The filmmaker preparing a documentary about the notoriously rancid and abusive behaviour in online gaming says she’s not really interested in having a dialogue with the trolls. Her project aims to make their conduct morally taboo, if not stigmatised in mainstream society.
GTFO, by Shannon Sun-Higginson, concentrates on the abuse directed at female gamers, where sites like Fat, Ugly or Slutty, or Not in the Kitchen Anymore, have done a solid job so far cataloguing the invective directed at women online. Asked if her project, currently about halfway toward a $20,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, intended to reach out to the perpetrators of this abuse for their side of the story, Sun-Higginson said not really.
“I don’t think the goal of this is, and I don’t think it would be even possible to open a dialogue necessarily with the people who are doing this,” she told GamesIndustry.biz today.
Though Sun-Higginson said she’s already gotten a taste of the blowback thrown Anita Sarkeesian’s way for her Kickstarter film, Tropes vs. Women in Games, Sun-Higginson’s project is different — it’s not about the depiction of women in games, it’s about sexist behaviour against women who play them. And Sun-Higginson makes no pretense to be a gamer, either. She calls herself an outsider to the culture.
“I didn’t think there was still an industry that in 2013 everyone was just fine with being really really sexist,” she told GI.biz, though softening that remark later by saying the business gets that rep from “a very vocal minority”.
Sun-Higginson has already been gathering footage and doing reporting for her project, having visited PAX East and a Major League Gaming event to talk to gamers there about this problem. Her financing is meant to pay for travel, shooting and crew expenses, post production, licensing rights for game footage and music, and then to submit her work to film festivals.
GTFO: Don’t Film the Trolls [GamesIndustry.biz]
Comments
19 responses to “Filmmaker Documenting Online Nastiness Doesn’t Plan To Feed The Trolls”
A worthy cause, but being “an outsider to the culture” and a predetermined bias?
I’m not making excuses for this behaviour, and I try not to be sexist, but her approach doesn’t seem very journalistic.
I’m not really sure it’s meant to be. (Some) Journalists (sometimes) try to be fair and balanced. Some folks hope to be persuasive by the strength of the evidence they choose to show, rather than outright editorializing. The weakness of this is that people can draw their own pre-conceived conclusions from the evidence without proper direction.
If you want to convince someone of something, sometimes you have to make an argument. And back it up. That seems to be what that is – one side of an argument. I expect it’ll be kind of depressing just how rich and diverse a selection is available of supporting evidence. If you’ve ever played public xbox live games, PC FPSes (CS, TF2, etc), or MMOs, there’s… a LOT to draw from.
My way of avoiding sexism. Don’t announce my gender when I login. No one cares.
Don’t pick a gender specific alias.
Remember we’re here to play games. And people will use whatever they can to get a competitive advantage. Including racist, sexist and utterly incomprehensible comments. Just to put people off their games.
Get over it. Ignore it. Move on. We’re all gamers. Sexuality, gender, politics, etc. None of it matters.
You’re right none of it matters, so why do women have to face that additional criticism in the community? If its a guy,theres no comment about gender. If it was in ‘real life’, sports people would face consequences for this behaviour.
I love to disillusion people so I’ll state this isn’t ‘real life’ and gamers aren’t sportsmen. For one, I don’t get paid to play games. People aren’t lining up for my autograph after a blue plate.
This is text stored in a database and displayed (either poorly or fancily) via text interpreted differently by the browser. Who I am, who you are, none of it matters. We’re here to play games.
As for girls in ‘the community’, as I already said, don’t login and announce your gender like it matters. Women play video games so what? If you act like gender is important, than people give it unnecessary attention.
If you want the Internet to clean up its act, tell parents to start monitoring their children (like they should be). Most of the ‘problem’ is there.
Isn’t that basically just the equivalent of staying in the closet though? Avoiding a negative reaction that shouldn’t exist by pretending to be something you’re not, even by implication since it’d be assumed as default that most gamers would be cis-male, white, heterosexual & all the other things the contemporary gamer stereotype embodies
You’re not pretending to be anything. Gender is not a factor.
The industry itself is fairly similar to any other with sexism, that’s not the problem – it’s the end product.
The end product being much more likely to have an online/interactive component for end users… welcome to idiot city.
Look at facebook/twitter, same idiot behaviour there, but you don’t blame zuckerberg, etc, for it.
I agree – I think there are two different battles, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to blur them. Is there sexism in the actual games production/development industry? Go after that if there is, much like you would go after Zuckerberg if there was sexism in fb development. Is there sexism in the communities that use the end product? yes. Go after that. But that’s not the games industry. That’s online culture. Two different battles that shouldn’t necessarily be blurred.
The latter isn’t even a battle that needs fighting.
It does in a way — say, I’m all for being a complete wanker on teamspeak with friends, but I don’t get sexist, etc, with randoms. It’s just stupid.
I’ve run into this a few times on Steam, only in TF2, and the player responsible is always silenced very quickly. I don’t play online on consoles anymore, so if it’s mainly related to my dedicated gaming brethren, then I can’t relate.
Self proclaimed “outsider”/non gamer.
Invokes the ghost of Anita.
States the entire industry is massively sexist, quickly has to backpeddle.
Yeah, this will be fair and go well.
The last line sums it up really..
and then to submit her work to film festivals.
So a balanced and well investigated documentary is not what you will expect from this, but rather a wave riding gasp-shock piece that will attract audiences, and hopefully catapult her to prominence to make more of the same.
Any gamers with hopes of this being an illuminating and ground breaking doco are likely to be underwhelmed. It’ll fall into the ‘paint all with the same colour’ , which will just add to the basement dwelling, obese, trash talking gamer stereotype.
So you are ready to judge it before you have even seen it?
Sounds like a prediction to me! With a bit of healthy judgement thrown in on the side. 🙂
Could be interesting!
Why so specific??
Probably to allow greater depth of exploration of motivations. There are a lot of types of online nastiness, and I’d suggest that while there may be some overlap in motivations between the types, you can better target,explore, and address those motivations without contradiction if you specialize.
Like medicine – if someone’s really super sick but there are a variety of symptoms with different underlying causes, they should probably see whichever related specialists can address certain issues. If you have cancer in the brain, you’ll probably need to see both a neurologist AND an oncologist. Each will address different aspects of the overall problem.
Hopefully someone else will be suitably inspired to take up the mantles specializing in racism, RL-related bullying, genre competition and other forms of nastiness.
I don’t believe there is different types of nastiness in online gaming. It is all the same nastiness, but the nasty people are just taking the cheapest shot. The people who are belittling women online aren’t all sweet to me when I log in.
I’m concerned that a document on ‘nastiness in online gaming’ could miss the forest if they focus on just one tree.