Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education 2 (2) 2011 3 Tim Hopper - University of Victoria, British Columbia game-play in physical education and video games Introduction Have you ever played a game where the rush of the game, the flow of your action and that of your co-players gives you sense of being a part of something more than you, a type of out-of-body experience, a flow with others, the environment and the task intent (Lloyd & Smith, 2010). How do you teach games to get at this sense of connection with a game? In this paper I explore learning to play a game through a complexity lens as a means to get at this sense of learning in game-play. As noted by Hopper and Sanford (2010, p. 122), game-play “refers to an action space, or third space, that is developed by the player, teacher or computer programmer to enable play to happen, a place of uncertainty that is located within the structure of a game.” A central proposition informing the arguments promoted in this paper is that too often in learning to play games in PE we remove the complexity of the game, focusing on motor skills to play the game and that this results in boring lessons, or in novice learners, a feeling of failure. In contrast, successful video games effectively channel this complexity formed in the game-play action space into exciting challenges that enable skill learning to emerge in the game as players experience the flow of the game (Gee, 2007). Game-as-teacher: Modification by adaptation in learning through game-play T his paper will explore how game-play in video games as well as game centered approaches in physical education (PE) such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) can draw on complexity thinking to inform the learning process in physical education. Using the video game concept of game-as-teacher (Gee, 2007), ideas such as enabling constraints from complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006) and information-movement couplings from motor learning (Davids, Button, & Bennett, 2008), learning will be framed as emergent, adaptive and self-organizing. To explain these concepts the following examples will be used (1) an auto-ethnographic narrative of the author’s memories learning to play tennis with his father, (2) an account of a beginner learning to play as an avatar in the video game Guild Wars, and (3) a group of beginners learning to play tennis using a TGfU approach. Drawing on the author’s narratives and the video game concept of game-as-teacher, the paper concludes by emphasizing the principle of modification by adaption as a way to engage players of different abilities to experience worthwhile game-play in PE.