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200 Mizuko Ito and Matteo Bittantiof games. Parents and kids’ perspectives often collide. The nature of theclash, however, is varied. In chapter 4, we have seen these conflicts playingout in how parents from different class backgrounds regulate gaming inthe home. We also have noted how certain gaming practices can functionas an intergenerational wedge, where parents are shut out from certainforms of media engagement. Conflicts about how games are perceived wereevident when kids talked about gender and gaming and in the larger proportionof boys who engaged in the more geeked out forms of gamingpractice. In this chapter, we work to tease apart some of the specifics ofhow these general cultural valences play out in relation to specific gamegenres and genres of participation with gaming sociability and culture.Although certain core practices of recreational and geeked out gaming arestrongly associated with the young, white male geek cultures that werefoundational to early game practice, today we see a much more variegatedpalette of gaming practices. The overall statistics of an expanding gamerdemographic need to be contexualized within highly differentiated formsof gaming activities. Our effort here is to specify some of these distinctionsamong different forms of game engagement.When we examine gaming from the point of view of gamers and gamepractice, then a different set of learning issues comes into view. While wedo not underestimate the relevance of the text, it is just one among a seriesof players in the ecological dance that results in complex social, cultural,and technical outcomes. For example, one of the most important outcomesof the practices that we call “recreational gaming” is the fact that youngpeople develop social networks of technical expertise. The game has notdirectly and explicitly taught them technical skills, but game play hasembedded young people in a set of practices and a cultural ecology thatplaces a premium on technical acumen. This in turn is often tiedto an identity as a technical expert that can serve a gamer in domainswell beyond specific engagements with games. This is the kind of descriptionof learning and “transfer” that a more ecological approach to gamingsuggests.We follow this approach through the body of this chapter by analyzinghow gamers talk about their own investments in games in relation to thepractices that they describe. In line with an ethnographic approach, wesee culture and discourse as constitutive of everyday practice and viceversa. Taking gamer viewpoints and investments seriously on their own