This article calls attention to the need to explore with greater seriousness the rationales and frameworks for adopting gaming/writing in communication and composition pedagogy. Outsiders may imagine the world of gaming as distinguished by bloodthirsty heroes, oversexed heroines, and unbridled imperialism, and may imagine gamers as escapist, misogynistic, sociopathic, or worse. In fact, certain negative stereotypes about gaming -for instance, that it can lead to poor thinking, escapism, and exclusionary behavior -seem all too plausible to us. Yet our research suggests that gamers are encouraged to hone rhetorical skill through immersion in the genres associated with digital discourse and that gaming groups, to the extent they are characterized by a fluidity of power relations existing all too rarely in school, may provide a model for democratic classrooms. Like many of our readers, but unlike the majority of our students, we are outsiders with respect to the worlds of digital gaming. Our marginal status in the gaming community inclines us to maintain a degree of skepticism toward the triumphal spirit all too often animating research into the educational uses of digital games. Indicative of the tone of such research are James Paul Gee and Michael H. Levine's comments that digital media, and specifically video games, "can help all learners become tech savvy -that Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press

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This article has been reviewed internally as an editorial for Open Library of the Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of the Humanities.

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