Abstract
In Ready Player Two, Shira Chess explores the limits of video games designed for women players. Scholars have written much about the video game industry, but few have examined the recent wave of games designed explicitly for women. Chess finds that games like Candy Crush Saga, Diner Dash, Farmville, Wii Fit, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood tap into and reproduce problematic ideas about femininity by employing themes of “personal beauty, the care of self and others, domesticity, bodily management, and shopping” (p. 15). This book is an important meditation on gender “inclusion” in a subculture once dominated by men.
The title is a nod to Ernest Cline’s dystopian science fiction thriller, Ready Player One. In Cline’s novel, the (presumably white) male protagonist is made hero by winning an immersive virtual reality game using his knowledge of 1980s male geek culture. Despite what the title might imply, Ready Player Two is not about women gamers. Instead, Chess analyzes the symbolic politics of games themselves. She argues that binary ideas about gender have given rise to Player Two—a feminine ideal imagined as white, middle class, cisgendered, able bodied, and heterosexual. If Player One was male by default, Player Two was developed by game designers as his foil, akin to Simone De Beauvoir’s woman as “Other.” In addition to interests, desires, and game styles eternally dissimilar from male players, Player Two is expected to have limited time for leisure, and assumed to find her primary fulfillment through consumption and caregiving.
Five major chapters unfold in service to Chess’s framework of designed identity, defined as “an unintended consequence of repurposing women’s leisure practices into digital play” (p. 5). Her major contribution is this concept, which she operationalizes in each chapter through the themes of time management, caregiving, social networking, consumption, and bodies. Chess also identifies ten recurrent game attributes, including “time positive” (games designed to be played for long periods of time, or picked up easily); “creative expression” (whether it is possible to design spaces or characters using individual expression and style); and “low harassment potential” (games designed so that players cannot be easily harassed by strangers). Through her systematic analysis, Chess illuminates the tensions alive in games that both address the real constraints placed on women and reproduce normative beliefs about their essential differences from men.
Chess emphasizes that her investigation remains within the boundaries of the game. At times, however, this is a difficult line to walk. Although Chess claims to explore “how designed identity constructs players” (p. 56), her book lacks an account of audience reception, including the women who comprise approximately half of the gaming public. A simple table with player demographics could have addressed the inevitable questions arising from readers about whether players are, in fact, the white, married, straight, cisgender mothers imagined by game designers.
Her findings are also somewhat weakened when she steps away from strictly textual and archival analyses. In chapter one, “Playing with Identity,” Chess presents her findings from interviews with game designers. These data inform the categories developed in subsequent chapters, yet there is no discussion of interview methodology, nor a record of how many people she interviewed. Additionally, Chess describes her approach as intersectional, yet in chapter five, “Playing with Bodies,” the voices of critical race scholars are notably absent in her discussion of avatars and embodiment.
Despite these flaws, Ready Player Two demonstrates how video games are about more than play. They are also projections of our cultural assumptions about who women are, and how they should spend their “free” time. These assumptions get normalized and reflected back to women in the very products meant to entertain and to provide imaginative relief from the limits of everyday life.
As a straight, able bodied, cisgender, white woman, Chess recognizes her own entanglement with the subject of this book. In the preface, she explains how the research began when she was an unpartnered graduate student, living on stipends, and fueled by a “self-righteous” attitude about second-generation games for women. Now a decade later, as a tenure track professor, and a married mother with a constant time bind, Chess sees herself as the person for whom these games are made. This revelation is at the heart of “designed identity”—the seductive, reductive, and potentially transformative potential of games that appeal to a dominant version of womanhood.
The conclusion, “The Playful Is Political,” is an example of what makes Chess’s Player Two analysis so compelling. A comprehensive account of the symbolic and material politics baked into digital games, this book demands the attention of feminists. In summary, Ready Player Two is a fresh offering for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars, including those in information science, computer science, communication studies, gender studies, and critical cultural studies. It is best suited for graduate-level courses in these areas.