that-giant-spacekat-is-a-scam-artist-7e238c3399cb

“InformUs” (March 9, 2016). Who is Natalie O’Brien and does she exist? Medium https://medium.com/@InformativeBot/does-natalie-o-brien-exist-7e2942f2433d

Ek, Robin (April 13, 2015). Giant Spacekat´s CEO is getting accused of being a fraud. The GG https://thegg.net/opinion-editorial/giant-spacekats-ceo-is-getting-accused-of-being-a-fraud/

Ralph, Ethan (April 9, 2015). BEATDOWN CONTINUES: Brianna Wu Gets Shredded by Former Employee. The Ralph Retort https://theralphretort.com/beatdown-continues-brianna-wu-gets-shredded-by-former-employee-409015/ [archive]

Media

AltConf (June 4, 2014). Brianna Wu – Nine ways to stop hurting and start helping women in tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGqmneujHYY