This week for our readings in the book Ready Player Two by Shira Chess, I decided to read the fifth chapter, Bodies, as it pertained to the topic in my final research paper, where I am going to look into the power of choice in avatars and character creation, and how those choices may or may not reflect our real world selves. Ready Player Two is all about identifying the ‘player two’ in the social aspect of video games, which is usually a woman, but can be any sidelined identity that does not correspond with the idealized white male we often see in video game culture. One of the most notable aspects of player two is that a lot of rhetoric surrounding the ‘female identity’ in media focuses on the assigned female at birth reproductive system. As such, the fifth chapter opens up with a description of a product called Skea, an alternative to regular Kegel exercises, which are supposed to strengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor, with the draw being that it was supposed to be a gaming experience akin to the series Temple Run. The major problem with this product is the advertisement made to fund the Skea, in which the inventor, Tom Chen, demonstrates the elasticity of the pelvic floor of a woman after childbirth by shoving fruit into a net in front of a poster of a scantily clad model. This demonstration assumes that all women loose elasticity after childbirth, and chooses to represent this process not with an anatomical model of the afab reproductive system, but with a poster of a lingerie model, a representation of a woman most can’t identify with. So even though this product was made specifically with women in mind, the assumptions the product makes isn’t applicable to everyone, and its delivery comes off as insulting to those who are supposed to buy it.

And that leads to a different problem. If we assume that the player two in our community is a cis, able bodied female, we neglect so many other identities that can be harmed by this assumption. Even then, in most media, a woman is equal to someone who is cis and is not only able to, but wants to experience motherhood. This allows groups, such as transphobic feminists, known as terfs or gender critical, to exclude trans women from female oriented spaces, implying that because they do not have a afab body, they cannot have these experiences, that they “appropriate women’s bodies while still embodying patriarchal dominance” (Chess, pg 160). This view of femininity overlooks that there are women who either cannot or do not want to experience childbirth, and adversely reduces us to a mere bodily function. It’s a view that is contrary to feminism, as the thought that child bearing being the only thing women are good at, being the one thing that makes us women, is our bodies.

How does this concern player two? For one, childbirth has always been a way to confine women to the predetermined role as ‘mother’. For example, Outlast 2 embodies this throughout its narrative. Many entries in the horror genre use the trope of the ‘painful pregnancy’, an inherently sexist trope that often forces the women in the story to become pregnant, and then experience it as painful and horrific in a traumatic way. In Outlast 2, you play as a white male reporter who is trapped in a murderous hillbilly cult, who must find his wife and survive the night. The ending shows you finding your wife inexplicably pregnant, giving birth and then dying. This is her only involvement in the story besides in flashbacks and dream sequences. The reality of player two is much too often of a cis female, someone that can easily be sidelined as a damsel in distress or as a woman in the refrigerator. It excludes women to a singular bodily function, makes us exist only as the foil and the motivation to the titular male character. It ignores that women aren’t just our bodies, and it also denies trans women who may not be afab the right to exist as women.

Works Cited

Outlast 2, Red Barrels, 2017.

“Playing with Bodies.” Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity, by Shira Chess, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.