View source for Ready Player Two

{{Infobox book
| name           = Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity
| author         = Shira Chess
| country        = United States of America
| language       = English
| publisher      = University of Minnesota Press
| pub_date       = 2017
| pages          = 224
| isbn           = 9781517900694
}}
In <i>Ready Player Two</i>, Shira Chess is interested in constructing the hypothetical and implied “Player 2” as games are increasingly developed for a feminine market. Methodologically, she does this through a combination of aesthetic analysis and a historiography of gaming culture and its evolution into an era of “casual gaming” on the iPhone, which can be seen to solidify gaming as mainstream in a general sense but, more specifically, as a turning point for women as a market. 

She first demonstrates that the white male market has been implied as the ideal gamer market in the past through a historiographical approach to developing console gaming technologies, which were almost exclusively marketed to boys except for the Nintendo Knitting Machine in the late 80's. The game reproduced mainstream sentiments of women's interests, modified them for a gaming platform, and was never released to wide markets, but it momentarily recognized women as a viable demographic for mainstream play. The potential the Knitting Machine held was shut down and proceeded by an almost entirely masculine market throughout the 90's. 

Chess then recognizes that, with the advent of this new recognition of “Player 2” now moving into view once more, she is also a semi-constructed and idealized vision, most often taking up characterizations and expectations of white heterosexual cis women as the market for games expand. This feels very much like the move Lynn Spigel made in her book <i>Make Room for TV</i>, which is an insightful and important text, but acknowledging and making space to address marginalized communities was handled better by Chess. Whereas Spigel made a comment up front that the women’s magazines in her study were likely geared towards white, upper class women at the time, she argued other marginalized groups were left with no choice and likely consumed the same magazines without addressing how their experience and relationship to that media might be complicated. Whereas Spigel left it with a comment up front, Chess often made space in each chapter to deliberate how Player 2’s assumed identity might be complicated in practice when people of different races, orientations, and ability must adapt to the new constraints and limits imposed by an explicitly expanding gamer culture. Regardless of whether her existence is viewed as a positive or negative change, Player 2 has nevertheless been accepting in some way or another as an existing and prevalent piece of the gaming market. 

Next, she outlines her definition of Player 2. What is she like, and how is she constructed? Chess is careful to note that Player 2 is both real and fictional. Oftentimes real women within the market who play these games possess many of the qualities and preferences envisioned of Player 2 in production. However, she expertly traces some of the context and conditioning of women throughout history, the social tendency to newly reproduce the same types of interests and sensibilities in the same demographics through developing technologies-- despite different content on the surface. Likewise, she delineates a history of the video game itself and its own “Hegemony of Play” that values masculine audiences and devalued feminine ones, contributing to the disproportionately masculinized culture that remains dominant in gaming today. At the same time, Player 2 also embodies the fictional question of “What kind of games do women want?” as a kind of designed identity posed by a disproportionately male production group— in terms of mainstream production. This is where aesthetic analysis comes in for Chess; she reads assumptions about the idealized female player through implications in the aesthetics and form of popular gaming texts that are intended for a female market. In other words, Player 2 is a designed and assumed identity whose assumptions can be widely misleading, depending on the player and their relation to the text, and/or equally the cause rather than the consequence of consumption preferences, but resulting in a designed identity who shares traits with many real players and real-world tendencies.  

Player 2 is first and foremost characterized by what she terms a “feminine ethos of leisure,” that equates to what those spurned in the dominant market have termed “casual." Casual gaming is often “demeaned by the game industry itself, [and] treated as a lesser form of play” (Chess 4). This ethos of leisure most often takes an imagined embodied form of a middle-aged housewife who supposedly stands in opposition to a “hardcore,” masculinized version of play. She therefore tracks specific qualities that often come up across women-intended versus men-intended games and devises a spectrum to gauge how far a game falls into a market intended for Player 1, Player 2, or straddling the line to incorporate both. Here, I would add that there are plenty of independent games that do not fall along this spectrum, and she does address independent producers in terms of more artistic games but argues their sensorial qualities would be perceived as feminine-- which is true to an extent if one is gauging from inside a mainstream headspace, but I think that does a disservice to us in academia. In other words, I think it’s important to link those free-floating, artistic games to an explicitly queer market that they often fall into—- especially when one is considering Player 2 in terms of the idealized mainstream woman who happens to share qualities with real people within that market. I don’t believe the queer qualities that happen to line up with feminine values should be lumped in together since there is absolutely a different in aesthetic quality between those mainstream games that project a vision of an idealized woman who also values cooperative play, low risk stakes, uncluttered spaces, etc. and those that do something entirely creative with these terms, though they may share many of the same values. I think too often we lump “not-male” in with feminine because it may very well be perceived that way by mainstream sentiments, but this defense is not suitable for an academic text that is aware and attentive to the blur in the distinctions she's making and justifying why she is making them. This one also needs to be justified and explained in the same way she does with other concepts. Those independent art games are so often particularly queer—- which tends to be accepted and resonate <i>better</I> with mainstream feminine audiences than the masculinized ones but are certainly still difficult for this idealized vision of Player 2 to resonate with nonetheless. Chess says designed identity can be applied to other games, formats, frameworks and, while player two is often constraining - white, heterosexual, cis, female, she also notes it doesn’t have to be. Player two could could also mean anything other than player one, though it currently doesn’t just yet, and that’s what she’s mapping. Therefore, the distinction feels necessary in this case. 

To exemplify the two responses to gamer culture’s recognition of Player 2 at large, Chess uses the fact that mainstream games are, in fact, catering to women’s market as a semi-positive recognition of her presence in terms of more representation and style of play, however constructed towards old sensibilities of what women should want (and oftentimes actually do, taken in context with the woman’s historical constructed-ness over time) that identity may be. She uses “Gamergate” to discuss some of the negative reactions to Player 2’s acknowledged presence within gaming culture. Gamergate was a phenomenon in which masculinized-- not necessarily male-- sentiments of what gaming "should be" (i.e. competitive opposed to cooperative, visual opposed to spatial, cluttered opposed to uncluttered, risky stakes with unforgiving game design in the case of error, competitive communication, and limited hyper-sexualized options in avatar character creation) sparked a movement against diversity in both video games and the industry and targeted specific women producers they perceived to be encroaching on their territory. Their hateful rhetoric acknowledged a growing space for Player Two and a market for both casual and indie games within the industry and expressed disdain for that change by trying to devalue it. Their fear of change is essentially an attempt to get women demographics to accept their gaming experiences as a superior quality, to attach themselves to competition, masculinized gameplay, and therefore cultural prestige. 

In other words, women always existed within gaming culture, but they were rarely acknowledged in gaming production previously. That acknowledgement and shift in production methods and priorities are likewise being recognized by those who would prefer she remain unnoticed. Those who gravitate towards masculinized sentiments perceive Player 2's acknowledgement as taking space that was once only oriented towards them, their sensibilities, and their desires. All in all, this book does an excellent job at both mapping Player 2 in their current state but also keeping potential open for who Player 2 could expand to be and what sensibilities they might embody going forward.