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As for conversation, we have learned much in our half-lifetime of working and talking with Jim.

Gee lists thirty-six places (at least) where even the most otherwise unedifying games are based on sounder learning principles than the conventional classroom, including: the “situated meaning principle,” where “meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience,” and the “distributed principle,” where “meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.”³⁵¹ The word we give this traffic of meaning is transposition.

Gee calls avatars in games “projective identity,” or “double selves.” A player’s other-self appears in “dynamic images tied to perceptions of the world and of our own bodies, internal states, and feelings.”³⁵² In our terms this might be phrased a transposition of role when the fictive other (an avatar) becomes an enacting self. And as the self is virtualized, another transposition, across meaningful time and place.

Players stay in the game because the conversation engages them, unlike the traditional texts of the scientific and cultural canon, and the texts of school. “Films, books, and music do not respond turn by turn to the viewer, reader, or listener and thereby co-shape an act of continuous meaning making. Viewers, readers, and listeners can respond in their minds – or to their friends – but their response cannot change the film, book, or music. Books, film, and music are not reciprocal or co-designed” in the way games are.³⁵³ It’s not that engagement can’t happen in traditional media and schools. It’s just that the dynamics of transposition are different.

In games, the conversation is with the (virtual) world, in a “turn-taking system.” And “even many sorts of animals can engage in this turn-taking system”: probe/world responds/reflect/probe again.³⁵⁴ By this process, the game is open-ended, as its outcomes are determined in collaboration between the player and the game designer.³⁵⁵ “[I]n a sense, [the players] design the game with the designers.”³⁵⁶

Or, to reframe this in some of the other terms we have been developing in this grammar, enacting the transpositions of conditionality, the anxiety of possibility meets the requirements of the game to become assertable experience.^§MS2.3 These are fluid relations, imminent (always about to move) and immanent (the one function meaningless without its impatient transposability into the others).

And the meaning of these meanings? “These pleasures are connected to control, agency, and meaningfulness,” says Gee. “If the body feeds on food, the soul feeds on agency and meaningfulness.”³⁵⁷

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³⁵⁰ James Paul Gee, 2004, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, London: Routledge; James Paul Gee, 2013, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

³⁵¹ James Paul Gee, 2003, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 203–10.

³⁵² James Paul Gee, 2015, Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Virtual Worlds, and Video Games, London: Routledge, pp. 176, 206, 25.

³⁵³ Ibid., pp. 9–10.

³⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 10–11.

³⁵⁵ McKenzie Wark, 2007, Gamer Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Ian Bogost, 2006, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Alexander R. Galloway, 2006, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

³⁵⁶ James Paul Gee, 2007, Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy, New York: Peter Lang, p. 173.

³⁵⁷ James Paul Gee, 2005, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul: Pleasure and Learning, Melbourne: Common Ground, p. 4.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 137–139. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

James Paul Gee’s “Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul” §AS1.4.3f