Response to Civilzation III and the Classroom

I couldn't get my post to work as a comment, so I just put it here.

Right away I have to state that I am not a video game player. My boyfriend is and I leave the room every time he starts to play. But sometimes he stops me and tells me what his task is in the game. I have been shocked at the different historical aspects that are part os what I call his "blood and guts games". In one such game there is a character that must face Aries, the god of war. I remember the test that I took in high school where I had to memorize the different Roman and Greek gods and now I have no recollection of who they are, but my boyfriend knows them all from his game.

All this to say that I think that video games can and do cover some content areas that have historically been a part of traditional scholarship in an interactive, memorable, and exciting way. My boyfriend's engagement with the material is much greater than mine and his recollection is instantaneous.

Buckingham and Burn, in their article entitled Game Literacy in Theory and in Practice, place additional value on gaming not as a teacher of curricula or to re-engage learners, but as a valuable entity unto itself as a cultural medium. As Buckingham and Burn describe gaming literacy, I am definitely illiterate. I find other ways to play that have not included the video game scene. So I wonder how prevalent gaming literacy is currently and how popular it will become. Is it a valuable literacy to teach in the classroom?