Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning
"James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes offer us vivid portrait of women of all ages ‘gaming beyond gaming,’ transforming the successful The Sims video games into a platform for their own social, creative, and intellectual lives.  These women are gamers, but they are also tinkerers, community leaders, authors, programmers, and artists, and their engagement with The Sims has opened up new opportunities for them to learn and grow far beyond the classroom.  Gee and Hayes are patient, informed, and insightful guides showing us how these kinds of participatory cultures might transform our understanding of education in the 21st century."--Henry Jenkins,Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century “Women and Gamingis must-read for anyone interested in the social or intellectual side of gaming - scholars, designers, players and parents alike. At long last, we have a serious treatment of the forms of social engineering or "soft modding" that women do as part of gameplay -- not merely as some counterpoint to the (predominantly-male) practice of technical modding (modifying) found in gaming communities but in fact as a vital practice in its own right and a key feature of what it means to Design. Gee & Hayes have managed to treat an often-ignored topic with both depth and clarity.”—Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison "If a good education is the path to human enlightenment, one might well ask what the current state of education is.  Authors Gee and Hayes waste few words in their answer: education in our culture is critically wanting...The authors have done a commendable job of positing a theory of learning according to which real education is not about acquiring knowledge, but rather about 'becoming' something."--Women and Gaming