I’m sort of thinking of it as like women in gaming is a microcosm of what has happened throughout history and will continue to happen every time people perceive a certain space as belonging to them, with other people as intruders. Gaming is the one example that I decided to stick with, but these issues are prevalent in a lot of other industries as well. I think that this relates to a lot of different topics that tons of news outlets are just now discussing. Gaming is just one small piece of the puzzle, so I’m thinking of this documentary as just one part of the greater conversation about what it means to be a woman in any male-dominated industry, but specifically in tech, or what it means to be a woman on the internet. I’m excited to see that other people are discussing this as well. Sun -Higginson: Well I hope so, to a point. TMS: Do you think you succeeded in doing so? Things were vaguely covered, but it just wasn’t nearly as part of the mainstream conversation as it is now. I guess at this point people are talking about this issue more now than they were in 2012. I just really wanted people like myself–people who are pretty tech-savvy, feminists–to see that this was happening. My friend said that that was not terribly unusual, actually. I was really shocked because I’m very much interested in women’s issues, and I’m also pretty tuned into geek culture on a personal level, if not gaming culture. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My friend sent me that video and I had just never seen anything like it. Sun-Higginson: The Miranda story that bookends the movie, the Cross Assault harassment story? That was our launching point. TMS: You kind of touched on it there, but why specifically this topic? What made you want to make this documentary? I started investigating it right away, and here we are. A friend of mine told me about the harassment that takes place in the gaming world, and I was pretty shocked by it as an outsider. I sort of fell into this topic a few years ago. We tried to cover everything from the casual gamer up to developers, artists, journalists, and professional gamers. Shannon Sun-Higginson: It’s a feature documentary about women in gaming. Jessica Lachenal (TMS): So tell me about GTFO: The Movie. ![]() We had a chance to chat with Sun-Higginson about the documentary and why she thinks it’s important to acknowledge the good and the bad and where she feels gaming is going now. Alongside screenshots of horrid tweets and audio clips of messages sent over Xbox LIVE were stories of women who are fighting to make the industry better the only way they know how: by being great. Sure, it calls the negatives out and there are some pretty gross depictions of the stuff women go through, but what was most interesting was that those terrible things were not the thrust of the project. ![]() The video featured in that piece is what spurred Shannon Sun-Higginson to create GTFO: The Movie, a documentary focused on women working in and around video games.īut what sets GTFO: The Movie apart from its contemporaries is that it isn’t a documentary that just focuses on the negatives. In a piece titled, “ This Is What A Gamer’s Sexual Harassment Looks Like,” Jason Schreier of Kotaku showed just how ugly “gaming culture” (whatever that is) can be. Back in 2012, footage of Miranda “Super_Yan” Pakozdi being harassed by an eSports coach during a live broadcast of a tournament made waves on the internet.
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