Famously, Friedrich Schiller (1794) claimed that persons were ‘most human’ when they were at play. More recently, digital media and learning theorists have suggested that learners may learn best when they are ‘at play’, where serious play and educative/learning action coincide. This course examines digital gameplay as it is currently developed and popularly imagined to more closely examine what is “learned”, what literacies are acquired and at play in those immersive environments. Although digital gameplay represents, for some people, something unfamiliar, potentially subversive and antithetical to education’s intellectual and social goals, play has always been a powerful vehicle for learning. There is little doubt that young people today, who represent computer gaming’s largest and fastest-growing audience, are learning a great deal in and through digital play, but what is it they are learning, and how? What digital and other literacies are learned through play? The purpose of this course is to give serious attention to and careful analysis of the contemporary digital forms of games and learning.