In the documentary “GTFO,” Jenny Haniver is relaxing in her living room in Wisconsin, thumbs on her Xbox controller, settling in for another session of Call of Duty. But when her fellow online combatants discover that the shooter in their midst is, to their chagrin, female, the comments commence. One player takes potshots at women — they are poor game players, they can’t drive — before commanding Ms. Haniver to leave the game. “You’re useless when your hymen is broken,” he tells her.
Over the years, Ms. Haniver has endured all sorts of abuse as a female gamer. You must be fat, male players tell her, or ugly, or a slut, or own a lot of cats. Several have threatened to rape and kill her. “One guy said he was going to impregnate me with triplets and then force me to have a late-term abortion,” she said in a phone interview. “Then he giggled.”
Ms. Haniver’s story of online harassment is one of the creepier moments in the film, which has its premiere March 14 at the South by Southwest Film Festival. While online harassment in the video game industry has made headlines of late — most notably, with the so-called GamerGate controversy, in which anonymous players threatened to rape and murder the game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others — “GTFO” (an acronym for an obscene dismissal) makes the case that these are not isolated incidents, yelled or texted today and gone tomorrow.
[For more of this story, written by Robert Ito, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...fight-back.html?_r=0]
Comments (0)