Today's youth are situated in a complex information ecology that includes video games and print texts. At the basic level, video game play itself is a form of digital literacy practice. If we widen our focus from the "individual player + technology" to the online communities that play them, we find that video games also lie at the nexus of a complex constellation of literacy practice. Because video games are an area of passionate interest for many young people (particularly males), they are one place where you can see what students that may not perform well in literacy-related courses are actually capable of--not because gaming is such an exceptional interest area, but because it is such a common one.