96% of teen girls play games, and yet we have something like 10-12% women in the game industry overall. What in God’s name is going wrong?
Unfortunately the answer is, a lot of different things.–Jessica Hammer
Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie-Mellon
As games have become legitimized as an artform, they have attracted the same types of criticism that movies, television and novels have before. The objectification of women and lack of female role models has come under scrutiny by media critics such as Anita Sarkeesian. But a small segment of male hard-core gamers disagree with critics like Sarkeesian and have viciously attacked any woman that attempts to change the status quo in the industry.
Sparked by a public display of sexual harassment in 2012, GTFO is a Kickstarter-funded documentary that pries open the video game world to explore a 20 billion dollar industry that is riddled with discrimination and misogyny. In recent years, the gaming community has grown more diverse than ever. This has led to a massive clash of values and women receive the brunt of the consequences every day, with acts of harassment ranging from name calling to cyber vandalism and death threats. Through interviews with video game developers, journalists, and academics, GTFO paints a complex picture of the video game industry, while revealing the systemic and human motivations behind acts of harassment. GTFO is the beginning of a larger conversation that will shape the future of the video game world.
GTFO is currently being submitted to film festivals, and in talks with distributors. For the moment, it is only available to Kickstarter backers, but you follow the producers on their website, on Twitter or Facebook. They will post updates when it is available for purchase by the public.