Anita Sarkeesian interview: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse'

When Anita Sarkeesian launched a YouTube series on misogyny in video games, she received death threats and was forced into hiding. A year on from GamerGate, she explains why a global 'temper tantrum' won't make her quit

Anita Sarkeesian doesn't give me the address of her San Francisco apartment over email. Instead, she texts it to me a few hours before we're set to meet. After thousands of rape and death threats, a bomb scare and an email promising a mass shooting at one of her speaking events, a woman can't be too careful.

Sarkeesian, media critic and executive director of the nonprofit and video web series Feminist Frequency, has spent the past few years of her life at the centre of a firestorm in the gaming community - one that brings together misogyny, technology and a cultural shift in an industry so huge it now outperforms Hollywood. In videos that discuss misogyny in video games and widespread tropes that diminish women, Sarkeesian - named one of the 100 most influential people of 2015 by Time magazine - talks to the camera, with a commentary that runs the gamut from feminist theory to historical analysis. Her videos are smart, incisive and much needed in an industry in which women are often treated as little more than background decoration or damsels in distress.