No Selling the Genie Lamp: A Game Literacy Practice in The Sims:

Drawing on the New Literacy Studies, the authors argue that game literacy takes multiple forms and is embedded in different practices associated with particular games and gaming communities. They examine one specific game literacy practice that involves players of The Sims creating challenges for other players, and they identify how playing and creating these challenges engages players as designers, modders, coach/mentors, teachers, and orchestrators of particular forms of discourse. The forms of writing that the players engage in, both in online game forums and in their stories about their Sims, is a new print literacy practice, as well as an integral part of a specific game literacy practice. The authors' analysis suggests that the ability to engage in 'soft modding' may be a crucial, though undervalued, aspect of game literacy in this context, and also illustrates how game literacies can be integrally tied to and, in turn, transform print literacies. A Socially Situated View of Game Literacy The word 'literacy' in its traditional use means 'writing' and 'reading' language. It is common, of course, to use the word in an extended sense, for things like 'visual literacy', 'computer literacy', 'music literacy', and even 'emotional literacy'. In these extended senses, the terms treat images, computers, music, and emotions as if they were systems, like language, for producing ('writing') and consuming ('reading') meanings. Thanks to the popularity of research on video games over the last few years, terms like 'game literacy', 'game design literacy', and 'gaming literacy' have emerged. For example, Eric Zimmerman (2008) has defined the term 'gaming literacy' quite expansively, using the concepts of design, play and systems to argue that gaming literacy represents a new paradigm for literacy more broadly. 'Game literacy' more narrowly construed would mean at least being able to use the design features of video games to play games. Games mix producing ('writing') and consuming ('reading') in a more integral way than does print literacy. Playing a game is at one and the same time a form of consuming ('reading' or understanding the design features and content of the game) and producing ('writing' or enacting the game by playing it). Some people view written texts in this way and see reading as a form of 'rewriting' the text by giving it specific meanings germane to the individual reader. However, if written texts worked like video games, people's acts of reading would change the print and even the content of the text, just as game play changes the images and even the events in a game. When someone chooses to steal something in the role-playing game Oblivion, for example, that event exists in the story and virtual world because the gamer put it there. The story and world in Oblivion is not fixed. The closest written texts could (and have) come to this would be a case where an author wrote bits and pieces of a text and left the reader to choose from among them and order them. For example, Julio Cortazar's (1966) novel Hopscotch, written in an episodic, snapshot manner, has 155 chapters, the last 99 being designated as 'expendable'. The book can be read either in direct sequence from chapter 1 to 56, which, Cortazar writes, the reader