116AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYplatforms and also examines what formsof cosplay content have flourished lately,such as YouTube videos, TikTok dancing,and streaming.
The design of costumes takes a prominent role in the book as well. Liptak, forinstance, explores the ways in which fansand makers add to existing stories andcharacters. Why do fans choose to represent characters in costume, and what is therelationship between franchises and costuming? The book provides many insights
around this, as well as the maker culture ofcosplay. How do fans, for instance, movefrom amateur to pro and sell their own
costumes? What does professional cosplay
look like?
Furthermore, readers can findinsights on the legalities of cosplay, its
economy, the aftermath of the COVID19 pandemic, and more. Liptak’s work
offers an insightful and comprehensive
guide of fan costuming as a practice, asstorytelling, and as a subculture. It is an
exhaustive work about this practice thatwill certainly be of use to media and fanscholars, and to fans interested in the practice. My only complaint is that the work
explores specific histories of costuming
at the expense of others. It focuses moreon the development of fan costumes in a
Northern American context than on thatin Japan and other countries. This limitation could have been corrected by drawing from other cosplay scholarship anddocumentation to compare more acrosscultures. However, the subcultures themselves, particularly in Western countries,
as well as their complexity, are studiedin great detail in this book. Liptak, forinstance, provides some nuanced reflections on gatekeeping in these commu-nities, as well as their sexist and racist
aspects. More broadly speaking, the bookalso includes sections on cosplay and politics and on protest cosplay and activism.
Although cosplay is not an inclusive hobby
yet, it can be used to spur change.
A key strength of the book is that it isvery accessible and outlines the history ofcosplay in a clear and thorough way. The
poignant cases and examples really bringthis volume to life. Overall, Cosplay: A History is a full guide to cosplay for newcomers and long-term fans. This is a fantastic
read if you have a passion for cosplay but
also if you want to know more as an outsider.
—Nicolle Lamerichs, Utrecht University ofApplied Sciences, Utrecht, Netherlands

Gaming Sexism: Gender andIdentity in the Era of Casual
Video Games
Amanda C. Cote
New York: NYU Press, 2020.
Introduction, conclusion,acknowledgments, appendix,
gameography, notes, bibliography, index,
and about the author. 280 pp. $30.00,paper. ISBN: 9781479802203
Amanda Cote has undertaken an ambitious project in Gaming Sexism, whichseeks both to explore the already completed academic work about gaming sexism and to fill in the existing gaps. In aday and age when the attempts to reverse
women’s rights are growing in Westernsociety, it is particularly pertinent toexplore women’s experiences in all fields—

Book Reviewsof work and of play. Cote uses this space
to examine what it means to be a femaleidentifying gamer in the twenty-first century, specifically when there is a plethoraof easily accessible games pervading media(casual games). As she states, while theaccessibility to games has widened greatly,
the perception of a gamer has only partially followed suit: white, cis-hetero men
still hold the identity of gamer, especially in mainstream console games (coregames). Cote’s book is a combination oftheorization and hands-on research, mixing interviews of female, self-proclaimed
gamers and statistics derived from thegaming industry with an examination ofprevious scholarship, sociological theories,
and gaming media. Cote strikingly andperceptively lays out the problems withthe gaming industry. She gets deep into
the weeds of the struggle women have withadopting the title of gamer, even in a society purporting to make way for diversity
in gaming.
However, although Cote’s streamlined syntax makes her work extremelyaccessible, the interweaving of multiple, varying threads often muddies theindividual points she makes. She hasa tendency to place her reasoning forincluding examples after the examples,
which leaves the reader wondering where
they are in the argument. At the sametime, the work is often repetitive, at times
repeating sentences verbatim within thesame chapter. Her audience appears to
be anyone related to the gaming industry who cares about equity in its boundaries, though Cote seems to shift fromthose long rooted in the scholarship to
those new to it—at times going into great
detail about the origins of terminology

and events; at other times assuming theaudience knows the context of particular ideas and hashtags. The fact is Cote
does an immense amount of work, andthough her writing style is marked with
precision, her ordering of information ina chapter does not always reflect the workand the stylistic exactitude.
Cote indeed makes a rocky start inher first chapter, biting off more than she
can chew as she explores casual versus
core and often tying out various concepts
and ideas before (or without) getting toconcrete examples. However, her argument becomes much clearer and morestreamlined in chapters 2 and 3, in which
Cote explores overt versus inferential
sexism. This fits neatly with her previous
discussion of hegemony, though she never
explicitly ties the two together. The workin these two chapters is not revelatory, as
Cote herself acknowledges. This sectionof the book includes much research thosefamiliar with gaming scholarship will recognize, but Cote inserts a freshness withher primary interviews and by delineating
between the two types of sexism. Though
the boundaries between the two are not as
distinct as Cote aims to make them, having a foundation for picking these apart iscrucial for future work in the field. Where
the work starts to really feel like Cote,though, is in the second half of the book.
Chapters 4 and 5 dive in deep to women’s
experiences with video games, how theyplay, and how they adapt. In this space,
Cote proves that women have already been
and continue to be core gamers. Although
this left me wanting a continued discussion of what it means for women to becasual gamers as well as an explorationof the role of indie games, the proof that117

118

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

women have always been gamers—andthe ways women assert this identity—feellike the heart of the text and the key forthe eventual next steps Cote will lay out inher conclusion. Beyond this deeper interpretative work, Cote also seems to havestronger footing here, falling less into hertendency in the first half of the book toundercut her statements with “probably”
and “potentially.” One sticking point: it
is not always clear to me where Cote isfocusing on issues women have as women
gamers versus issues women have as gamers—and what it means for these to coexist
as distinct entities. Her final chapter offersa poignant, refreshing perspective on how
women gamers’ identities shift over time,
although her framing of the entire chapter
around GamerGate seems slightly awkward and forced.
Overall, though the book struggles
to weave all the pieces together, Cote haspresented an efficient and powerful historyof what it means to be a female gamer andhow all present in the gaming realm canpave a way forward. There do seem odd
gaps in the discussion. For instance, Cotetwice brings up the “second shift” in relation to women’s household work, but she
never addresses in detail the skewed labor
women take on while establishing and protecting their gamer identities. Her exploration of prior research in the first half of thebook could be greatly condensed, whichwould allow more room for interpretation in the vital second half of the text.
Regardless of these quibbles, Cote’s voice
emerges strong. Because the work leansoften into compilation and reflection, it isa solid resource for anyone who has notpreviously delved into gaming sexism. For
anyone already well versed, this book does

not seat itself as a particularly revelatory
text, but its collection of proof and detailof the feminine gamer identity makes it aworthy read for those who want to further
gaming equity in the near future.
—Christina Xan, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

Performativity in Art,
Literature, and Videogames
Darshana Jayemanne
London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.
Introduction, list of figures, list of tables,bibliography, and index. 331 pp. $159,paper. ISBN 9783319853963
Darshana Jayemanne’s Performativity
in Art, Literature, and Videogames has
seemingly modest aims: to explain how
games create experiences. However, as
Jayemanne demonstrates, this is anything
but simple. Neither games nor play arehomogenous. There is variability in bothplayers and games that makes typological approaches to video games unwieldy.
Additionally, games scholarship has generally taken either a player-centered or a formalist approach—in other words, a focuson the individualistic act of play or the formal construction of games as a medium.
As Jayemanne notes, the tendency to overprivilege either leads to overstating each’simportance. This is the gordian knot that
Jayemanne cuts through by developing
the concept of “performative multiplicities” as well as a corresponding methodology, which he describes as a “comparativeapproach to the analysis of videogame performances . . . that is capable of accounting