I'll be upfront.

I'll be upfront. I"m a skeptic and have never even dabbled in Mindcraft and have never played games or sims of any sort. (And don't own a cellphone, smart or otherwise.) But I'm curious. And willing to keep an open mind. I'm a friend and past colleague of Vance Stevens when we both taught at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. At the time I was interested in CALL. For the past 20 years I've been at a small private university in Japan, but my interests have shifted from CALL to Conversation Analysis and to a lesser degree corpus linguistics and the application and implications thereof to language education. I completed my Ph.D., looking at novice L2 interaction, in 2005.

I do, however, have extensive personal experience with several online "Communities of Practice" and know something of the theory. I know that online communities not only seem real but ARE real. One of my hobbies (obsessions) is building museum scale radio control models of WWI aircraft. It took me three years to complete the last one. I'm an active participant in three different modeling communities (each with its own distinct "culture"). There are many similarities in the ways that Mindcraft users document and describe their inworld creations.