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196 Mizuko Ito and Matteo Bittantiin some form of electronic gaming, and 24 percent reported that they playgames daily. Gaming represents the central form of early computer experiencefor kids. More than two thirds of the kids we interviewed had a gameconsole at home before the age of ten. Not only is game play time growingamong U.S. youth, but forms of game play and gaming demographics arediversifying. Drawing from a survey by the NPD Group, the EntertainmentSoftware Association (ESA) (2007) reports that 38 percent of game playersare women. Women age eighteen or older represent a significantly greatershare of the game playing population (30 percent) than boys age seventeenor younger (23 percent). Although the first-person shooter (FPS) game Halo3 was the best-selling title of 2007, only 15 percent of games sold that yearwere rated Mature, and sales of Family games grew 110 percent over theprevious year. Accessible online and casual social games have tipped thebalance toward adult women, or more accurately, toward a diversified ageand gender demographic.In the past two decades, as electronic gaming has gradually becomeestablished as one of the dominant forms of entertainment of our time,there has been widespread debate over the merits of the medium. Somehave accused games of promoting violence and sexism. Despite very littleempirical evidence that games lead to antisocial or violent behavior,popular perception persists in painting a picture of the aggressive, isolated,compulsive gamer. 1 Unlike the image of the violent gamer, sexism ingames does have some grounding in everyday practice; although in thepast five years the increase has been tremendous in the number of girlsand women who game, most of those gains have been made in the areaof “casual” games in online and handheld platforms, and more “hard-core”and technically sophisticated forms of gaming and game modding 2 are stilldominated by boys and men (Kafai et al. 2008). In contrast to these concerns,researchers have been arguing that games have important learningproperties that can be mobilized for education. Research in this vein wasa central part of the early games industry, and it resulted in the developmentof a genre of game software that came to be known as “edutainment”in the 1980s and 1990s (see Ito 2007, 2009). More recently, educationalresearchers have engaged with simulation and other state-of-the-art gamesto argue that games provide important opportunities for learning in practice(Gee 2003; Shaffer 2006; Squire 2006).