I think that Gee’s discussion of literacy and video games in “Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a ‘Waste of Time’?” could be a helpful framework through which we might continue to think about video games as a pedagogical tool. Indeed, it seems important to note Gee’s argument that “[w]hen people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word ‘literacy’ is normally used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write. Why, then, should we think of literacy more broadly, in regard to video games or anything else, for that matter?” (13).

Perhaps one reason why we should think of literacy in regard to video games is that doing so might allow us to challenge the manner in which certain types of knowledge and learning are often privileged:

Important knowledge (now usually gained in school) is content in the sense of information rooted in, or at least, related to, intellectual domains or academic disciplines like physics, history, art, or literature. Work that does not involve such learning is ‘meaningless.’ Activities that are entertaining but that themselves do not involve such learning are just ‘meaningless play.’ Of course, video games fall into this category. (21)

This resistance to types of so-called “meaningless play”—play that, Gee notes, video games often come to encompass—also brings to mind Huizinga’s discussion of seriousness and play, and it also makes me think about the fact that it seems that it’s not just certain learning activities (i.e. the more “serious ones”) that can be privileged but the disciplines as well, for even though Gee lists physics, history, art, and literature as examples of important domains of academic knowledge, perhaps some of these domains are often viewed as being “more important” than others.

As such, Gee’s discussion of games, here, is making me think a lot about the hierarchical nature of the ways we think about knowledge and learning. And I think that Gee’s presentation of an alternative perspective to knowledge production could be helpful too: “The alternative perspective starts with the claim that there really is no such thing as learning ‘in general.’ We always learn something. And that something is always connected, in some way, to some semiotic domain or other” (22).