Hardcore Gamers in Ballgowns: At the Crossroads of Gender and Play

This DiGRA 2025 paper by Ashley Guajardo examines romantasy balls, formal fantasy-themed events where adults dance, dine, and roleplay in costume, and asks what these events reveal about the intersection of gender and gamer identity. The author argues that gamer identity has long been framed as masculine, white, and geeky, and that romantasy balls, which do not market themselves as gaming events, nonetheless draw participants who play games seriously. The central thesis is that these attendees complicate conventional assumptions about who counts as a gamer and how gender shapes the ways fandom is expressed.

The study's early findings come from a qualitative design combining participant observation with 20 individual structured interviews. The author reports that 17 of the 20 interviewees qualify as "hardcore gamers," using the Quantic Foundry definition of owning high-end equipment and playing seriously or competitively. Of these 17, 13 identify as women, 3 as nonbinary, and 1 as a man. The paper situates these results against broader quantitative data indicating that roughly half of U.S. gamers are women, and against research showing that perceptions of hardcore gaming vary by gender.

The scope is geographically focused on events popular among femme-presenting participants in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and the work draws on game studies literature spanning gamer identity, online harassment such as #GamerGate, and the potential of games to drive social change. The author concludes that the phenomenon reveals a paradigm shift in understanding gamer identity and that gender significantly influences how fandom is experienced, while acknowledging that games alone have limited power to alter the social systems that produce them.