About this item
Cultural stereotypes to the contrary, approximately half of all video game players are now women. A subculture once dominated by men, video games have become a form of entertainment composed of gender binaries. Supported by games such as Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files, Wii Fit, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood - which are all specifically marketed toward women - the gamer industry is now a major part of imagining what femininity should look like. In Ready Player Two, media critic Shira Chess uses the concept of "Player Two" - the industry idealization of the female gamer - to examine the assumptions implicit in video games designed for women and how they have impacted gaming culture and the larger society. With Player Two, the video game industry has designed specifically for the feminine ideal: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled.
About the Author
Shira Chess is an Associate Professor of Entertainment & Media Studies in the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She received her PhD in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is author of Play Like a Feminist (MIT Press, 2020) , Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) , and co-author of Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology (Palgrave, 2014) .
