Peculiarities of gender characteristics in the game related phenomenon of crossplay

The article deals with the analysis of the representation of gender in game related phenomenon of “crossplay”, which involves impersonation as a character of the opposite sex, or attempts to try on the image of a character in a computer game, anime or film, which is gender different from the one originally presented in one or another fictional story narrative. The author analyzes the phenomena of M2F, F2M, gender bender and try to show the correlation of these everyday practices both with some problems of self-identification of a modern person living in contexts of fluid identity, oversaturated with the meanings of the modern cultural space, and with the complexity of the computer-game narrative, the convergence of gaming, animation and cinematic types of narrative representation of the fictional world and its heroes. The author draws conclusions about the “removal” of problems of self-identification in the phenomenon of cosplay, its special specificity among other types of everyday practices.