ABSTRACT
Over a remarkably short span of time, digital games have come to command an increasingly important role in social communications. Education, skill development, job training, ideology-formation, artistic endeavours and more have all come under the spell of the so-called “stealth-learning” possibilities that digital games afford (Prensky, 2000). So seen, digital games are a significant new medium, and game play, on this view, both depends upon and develops a kind of “new literacy” (Gee, 2005; Kafai, 2006). James Paul Gee, for example, has argued extensively that playing digital games constitutes a new form of literate practice, and he has referred to learning through video games as (amongmanyother things) the “ability to read complex semiotic scores” (Gee, 2007). Alongside such work, is that which is looking at the playing of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) as the formation of complex “communities of practice” in which not only learning takes place but important social and cultural bonds are established and developed (Taylor, 2006). What we need at this point, however, is a more specific analysis both of the particular kinds of “new literacies” that gameplay purportedly develops, and no less importantly, a rich data set which allows us to look in depth and detail at the particulars of this widely endorsed general claim.
