Christina Sommerfeldt, "The Embodied Adventurer: Women as Player-Characters, Gamers, and Module-Builders in BioWare's Neverwinter Nights"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Relation between player/avatar and player/game as "a mode of gendered subjectification"
- Character creation and modding as a performance of gender that draws attention to its construction and contingency
- Gender can be subverted in various ways in mods
- Character creation foregrounds gender as an essential feature of personhood
- Romantic subplot options to attract female gamers (Dragon Age is a more recent, highly successful, example of this... a "girlfriend game")
- Female-created mods often deal with gender, sexuality
- Avoid essentializing male and female gaming styles and simply reifying the categories we are trying to challenge
- Need to highlight the construction of gender, race and other categories in digital games
- Sommerfeldt makes some good points but much of the chapter seems sort of empty, disjointed