Epistemic games and the Digital Divide

A widely read paper/blog on Playing the Digital Divide looks at whether and how video games can help close the gap in information technology skills. The paper suggests that epistemic games can play an important role in this process:

The group’s key contributions to gaming studies discourse has been the notion of video games as ‘epistemic frames’ and as a vehicle for literacies.

Epistemic video games provide educators with a potentially revolutionary teaching tool that can advance multiple new media literacies (Flanagan’s RAPUNSEL project is but one such example). These new literacies, with the right pedagogical support, promise to arm students with the critical tools necessary to engage both canonized and popular texts alike, and not simply regurgitate rote information for the purposes of passing standardized tests.