Based on insights from previous research, Chapter 4 introduces the language and complex interactional structure of video game interaction, including both online and offline elements. While the chapter identifies multiple combinations and configurations of gaming interaction which are available to children, most research studies are focused on co-located collaborative gaming, where children game side by side rather than at a distance. The chapter develops an analytical framework based on conversation analysis principles, which is applicable to most games, and which is the basis for analysis of Minecraft text chat in Chapter 5. This framework considers interactivity as a social rather than technical accomplishment, to assess videogames’ potential to promote children’s learning through interaction. This chapter includes an analysis of the language used when co-present gamers play face-to-face, which reveals that despite its interactional complexity, gaming language is often linguistically limited, as imperative forms, instructions, exclamations and interjections constitute most of the language used by gamers. This language may however be valuable to children for game-related problem solving and relationship building. It is also an opportunity for authentic language practice on specific language learning objectives where gamers are using a second language.

Videogames once seemed like they would have a part to play in the future of the book – the natural evolution of literary practice onto more expressly interactive digital platforms. Today, despite numerous compelling examples of videogames that support literary engagement, the comparison can seem strange, clichéd, banal, and beside the point. This chapter attempts to reset the comparison of videogames and literature for the present moment of digital culture. First, it presents a brief history of critical perspectives on videogames as literature. Second, it reflects on the contemporary status of and challenges to videogaming’s literary aspirations following recent shifts in the industry’s design priorities and monetization practices. This chapter does not present an argument regarding the status of games as literature. Rather, its goal is to describe the urgent work of literary studies in continuing to rethink digital gaming in the unfolding digital age.

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”

This conceptual piece attempts to evaluate the rising disruptions of students’ social networks due to the digital explosion and massification of education. Digitalised education has made impacts in terms of universalising and internationalising education, but there are corresponding disruptions in students’ social network system. It is perhaps safe to state that students’ social network is about to be exterminated. Thus, this effort is a holistic view of students’ network activities that can enhance interactivity, bonding, and attachment to promote multicultural and intercultural competencies. Education is only holistic when it stimulates the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains proportionately. Pathetically, technologisation and digitalisation threaten the existence of holistic education and make it a remnant of the past if scholarship discourse fails to address the challenge now. Hence, this endeavour recommends the inclusion of activities that can constantly bring digital students together from time to time to create room for interaction and socialisation.

Chapter 9 focuses on paratext from the eighteenth century to Victorian novels, highlighting the revival of omniscience in twenty-first-century storytelling before taking a technological leap to hypertext. Building on theories put forward by specialists of the field, it shows to what extent the notion of ‘interactivity’ and the reader’s higher implication in the creative process in digital fiction as opposed to print fiction need to be narratologically and pragmatically qualified. As the reader is strongly invited to (virtually) perform the action mentioned in the hyperlink by clicking on it if the story is to go on at all, the reference model (of Chapter 1) is tested and adapted to foreground the limits but also the potentialities of digital art. In response to Warhol’s distinction (1986, 1989, 1995) between ‘engaging’ and ‘distancing’ narrators, Chapter 9 also proposes a new model of implication in fiction, taking the perspective of actual readers. Given their degree of engagement and immersion in the narrative addressed to ‘you’, distinctions between ‘engaged’, ‘distanced’ and ‘immersed’ readers are suggested in a flexible model allowing for intermediate positioning.