Digital games are an established feature of contemporary popular culture. They are no longer confined to desktop computers or consoles. We find them embedded in social media, on our smartphones and tablets. While digital games were once designed for and played by those with high levels of technological and gaming literacy, they now reach into a far wider market, with elements of games employed in advertising, business, training and education, as well as consumer and communications cultures. Freed from the constraints of interfaces such as keyboards or game-pad controllers and from expensive, dedicated hardware, games have extended their invitation to a more varied range of people. In addition, it is also increasingly easier to make games, with simplified drag-and-drop interfaces provided by game engines such as Unity. As a result, games are losing their technological opacity and extend beyond the tastes and competencies of the traditionally maledominated market (Ofcom 2014). While these developments are positive and create a broader and more gender-inclusive participation in digital game media, game development companies are nonetheless still largely populated and led by men. Resistance to equality-driven change is also in evidence, with mainstream news channels in the closing months of 2014 featuring misogynist voices claiming to represent gamers angrily expressing a minority desire to preserve games from ‘feminist insurgents’. Representations of gendered embodiments, psychological profiles and role functions within games commonly make use of stereotyped and often gender-exaggerated modes to attract players. This is particularly the case in big-budget high-risk games made for the ‘Triple A’ market, which target male players (such as the Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty series, for example). Less risk-averse and lower-budget games do design for other markets, however. Indeed, powerful, agentic and often complex female characters are not completely absent from the field of games.

Within this group there is a particularly high proportion that draws on the Gothic, often sold under the rubric of horror or fantasy. Game development companies often use Gothic as form of branding to attract a pre-established market; in so doing they take advantage of Gothic fiction's appeal across the gender divide to reach beyond the usual male market for games. As distinct from other games, a relatively high percentage of Gothic games are designed by women.