Friday, February 2 2018, 12:20pm Miller Learning Center 214 Special Information: FREE, open to all, FYO approved Friday Speaker Series Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity presented by Dr. Shira Chess, Assistant Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia 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 this talk, I use 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, I examine how games have been engineered to shape normative ideas about women and leisure.
