[ecrea] new publication: Ready Player Two - Shira Chess

A new publication from University Of Minnesota Press

Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/ready-player-two **

**

*Ready Player Two***

*Women Gamers and Designed Identity***

/Shira Chess///

    "/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

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.

University Of Minnesota Press |  September 2017| 240pp | 9781517900694 | 
PB | £21.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL917PLAY**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.

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