This application is not a breeze to get running on Gentoo. After emerging it, and executing the script /opt/vmware/player/bin/vmware-config.pl, it still complained with the following error when running vmplayer:

Hey, but I did configure it! It seems the script forgets a little thingy: removing the file /etc/vmware/not_configured. When you remove it yourself, the vmplayer should work.

So much for nice configure scripts, especially when they forget crucial steps to end up with something useful.