Several things immediately excited me about this text: the definition of game introduced up front, and the discussion of Facebook as a learning tool, and these ideas of avatars and representation. These are all things I’m into lately, and to see them all in a single chapter was really exciting.

I wanted to speak to Alberti’s notions of Facebook as learning tool just on the face, because I talk about this kind of thing a lot with my students from semester to semester, particularly in addressing the common idea that “people don’t read these days,” which of course means they don’t write. We’re reading and writing all the time, and even if it’s Yik Yak or text messages or reddit or whatever, we’re still participating in these discourse communities, and they all require some construction of identity as well as approach to a rhetorical situation. What I hadn’t thought about, though, was social media as play, and I’m fascinated by the way Alberti fits that in here. While I don’t think I’d use Facebook, I have been thinking more and more about addressing social media through exercises in the 106 classroom (I’ve done it in 420), and this really cements my desire to do so.