In 1998, everyone else in the world, especially everyone else my age, became a member of the global digital citizenry. I was too busy joining a German educational cult based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, making tofu and burying myself under a mound of environmentally correct cloth diapers which were very real, and in no way virtual.

A few years later, my daughter learned to feed herself and I got a life, a divorce, and a job in a public library. It was during long quiet afternoons at the circulation desk that I learned to stop worrying and love the Internet. My atomic affair with email grew quite organically out of my lifelong complete disbelief in reality.

I always avoided online gaming communities for the same reasons I avoid tiramisu and heroin. I am afraid I would like them, and then where would I be? The fact that I find the "physical" world I live in to be very much un- or sure- real, makes the idea of creating a "second life" for myself seem like a duplication of efforts. The idea of creating another, ideal self, using the intellectual secrets and superpowers of my "physical" created self is so seductive it gives me vertigo. I guess part of me is afraid I could get sucked in and never get out. I could "live there," online, in a place even more remote than the stories I already tell myself.

In "We Live Here: Games, Third Places and the Information Architecture of the Future," Andrew Hinton (http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-06/hinton.html) talks about virtual communities like Second Life, World of Warcraft and even MySpace and Facebook as virtual "3rd Places" that have developed to fill the vacuum of community recreation spaces left by our general contemporary isolation. This idea fascinates me. I love the idea of a low-consequence, interactive playing space for the viral transmission of ideas...the Internet as proverbial meme-kleenex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme), but everytime I think about this, I wonder about neurobiology and evolution. Think about online dating. Where you once might've formed a first impression of someone based on their chin or the way they smell, now we decide who we want to date based on their digital photograph and whether or not they "give good email." Is mating like this going to cause natural selection to seek out genetic traits like not splitting infinitives or not ending sentences with a preposition?

The James Paul Gee article "Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines," argues that the learning strategies built into the design of computer games, especially the interactive ones, demonstrate cutting edge educational principles that can and should be employed by mainstream educators. This initially made me think of the old wire-monkey-mama experiment, as if poor little anemic, egg-headed preschoolers were going to be put in front of giant glowing screen, but I decided I was being reactionary. The arguments in the article make a lot of sense to me, and as the mother of a 3rd grader, and as a student myself, I can see how the learning strategies in video games would be beneficial in every kind of educational context.