In this study, I discuss the need to increase girls' involvement with game design due to the numerous benefits that engaging in this practice might have. In particular, I discuss the tool Twine, an accessible and relatively easy-to-use platform for creating text-based games. I provide an overview of the tool and its potential benefits for…

As video games become a ubiquitous part of today's culture internationally, as educators and parents we need to turn our attention to how video games are being understood and used in informal and formal settings. Serious games have developed as a genre of video games marketed for educating youth about a range of world issues. At face value this…

This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom for teachers. The model illustrates the connections between in-game actions and youth gaming culture. The article explains how the out-of-school knowledge building, creation and collaboration that occurs in gaming and gaming culture has an impact on…

In 2007, the authors' ethnographic research study of 11 adolescent gamers began in a response to social concern regarding adolescent (dis)engagement in school literacy practices. Since then, the authors' ongoing research has revealed the importance of understanding and knowing more about individual gamers' ways of knowing, and also about the…

This article explicates the ways that developers working at an independent game company in New York City organized their development process around a deep concern for how players make meaning from their games. Two designers' descriptions of their processes are used to illustrate the company's commitment to developing games that invite…

This article addresses recent approaches to uncovering and theorizing the design activities that occur in online gaming affinity spaces. Examples are presented of productive d/Discourse present within online forums around three video game series, video games, or game platforms, and key design practices engaged upon by gamers in these spaces. It is…

Digital games have become a major part of the twenty-first-century learning environment, but little attention has been paid to understanding what young learners already know about games and how this understanding can be used as a bridge to academic literacy. In this study, the authors analyze second-grade students' efforts at critiquing digital…

This article addresses practices of textual appropriation in computer games made by young people. By focusing on how young people's production work makes reference to popular media texts, it examines the basis on which such work claims to be legible as a game text: how it claims to be literate in the context of an after-school game-making club.…

Over the past several years, educators have been exploring the potential of immersive interactive simulations, or video games for education, finding that games can support the development of disciplinary knowledge, systemic thinking, the production of complex multimodal digital artifacts, and participation in affinity spaces or sites of collective…