Building on Lisa Nakamura’s essay, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” in which she conducts an exploration of race and racial performance in early text-based cyber-environments, I examine the depiction of gender and its performance within the context of the contemporary multiplayer online role-playing game, EverQuest II. In particular, I explore how gender within the context of an online game is mediated by several factors: the programming of the game, the diegesis upon which the milieu is built, and real-world stereotypes derived from European models of normative gender identity. As a result of this mediation, I find that players who participate in the world of EverQuest II are forced to adopt an interpretation of gender that is determined by the game developers and ultimately reifies sexist gender stereotypes within the spectrum of the heteronormative gender matrix.  [Article]