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220 Mizuko Ito and Matteo Bittantiand then being moved to the physical, they are being created in bothequally” (15). They conclude: “These players are learning to create newdispositions within networked worlds and environments which are wellsuited to effective communication, problem solving, and social interaction”(17).Following from Thomas and Brown, we also believe that the importantlearning outcomes of mobilized gaming cannot be reduced to an issue oftransfer of knowledge or skills. Knowledge, competence, and dispositionsare developed in the contexts of intense collective social commitments.These commitments can be so strong that they compromise commitmentsto other social groups and activities, whether they are family, offlinefriends, or school. At the same time, it is important to recognize that theseforms of gaming represent opportunities to experience collective actionand to exercise agency and political will. This genre of game play involvesjockeying for power, status, and success within competitive game play withothers with whom one is deeply connected. As Thomas and Brown suggest,these forms of collective action in gaming worlds can function as traininggrounds for collaborative forms of work and social action.Augmented Game PlayAs games get more complex, and gaming culture gets broader and deeper,players increasingly engage with a wide range of practices that relate toknowledge seeking and cultural production through games. We call thisgenre of gaming “augmented game play”—engagement with the widerange of secondary productions that are part of the knowledge networkssurrounding game play. These include cheats, fan sites, modifications,hacks, walk-throughs, game guides, and various websites, blogs, and wikis.In her book on cheating in video games, Mia Consalvo (2007) suggests anotion of “gaming capital” to understand the broader cultural context inwhich gaming knowledge and expertise are negotiated. She positions thedevelopment of various cheats and cheat codes in games as part of a muchlonger history in the “paratexts” surrounding gaming—texts that helpgamers gain knowledge and interpret the culture of games. In our genresof game play, cheating and engaging with these paratexts is part of whatwe consider “augmented game play,” the engagement with the peripheraland secondary texts made about and with games. Paratexts, in the formof game magazines, have been part of gaming since the early years of

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