Abstract:This research study investigates how youths actually play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and what meanings they make from it. This study finds that players use their own experiences and knowledge to interpret the game -they do not passively receive the games' images and content. The meanings they produce about controversial subjects are situated in players' local practices, identities and Discourse models as they interact with the game's semiotic domain. The results suggest that scholars need to study players in naturalistic settings if they want to see what "effects" games are having on players.

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Over the past several years, educators have been exploring the potential of immersive interactive simulations, or video games for education, finding that games can support the development of disciplinary knowledge, systemic thinking, the production of complex multimodal digital artifacts, and participation in affinity spaces or sites of collective intelligence. Examining verbal interaction data from a game-based after-school program, the authors offer evidence that expert players of learning video games: (a) think relationally and strategically about elements of the game system; (b) draw on their experiences in similar activity domains when approaching systemic problems; (c) consider systemic properties as they are tied to action; and (d) think and act in markedly social ways while engaged in systems-oriented reasoning. Using discourse analysis, the authors examine the talk and game play of two participants to understand how they think about the relationships between elements of the game system. From these exchanges a kind of play emerges which contains the kinds of systemic thinking that educators might hope to find in twenty-first-century classrooms. There was evidence from students' reasoning that the situated systems thinking in which they engage contains the reasoning and problem-solving strategies for complex economic, political and geographic systems that twenty-firstcentury classrooms might value.

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