This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Adi Robertson: How have things for women in games changed over the years you were making GTFO? Besides Gamergate, of course.

Shannon Sun-Higginson: The thing I’m excited about is that people are starting to talk about it in a more serious way, rather than just looking at it as a circus, which I think is how people who are not in the gaming industry kind of look at it sometimes. It's really unfortunate, because these few people who are doing the harassment are really making a bad name for gamers, and we wanted to show the more positive and supportive areas as well. When people look at gaming they're like "Eww, yeah, I heard that happened…" That sucks for people who really are in the industry, they love it, they're passionate about it, and they want it to be a better and more inclusive space.

The things that I've heard come out, a lot of them were after Gamergate — up until then, I didn't really see any big shifts. I've been keeping in communication with all the women in the movie, and nobody really mentioned that much until after Gamergate happened. Jeffrey Lin at Riot Games has been talking about how to create a better [League of Legends] moderating system — steps like that, from people who are in the moderation sector of gaming, that's a really good start to making a change. To say: "You are going to be held accountable for your actions. You can't just say whatever you want, because your peers are going to stop you."

How much of solving harassment is a technical problem, and how much is a cultural problem?

I think the shift already is happening — that's where this backlash is coming from — but I think it has to happen at every level. So for example, the group Girl Gamer Vogue in New York that we filmed, they're doing a safe space for men and women to come play. And then there was the Code Liberation Foundation, they have a class that's exclusively for women. Even when you're at that very beginning level, where you're like, "Oh, I just want to play with some friends," or "Oh, I just want to learn to code a basic game,' it is intimidating to go into an environment where you are the only woman. There's something you can do at every level. I don't think it's just fixing the reporting abuse system in Xbox Live; a lot of other things have to happen on top of that.

There are a lot of intersectional questions around gaming harassment, like transmisogyny. I was wondering how you thought about that.

Intersectionality is something that we've talked about a lot. Originally we did have a chapter that tried to cover other areas of diversity — we had race, sexual preference, queer identity, ability, religion, all these other things. And then we realized that should each be a separate movie. It's not really fair to give this small amount of time to every single other group.

We felt that the issues that women are dealing with are so distinct, right? It's often related to the woman's appearance, it's very much related to the woman's being as a sexual person — determining whether or not they are interested in having sex with that woman, and that's her only value. I really wanted to delve deeper into queer gamers, but that was something that there's an entire movie about — Gaming in Color. You could make an entire movie about trans women in gaming. You could make an entire movie about women of color in gaming.

"It is intimidating to go into an environment where you are the only woman."

Yeah, weirdly, the two questions I get asked are "Are you worried that this discourages women from gaming?" and also "Do [you] game?" Actually, researching this movie made me a lot more interested in games. I didn't consider myself a gamer; I always thought it was for other people — I knew there were women who did it, but I thought "Oh, that's for people who played games as kids and grew up with them and are good at it." But after talking to all these women and seeing how excited they get about games and how many different types of games there were, I got a lot more into it. I’ve played Portal and Gone Home, Minecraft. I was like, I don’t need combat skills to play those games! I think it’s really cool.