Ready Player Two by Shira Chess

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. Drawing on categories from time management and caregiving to social networking, consumption, and bodies, Chess examines how games have been engineered to shape normative ideas about women and leisure.

Ready Player Two presents important arguments about how gamers and game developers must change their thinking about both women and games to produce better games, better audiences, and better industry practices. Ultimately, this book offers vital prescriptions for how one of our most powerful entertainment industries must evolve its ideas of women.

Shira Chess is assistant professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

"Ready Player Two takes an important critical look at games designed for women, a market and area of games that have too long been overlooked in games scholarship. In this book, Shira Chess unpacks the assumptions made about women in how these games are designed and identifies the broader cultural and commercial impacts of these games."-Adrienne Shaw, author of Gaming at the Edge

"Ready Player Two presents a groundbreaking look at 'designed identities' in gaming. Shira Chess explores how constructions of gender-from emotional labor to embodiment-are embedded in playful systems. This is an important book for anyone interested in understanding not only in this emerging leisure domain, but the role of design and technology in these spaces."-T.L. Taylor, MIT

"Discussing why women play what we play, and how we are understood as players, pushes the industry to treat women not as a genre, but a diverse audience. Ready Player Two moves us closer to the mark."-New Republic

"A vital step forward in the field of games studies, and will resonate strongly in wider critical arguments about gendered play and leisure activities."-Times Higher Education

"Chess's analysis is thought provoking, informed by her understanding of the genre both as a member of its target audience and as a critical feminist theorist."-Choice