Ready Player Two

Since the mid-2000s, an increasing number of video games have been designed for women audiences. The market is tenuous, and has grown in spurts, but has resulted in a reality where roughly half of all video game players are now women. What once was considered a masculine domain is currently embedded in a stylistic and economic shift. With this in mind, Ready Player Two: Women, Video Games, and Designed Identity is an analysis of video games designed and advertised for women audiences, with the goal of better understanding what is really “at play” in these games. Games in this category range in style: from Diner Dash to Mystery Case Files and from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to the Nintendo Wii, even distinctly different games have commonalities. Using the premise of “Designed Identity” or “a hybrid outcome of industry conventions, textual constructs, and audience placements in the design and structure of video games” the book introduces the premise of Player Two. Player Two is not a real player, but a ghost of a player, imagined by the video game industry. While feminine, Player Two also comes packaged with other identity markers: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. Breaking down how Player Two is constructed in the games created for her, Ready Player Two considers both the positive and negative aspects of this fictionalized, yet transformational character in the video game industry.