This introductory article provides an overview of the special issue and addresses digital practices and cultures. Combining conceptualizations by Huizinga and Appadurai, authors suggest that playscapes help to support expanded examinations and discussions of entangled meaning making across space and time.

This article defines and illustrates features of belongingness visible in videogame spaces, highlighting how doing–being–valuing combinations help to contextualize participation. Underscoring the dynamics of hierarchical participation in interest-driven practices, this article has implications for understanding how youth (re)configure their social practices to seek inclusion by using and honing specialist language and behavior.

In the past fifteen years, there has been a shift in the way researchers have conceptualized identity, moving from the “identity-as-thing” to an understanding of “identity-in-practice” (Leander, 2002, 198–199). This is not necessarily a new concept, as earlier researchers recognized sociocultural influences on perception (Bartlett, 1932/1995; Vygotsky, 1978) and on the performative nature of identity (Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1959). New Literacy Studies theorists (Barton, 1994, 2001; Gee, 1996, 2000; Street 1995, 1999) began to examine identity-in-practice in relation to literacy. In addition, ethnographic accounts (Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1997; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) began to document ways that literacies and identities were interconnected. There was an epistemological shift, underscoring the individual and community practices that help to shape one’s identity. Literacies included all activities inside and outside school, highlighting the relationship between people’s literacy practices and their situated actions, behaviors, beliefs, and values, or their Discourses (Gee, 1999, 2008, 2011).

This chapter examines intertextual meaning-making across and within virtual and real video game environments, looking to observational and interview data of middle and high school students to illustrate the conflation of real and virtual experiences. The discussion of the associative I/identity helps to distinguish and clarify the interconnected nature of on- and offscreen situated practices that promote meaningful learning