The open-ended, informal, and socially negotiated nature of role-playing games creates a distinct learning challenge for newcomers to the hobby. The explicit rules of the game provide only an incomplete framework for structuring the actions of players, and the expectations and mores of a given group will add other, unspoken rules that discourage…

Digital or computer games have recently attracted the interest of education researchers and policy-makers for two main reasons: their interactivity, which is said to allow greater agency, and their inherent pleasures, which are linked to increased motivation to learn. However, the relationship between pleasure, agency and motivation in educational…

This article argues that children in a particular virtual community are learning through their participation in the discursive and social practices of the community. Using Wenger's model of "communities of practice" the article illuminates examples of children's learning that were a direct result of collaboration towards a common goal.…

In this article the author explores the seamlessness between children's online and offline worlds. For children, there is no dichotomy of online and offline, or virtual and real; the digital is so much intertwined into their lives and psyche that the one is entirely enmeshed with the other. Despite early research pointing to the differences that…