This past week was our first week of Discord class. Our main discussion topic this week was based on Chess’ Ready Player Two as well as an introduction into the game Life is Strange. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate as much this week as I had to buy the book again. The primary purpose of the book seems to be discussing the role of “Player Two” and how that role is treated in the gaming community. From our class discussion, “Player Two” is predominantly described as those who do not fit the stereotypical gamer, although it primarily focuses on women. It is the people who do not fit the marketed identity of your average gamer. The rest of the Chapter transitioned to identifying how game designers market their games and what characteristics are common in more inclusive games.

Personally, I found the chart at the end of Chapter 1 to be a bit interesting. The purpose of the chart is to identify whether a game was made to be inclusive for women or not. It displays a variety of traits and commonalities between multiple games and tally them up to create a score of sorts. While I understand the purpose and the parallels it is drawing, I feel that some of the traits are pretty vague and opinionated. This leads to varying perceptions of what the final score should be. In my personal opinion, I feel that Grand Theft Auto, which received a zero in all categories, should fit for a few of the categories like collaborative/social and creative expression. I’d even argue that it’s fairly low in harassment as well since you can play the entire game solo or play online in passive mode which prevents other players from being able to interact with you at all. Also, I generally viewed the game as fairly casual when it comes to time commitment. My friends and I only really got on to mess around and goof around. I never really felt that the game was time-demanding with a sense of mastery and skill. Rather, it was more of a social time waster to hop on and blow some stuff up with some friends. Conversely, my friends and I used to play a lot of Clash of Clans back in high school. The chart identifies the game as low risk and low harassment, yet as you upgraded your base higher, the game became progressively more competitive. You needed a lot of gold and elixir to continue upgrading and building your armies, meanwhile your base is always at risk of being attacked by other players. If a player successfully raids your base, they took over half of your resources, meaning you would lose your only means of progressing in the game. We also saw a common theme where people would intentionally lose trophies, effectively deranking themselves, in order to be able to attack weaker, lower leveled players. In Clash’s case, I feel it was a bit more competitive than the way the it had been evaluated in the text.