A year after 'gamergate,' women say online abuse is still a big deal

Mike Snider | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Women still fighting for fair treatment in video game industry A year after the "gamergate" scandal erupted, women in the game industry are still fighting for fair treatment.

Filmmaker Shannon Sun-Higginson could not believe what she was seeing.

A friend had forwarded her a video link to an online reality show called Cross Assault, in which two teams of video-game players were competing. But what she saw was a hulking coach verbally harassing his own player, the team’s lone woman.

Sun-Higginson watched as the coach, Aris Bakhtanians, told female player Miranda Pakozdi to take off her shirt. Then he smelled her. He also directed the camera to parts of her body. "This is creepy," Pakozdi said. Soon, she would purposefully lose a match to exit the show.

"The first time I watched the video I wasn't even sure what I was looking at it. I had so many questions: 'Why was this being tolerated? Who was this guy and why did he feel comfortable harassing this woman in plain sight of everyone around him? Why wasn't anyone trying to stop it?'" Sun-Higginson said.

So she made a documentary about it. “I had no idea that harassment could reach the heights that I saw in that video,” she said in an email interview. “I started filming my first interview that weekend and it snowballed from there.”

Sun-Higginson had hit upon a significant trend. Girls and women have gravitated to video games as they have become playable on more devices, including phones and tablets. Now, nearly as many girls and women (44%) play video games as do boys and men (56%), according to the Entertainment Software Association.

The production of her film coincided with a heated, often vitriolic and sometimes life-threatening online argument over gaming culture dubbed "Gamergate." The upshot: Last year, several women in the game industry said they received online threats of rape and death.

Online harassment against women also made the news when Reddit CEO Ellen Pao resigned over what she called "the largest trolling attack in history." That came after Reddit began taking down revenge porn and banning harassment earlier this year. When Reddit removed sections of the online discussion site where heavy harassment occurred, Pao and other employees received death threats and had their private information posted online. "Reddit is the Internet, and it exhibits all the good, the bad and the ugly of the Internet," Pao said in an editorial in The Washington Post. "It has been fighting this harassment in the trenches."

The battleground is immense. Nearly three-fourths of Internet users (73%) have witnessed online harassment, according to a Pew Research Center report released in October 2014. While more men (44%) than women (37%) said they have experienced some kind of harassment, women are more likely to be targets of serious cases in which they are stalked and sexually harassed.

Young women aged 18-24 are "uniquely likely" to be targeted with stalking and sexual harassment, the researchers found. Also, African Americans and Hispanics are more likely than whites to encounter harassment online; more than half (54%) of Hispanics and (51%) of African Americans said they had experienced harassment, compared to 34% for whites.

Social media sites, website comment sections and online gaming networks are among the places where harassment most likely takes place, the report found.

And all of those outlets were looked at in Sun-Higginson's film GTFO — an acronym that contains an expletive and means to “get out” — that premiered this spring at the South by Southwest Film Festival and is available on various digital services.

Among her notable interviewees: media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who started the Feminist Frequency online video series in 2009, and became a target of online harassment after turning to Kickstarter to fund her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video project.

As she began getting supporters — eventually she collected nearly $160,000 — she also began getting harassing comments via social media and on comment sections. So Sarkeesian began publicly posting a few select ones, including the fact that one guy created an online Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian game that let you bruise and bloody her image.

The harassment escalated to death threats and, in October 2014, Sarkeesian and Utah State University cancelled a speech after she got another one. "I'm still harassed today," she says in the film.

The Utah State cancellation came amid the growing Gamergate controversy, which began in August 2014 with the harassment and online rape and death threats waged at game developer Zoe Quinn. Anyone who waded into the discussion, which continues today, became potential targets, as another game developer Brianna Wu discovered when she challenged the online misogynist attacks against women. She and her husband were driven from their home after a death threat included their home address.

Among the myriad issues interwoven within Gamergate: equality in video games — for players, developers and characters — as well as unethical practices by video-game journalists.

There was a huge pushback from a vocal subset of core gamers, overwhelmingly white males, against the encroachment by women into games.

The public discussion over Gamergate partly reflects video-game industry's growth from a niche pastime. For years, developers knew they had a core audience of primarily young male consumers to create for, said Laralyn McWilliams, who over the last three decades helped develop video games such as The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, Full Spectrum Warrior and Free Realms. .

"If you make lots of games featuring angry white guys, a lot of angry white guys play those games because the themes resonate with them," McWilliams said. "The call for — and in some cases presence of — other kinds of games for other kinds of audiences can feel like a threat if you're really passionate about specific types of games."

Engineer Erica Baker, who also uses Erica Joy as a social media handle, used video games as a way to fit in at game-playing gatherings with co-workers. But when she played Halo online she was met with rampant racist and sexist harassment.

"My brother and I have lived far away from each other for most of our adults lives, so playing online with each other was our 'quality' time," she said in an email interview. "Anytime anyone got an inkling that my brother and I were black, without fail someone would start calling us monkeys ... or whatever racial slur they could think of.

"The gaming world is extremely hostile and toxic toward black people and women, I'm not sure why."

Things may have changed a bit, thanks to the issue being brought to the fore by these public incidents. Pao said that the number of positive messages Reddit received grew as the situation went on. "These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words," she wrote. "Many shared their own stories of harassment and thanked us for our stance."

E3 2015: Women take on stronger roles in video games In an industry that is known for being male-centric, women make up a large percentage of gamers. Now game-makers are responding by including more women behind-the-scenes and adding female characters.

Improvements in the tech industry require more executives sitting down with employee resource groups to find out how people are feeling, understanding and empathizing with them, Baker said. "

Game developer McWilliams worries that change won't come quickly enough. "I've heard more women talk about (and act on) leaving game development in the past year than I did in my other 22 years combined," she said. "If we don't find ways to resolve these issues, we're going to continue to lose women we manage to attract to the industry. We'll also stay in our narrow little rut of assumptions: that game developers are white men and that games are for (and) about or only bought by white men."

That would be sad, says Sun-Higginson, because "there's an amazing explosion of creativity happening" in video games. "There are games that are world-building, educational, exploratory, personal, beautiful, creative. And I've found these types of games often go hand in hand with an increase of diversity of all kinds," she said. "I think that the future of video games is very bright and exciting, if we can just find a way to deal with the few people who choose to make the lives of others miserable."

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider