Over the past few years, games have gone from social pariahs to the darlings of the media, technology, and now educational industries. E-learning educators in particular stand to learn a lot about building next-generation learning environments from games (Dalesio 2004). While online courses are usually little more than "online course notes, " games offer entire worlds to explore. While educators wonder if it is possible to create good online learning communities, game designers create virtual societies with their own cultures, languages, political systems, and economies (Kolbert 2001; Steinkuehler, forthcoming). While completion rates for online courses barely reach 50%, gamers spend hundreds of hours mastering games, writing lengthy texts, and even setting up their own virtual "universities " to teach others to play games (Squire, forthcoming). In short, while e-learning has a reputation for being dull and ineffective, games have developed a reputation for being fun, engaging, and immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving (Gee 2003). Given emerging research on how video games and associated pedagogies work in designed settings (Shaffer 2005), it seems the important question is not whether educators can use games to support learning, but how we can use games most effectively as educational tools. The explosion of research initiatives, conferences, books, and software focused on educational games suggests that computer and video games will have some part in education, just as all media before them have been used for learning. However, the history of educational technology also suggests that educators will

In an article in this issue of Innovate, Jim Gee asks the question "What would a state of the art instructional video game look like? " Based on the game Full Spectrum Warrior, he concludes that one model is "to pick [a] domain of authentic professionalism well, intelligently select the skills and knowledge to be distributed, build in a related value system as integral to gameplay, and clearly relate any explicit instructions to specific contexts and situations " (2005, para. 20). That is, he describes a good instructional game as an adaptation of "authentic professionalism " in video game format. Here I would like to give a more detailed account of this idea by looking more closely at the terms "authenticity " and "professionalism. " I begin by connecting these concepts to some of the theories of learning on which they are based: ideas about communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), reflective practice (Schon 1987), epistemic frames (Shaffer 2004a) and pedagogical praxis (Shaffer 2004b). These theories link games, simulations, and professional practices. In so doing, they provide tools and techniques to guide the development of games for learning. To show how this works, I will give an example of one such game that, while still a prototype, demonstrates how a deliberately constructed simulation of professional practice can be both an engaging activity and a compelling learning environment. Epistemic Frames and Reproductive Practices

Schools have much to learn from video games and the gaming community. By providing compelling activities for motivating otherwise indifferent learners, video games can potentially help teachers improve the design of learning environments. However, there are considerable rhetorical and practical barriers between the schooling and gaming communities grounded in fundamentally different approaches to learning. Whereas schools are moving toward increasingly standardized learning experiences, games offer the prospect of user-defined worlds in which players try out (and get feedback on) their own assumptions, strategies, and identities. It is difficult, at first glance, to see how gaming can help teachers meet the demands of an increasingly standards-driven public schooling system. The adversarial relation between the two cultures heightens the contrast between the underlying theories of gaming and schooling. Many school leaders and teachers react negatively to video games and gaming culture, bashing video games as diversionary threats to the integrity of schooling or as destructive activities that corrupt moral capacity and create a sedentary, motivation-destroying lifestyle. Apart from embracing a few games such as Oregon Trail or SimCity, schools have typically acted to eliminate or marginalize gaming. The strong content and the addictive play of games such as Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Everquest have led non-players to overlook the learning principles incorporated into the game design. Thus games have come to typify the essentially subversive side of computing in

Video game use in education has focused on the application of games within the existing education system and on their inherent potential for producing learning (Gee 2003). However, research has revealed a fundamental mismatch between the goals of games and the object of school-based learning (Sandford et al. 2006; Squire 2005; Becta 2002). As a result, efforts to integrate games into the curriculum have frequently fallen flat despite the best intentions of teachers and the gaming industry. Such efforts have failed either because games designed to educate do not engage their intended audience, or because truly engaging games do not provide enough educational value. In part, this failure has been because games are fundamentally incompatible with the school environment ( Exhibit 1). From the student's point of view, integrating games into the school culture dilutes the experience of game playing. From the teacher's point of view, games are too long, too immersive, and focused on the wrong outcomes, motivating students to achieve defined win states rather than to seek knowledge. The problem is that educational game designers have approached the problem backward: Rather than striving to get games into education, educators should be investigating ways to get education into games. This article suggests ways to accomplish this via a new genre of video game that engages gamers outside of formal schooling. This approach is contextualized by a brief outline of the shortcomings of video game usage

Machinima is the appropriation of software-generated 3D virtual environments, typically video games, for filmmaking and dramatic productions. The creation and distribution technology of machinima tends to hide the nature of the performer, provoking consideration of a definition of ‘liveness ’ that can accommodate the real-time rendering of screen content by game software in response to human input, or – at the extreme – as if there is human input in accordance with performance parameters coded by humans. This paper considers the continuum of creative modes that machinima makers work on, and the differing aesthetic/technical decisions affecting the level of liveness in the finished production. Machinima films derive from