I might write about this more later (or you can), but I just wanted to throw up this link while I was thinking about it. One of the more interesting things about this essay (as opposed to other "What I Learned from Tetris" essays, of which there are many) is the "I was programmeed" metaphor, which is a strikingly different way of describing the pedagogical process.

http://io9.com/353746/i-was-programmed-by-tetris-to-be-a-better-person

I didn't think of this when Mark Hannah was raising concerns last week, but I think one important aspect of gaming (and one which may not be constitutive of literacy) is the amount of repetitive tasks many games (like WoW) tend to foster in players. Everything up until the point that a game becomes a set of repeated, status- or wealth-building exercises ("grinding") follow Gee's provisions for literacy, but I wonder if experience grinding is something else (something less beneficial to literate practice).

Here are some places that have emulators. For the old Nintendo, Nesticle is one of the most trusty. There are emulators for lots of different game consoles. I've seen some pretty nice N64 emulators, although my experience is that the more advanced the console you're emulating, the more bugs there are in the games:

http://www.emulator-zone.com/

http://www.emulatorworld.com/

You will need "ROMS" to play. If the emulator is the console, the roms are the cartridges (or discs) that you put in them. A good ROM directory is:

http://www.coolrom.com/roms.php

I really got a kick out of Tom Derrick's DOSEQUIS article, both for the beauty of the game itself and the quality of the work it produced (if the examples are any indicator). I'm aching to try it, but I'm not teaching 106 this semster, and my 420 kids are kind of humorless.