Sexism in the tech world can be a touchy subject to broach, but if the industry is going to shed its "boys' club" image then it's something that needs to be discussed. Samsung ran into some trouble with its Galaxy S4 presentation, and Sony caught some flak for not elevating a single female presenter at its PS4 reveal.
But even these instances are nothing compared to some of the comments and behavior women receive in the video game industry. Now, the filmmaker behind a new Kickstarter documentary titled GTFO hopes to bring it all out in the open.
GTFO, which references a common slur aimed at female players, will tackle the subject of women in gaming and try to move the discussion beyond articles on gaming sites.
"The purpose of this documentary is to reveal the experiences of women in the gaming world, both good and bad, as well as to provide steps we can take to change the environment for the better," Shannon Sun-Higginson, GTFO's creator, wrote on the project's Kickstarter page.
"Of course not all gamers are trolls or abusers - many are kind, supportive, and equally disgusted by this type of behavior. But the fact remains that this is a real problem, and it's time that the non-gaming public know about it."
The filmmaker spoke to GamesIndustry International recently and said she hopes to accomplish a couple of things with her film.
"There are a few goals, one of them is to make more awareness and more of a stigma for those people so that they see it and they're like 'oh, wait, maybe this is not an acceptable thing to do, maybe bad things will happen if I do this,'" she said.
"And the other thing from the developers' end and the monitoring end for people get muted and reported so that this happens less and less, and to make it easier for women and men and anybody who gets harassed to report these people so they won't be allowed to do it to anyone else."
Engaging with the topic of sexism in the gaming industry means you have to confront the very people making death threats and speaking obscenities against women, but does that mean you should give them a voice? Sun-Higginson said she doesn't expect to feature those people in her film, but that she wouldn't necessarily mind doing so.
"A lot of these anonymous people who are saying that they're going to do horrible things to these women, it would be hard to get them on camera, I would think, and I would hope... I wouldn't mind giving them airtime because then their face would be on the project and it would be a detriment to them, not to myself," she said.
"If I can stop people abusing women that would be a success but I think it's more about not speaking directly to those people, but making it more of a taboo, more shameful to do that. And the second aspect is making everyone aware of this as a huge problem that needs to be fixed."
