video games

Report: More Women Own Videogame Consoles Than Men in US

While conventional wisdom has told us for years that video games are a male-dominated past-time, reality is rearing its ugly head and challenging that sexist trope.

According to a recent Pew Research Study, 42% of American women own a video game console, but only 37% of men do. So the potential market for console video games for women is actually larger for women than men, but the market has not yet adjusted to this new reality.

It will be interesting to watch in the coming years how the market will shift to take advantage of these rapidly changing demographics, and who will succeed in making those adaptions, and who will be left behind clinging to outdated notions about women, technology and gaming.

Pew Research Study

Trailer Release – GTFO: The Movie

96% of teen girls play games, and yet we have something like 10-12% women in the game industry overall. What in God’s name is going wrong?
Unfortunately the answer is, a lot of different things.

–Jessica Hammer
Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie-Mellon

As games have become legitimized as an artform, they have attracted the same types of criticism that movies, television and novels have before. The objectification of women and lack of female role models has come under scrutiny by media critics such as Anita Sarkeesian. But a small segment of male hard-core gamers disagree with critics like Sarkeesian and have viciously attacked any woman that attempts to change the status quo in the industry.

Sparked by a public display of sexual harassment in 2012, GTFO is a Kickstarter-funded documentary that pries open the video game world to explore a 20 billion dollar industry that is riddled with discrimination and misogyny. In recent years, the gaming community has grown more diverse than ever. This has led to a massive clash of values and women receive the brunt of the consequences every day, with acts of harassment ranging from name calling to cyber vandalism and death threats. Through interviews with video game developers, journalists, and academics, GTFO paints a complex picture of the video game industry, while revealing the systemic and human motivations behind acts of harassment. GTFO is the beginning of a larger conversation that will shape the future of the video game world.

GTFO is currently being submitted to film festivals, and in talks with distributors. For the moment, it is only available to Kickstarter backers, but you follow the producers on their website, on Twitter or Facebook. They will post updates when it is available for purchase by the public.