ABSTRACT
As video games reach larger audiences, player identity is changing rapidly. Casual gaming has helped to facilitate a broader notion of who is permitted to play, while still putting constraints on how that play occurs. By employing constitutive rhetoric, this chapter interrogates the construction of the “casual gamer.” While this gamer is constructed as feminine, she is also white, middle class, cis-gendered, middle-aged, and heterosexual. The author interrogates the complexities of this debate by placing herself within it: as a white, middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual, cis-gendered woman who plays and studies casual games, her identity construction becomes a point of complication.
