Already Core
This chapter focuses on the ways in which women embody a gamer identity, laying out how their preferences in gaming are personal, contextual, and rarely specifically gendered. It provides an update to existing research regarding the pleasures women get from gaming, then draws on theories of community and identity to address how women envision the gaming community and their place within it. Through this, the chapter demonstrates how women are a diverse, rather than essentialized, group and how both gender and gamer identity can be embodied in multiple ways. It also argues that, because female gamers already embody many “core” characteristics, they have a foundation from which to build networks of affinity with their fellow male gamers, which could help address inequality in game spaces. However, this chapter also continues to show that female gamers’ interactions with games in the casualized era are conflicted, with interviewees struggling to embody both their gender identity and their gamer identity without being singled out for this seemingly contradictory combination.