Starting in the 1980s, video games have been heavily marketed towards and associated with men. This gender shift eventually brought about what is typically known as the “girl games movement” where game developers and companies began making games targeted more towards women and girls with themes of dress up, make-up, shopping, and other hobbies that were deemed more feminine. In her novel, Ready Player Two, Shira Chess goes into detail on these types of games and what it means to play them and others as a female player. Chess specifically focuses on the idea of mania in girl games in her chapter “Playing with Time”, writing that timed games with levels designed to have quick play times often have the word “mania” in them, such as Cooking Mania or Shopmania. This notion of relating mania to feminine games comes from the stereotype that femininity is extreme and irrational; Chess explains that “[b]y tapping into this notion of “crazy” within the designed identities of Player Two, thee is an implication that the play is guided by and toward hysteria. For hundreds of years hysteria was primarily defined via femininity…” (86). Many of these games targeted towards females use words like “mania” or “fever” because the idea of hysteria is associated with women, not men. Games targeted towards men don’t usually feature such hysterical language.

In her chapter, “Playing with Emotions”, Chess adds on to this idea by explaining that “the designed identity of Player Two is inextricably linked to an anticipation of women’s emotional state, which often seems to bounce between the unstable (the manic) and the nurturing (the necessitated emotional)” (92). Here, Chess brings up the point that feminine games try to show female emotions as either irrational or caring, depending on the context. Chess goes on to explain how emotional labor, such as careers of waitressing, nursing, or care giving, also factor into Player Two’s identity and is used in emotional play to describe how women play video games (95-96). Thus, games developed with these types of emotions and emotional labors in mind are marketed towards women because there is an assumption on how they will play these games. This assumption, among a long list of others, can easily be used to explain why there are “masculine” games and “feminine” games, instead of all games being marketed towards everyone as a whole, regardless of gender.