When a teenager starts to transition to adulthood, or starts college, video games are often left behind (Bittanti, Game Play). Mary, a nineteen-year-old from Alameda, California, said: “I guess when I went to college [I gave up gaming]. I did not have enough time to socialize and still play games and most of my friends were into MySpace and Facebook and so I stopped playing altogether.”

Through recreational gaming, kids build social relationships that center on game-related interests and expertise.

While we do not see these forms of gaming as sites of profound social activity or learning, they are part of the play, of the messing around with new media that are seamlessly integrated into kids’ everyday life rhythms

More recently, educational researchers have engaged with simulation and other state-of-the-art games to argue that games provide important opportunities for learning in prac-tice (Gee 2003; Shaffer 2006; Squire 200

Drawing from a survey by the NPD Group, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) (2007) reports that 38 percent of game players are women. Women age eighteen or older represent a signifi cantly greater share of the game playing population (30 percent) than boys age seventeen or younger (23 percent).

Kids fi nd a different network of peers and develop deep friendships through these interest-driven engagements, but in these cases the interests come fi rst, and they structure the peer network and friend-ships, rather than vice versa. These are contexts where kids fi nd relation-ships that center on their interests, hobbies, and career aspirations.

Young people in the United States today are growing up in a media ecology where digital and networked media are playing an increasingly central role.

In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.

During the first he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the "preservation of and knowledge" we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.