![]() ![]() One of the challenges was figuring out how to make the admittedly sedentary activity of gaming visually compelling. “I decided to take a step back and explore what it means to be a woman in gaming in general, both the positive and the negative,” she said. Sun-Higginson initially planned to focus on this sort of harassment, but her approach broadened as she spoke with more women. Sun-Higginson first started work on “ GTFO” in early 2012, after she had seen a clip from Cross Assault, a live-streaming competition series in which a player, Aris Bakhtanians, sexually harassed his teammate Miranda Pakozdi for several minutes during the show, commenting repeatedly about her thighs and bra size, telling her to take off her shirt, and pretending to smell her. Even TV procedural writers have taken notice: A recent, much-maligned episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” featured a female developer who is abducted and tortured by mask-wearing gamers. Women in Video Games,” recently announced plans for two online video series about gender representations in video games, set to begin this year. And the media critic Anita Sarkeesian, host of the current web series “Tropes vs. “No Princess in the Castle,” a feature-length documentary about the experiences of female gamers and developers, is in the works. In addition to “GTFO,” which tackles issues like images of women in video games and the low numbers of female programmers, there’s “GameLoading: Rise of the Indies,” about indie game developers, which had its premiere in San Francisco on Thursday. The treatment of women in gaming - as players, developers or cultural critics - is being explored in new documentaries, some begun long before GamerGate and inspired by events and conditions that have been well known for years within the gaming world. While online harassment in the video game industry has made headlines of late - most notably, with the so-called GamerGate controversy, in which anonymous players threatened to rape and murder the game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others - “GTFO” (an acronym for an obscene dismissal) makes the case that these are not isolated incidents, yelled or texted today and gone tomorrow. Haniver’s story of online harassment is one of the creepier moments in the film, which has its premiere March 14 at the South by Southwest Film Festival. ![]() “One guy said he was going to impregnate me with triplets and then force me to have a late-term abortion,” she said in a phone interview. Several have threatened to rape and kill her. ![]() You must be fat, male players tell her, or ugly, or a slut, or own a lot of cats. Haniver has endured all sorts of abuse as a female gamer. “You’re useless when your hymen is broken,” he tells her. One player takes potshots at women - they are poor game players, they can’t drive - before commanding Ms. But when her fellow online combatants discover that the shooter in their midst is, to their chagrin, female, the comments commence. In the documentary “GTFO,” Jenny Haniver is relaxing in her living room in Wisconsin, thumbs on her Xbox controller, settling in for another session of Call of Duty. ![]()
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