One last thought for the evening. I started writing a note to a friend who doesn't play video games tonight and once again found myself typing the words "I can't really explain them to you -- you have to play them yourself" -- words which over the past few months I've spoken over and over to folks who did not grow up with video games. They started feeling a little odd running around in my head. Was it because this hands-on imperative (as Stephen Levy puts it about hacking culture) is really bogus?

In the end I decided it's not that it was bogus; it's that this guy is an architect, not a teacher, so at that point I was really being kind of knee-jerk, telling him that.

But why insist teachers play, for that matter? Let me just reaffirm a few key points, for my own purposes. First, this dictum seems to spring from the ludology-narratology debate: the idea is that you can't just watch video games and expect to understand them, because they're something more than a story. Second, I wouldn't recommend teachers play video games any more highly than I would recommend they listen to the music and watch a few of the TV shows and movies that their kids take in. It's just a good idea overall to have a good sense of the materials your students are using to construct their senses of self, and know how those selves might be at odds with the information you're supposed to be imparting to them. (Once again, the Margaret Finders defense. That slender little book is coming to look like it will be the cornerstone of my work. I wish that didn't make me feel strangely guilty. I feel like I ought to be drawing theory from some sere old teat... Derrida's, or something.)