Mackenzie Wilson wanted to create a videogame. Her older teenage brothers thought that was silly -- being only 9 years old, she wasn’t good enough, and after all, she was a girl. So her mom helped her start a Kickstarter, asking for $829 to go to computer camp to learn to make a role-playing game and prove her brothers wrong.
In a couple days, her campaign blew past $10,000. Now, six days in, pledgers have promised more than $20,000 for Mackenzie's project.
"It got more popular than I expected," the third-grader says. "It makes me feel good, because people like it and people actually want to see it."
It’s a cute, PG analogy for the stereotypes and slanted demographics that face women and girls in tech, and, as usual, it lit up the comment boards with both enthusiasm and criticism.
"Kenzie said, 'Mom, can we do this?'" says Susan Wilson, Mackenzie's mother. "She goes, 'I can pay for the camp.' And I said, 'Alright, you want to do a crowdfunded campaign?'"
"It wasn't about we couldn’t afford it," Wilson says. "It was just about Kenzie wanting to prove that she could do it. And I wanted to prove the power of the crowd too. I'm a huge fan of crowdfunding."
Ben Forta, Adobe’s director of creative cloud learning and training, was inspired by the project. He not only backed it, but donated a subscription to Creative Cloud to help Mackenzie with graphical assets, sound and video.
“I loved seeing this 9-year-old girl so genuinely excited and passionate about computer gaming,” says Forta. “That type of excitement is infectious and needs to be encouraged.”
But despite the empowering narrative of a girl making her own way to gaming camp, and the steady flow of campaign backing, some commentors started to raise questions about whether the project is appropriate; Monday even saw a net decrease in the number of backers as the debate continued.
Wilson is far from the first parent to help her underage kid experience the power of crowdfunding. There's been mother-daughter and father-son short films, and parents, including Wilson, are generally forthcoming that they're writing on behalf of their kids. Kickstarter's policy allows this, so long as the parents' role in the project is clear.
It's clear throughout that first- and third-person identities are a little fuzzy, and that Susan Wilson has inserted comments on some issues she feels strongly about as well. The video contains photos of beautiful women with older men, saying, "When any girl asks why she should study ... show her these!" and asking for money ("So I never end up like this woman & 'Sugar Daddy' becomes extinct as a life plan").
The success of the Kickstarter will allow Mackenzie to attend a weeklong game-programming camp, and funding beyond that is going toward a laptop. And the funding beyond that, they're not sure. Wilson thinks there will be a good use for it -- she's just not sure yet what it'll be.
"Obviously, there's more money there than the campaign needs," says Wilson. "So that's the big question is what happens to that. And I don't know the answer. But it's definitely bigger than Mackenzie. There's something people latched on to."
This is where Kickstarter's rules get a bit fuzzy, too. The site disallows "fund my life" projects, and explicitly denies using funding to pay tuition or buy a camera. A representative for Kickstarter says that in this case, Mackenzie is raising funds to complete a creative project -- a game -- and she needs a few things, including a week at camp, to do so.
Kickstarter's not free from comment trolls, either -- even when 9-year-olds are involved, even when you have to back a project in order to post comments on it -- and noble as a pitch that speaks to gender issues is, some backers and commenters questioned whether it might be a scam, if Mackenzie was indeed real. The project's writeup explains that Mackenzie's not in the video "because there are some weird people out there," and photos of Mackenzie are not current. When Wilson let us speak to Mackenzie on the phone, she mentioned that we were the first people that she let do so.
"You just can't plan for those things," Wilson says of the criticism. "And I let the negative stuff get in my head. I went to bed and I was angry and frustrated instead of happy. And then I felt bad, 'cause Kenzie is so excited. It was just weird."
At first, commenters tried to remain civil, but in the wake of increasingly threatening comments and offensive posts, both on Kickstarter and on other forums, Wilson has removed her Facebook information from the Kickstarter. The worst of them are personal attacks, directed at the family, the kind of vile, ugly trolling that explains why Wilson wouldn't want to put her daughter out there in the first place. Some commenters went so far as to donate just to make a comment, then withdraw their donation.
In the beginning, it wasn’t the commenters who took shots at Wilson's family; the brothers whose doubt was the impetus for the project are referred to throughout as snide, mean, belligerent, smug and bratty. Though Mackenzie's proposed game would be one that's age-appropriate and "isn't too violent and isn't filled with bad words," she mentions uber-violent, M-rated Borderlands 2 as one of her personal favorite games. According to Wilson, it was Borderlands 2 that Mackenzie was playing (with her dad) when she took time out to speak to Wired.
Wilson, who was named one of CNN Money's most powerful women entrepreneurs in 2009 (for founding and running a collection agency), has since gone on to found FundHer, a crowdfunding site for female entrepreneurs. But that's in its infancy, so Wilson says Kickstarter was a better option for Mackenzie's RPG-making plans.
Intentionally or not, the emotional appeal of a girl and her dreams sent the Wilsons and their project flying. Ultimately, this will probably be a good thing for Mackenzie, for the Wilsons, for girls in tech, but it's just one example -- a microcosm of the way crowdfunding taps trends and emotions and the way the internet responds to it.
"It's not about technology necessarily; it just happened to be what she wanted to do," says Wilson. "And I just think it was important; as a parent it was my job to find out what your kids want to do and support them and encourage them to follow their dreams. And it should be fun."
