This video is one of several on YouTube that depicts a Simmer engaging in Yamx's challenge; notably, this is the result of contact with commenters who requested the poster attempt the challenge (00:44-00:58).

This video describes some challenges created through incorporating contact with other movies and television shows into the system of ideas.

In this video, the Simmer provides suggestions for those who feel bored with their gameplay. He recommends watching other Simmers' gameplay, including challenges, to give inspiration (06:16-06:58). This example directly identifies one of the ways in which Simmers utilize the system of ideas through challenges.

Confluence of Knowledge:

Influential Simmers work to position their content in relation to the System of Ideas through both drawing from shared understandings and contributing new knowledge to that shared understanding.

As players gain more familiarity with the game and the community, interacting and coming into contact with other players and other negotiated texts that those players have made, their ability to compose something more complex, impactful, and mindfully situated within their contemporary ecological moment develops.

In these cases, content creators may gain a larger following, which provides them with more power to influence the system of ideas. Margaret Syverson speaks of this process in her proposed ecological framework, The Wealth of Reality. She says these people in power "emerge as influential: the texts they produce not only provoke attention or interest among readers but generate a kind of following. Writers respond to new texts that reflect the influence; and when a certain threshold is passed, a literary movement, a genre, or a style develops genuine force and momentum" (Syverson 10). Here, Syverson discusses a practice that many composers seek to emulate but few truly accomplish. Essential to the construction of this influence is the shared understanding and system of making meaning between writer and their peers.

Hayes and Gee have tracked how influential meanings, ideas, and texts have emerged out of contact between a Simmer, the game's engine, a book, and other Simmers. In "A Game Literacy Practice," Hayes and Gee present a case study on a Simmer named Yamx who composes and moderates a challenge for other players. Challenges are a type of text and a common means of making meaning within the Simming ecology. In these situations, content creators issue one or more goals along with a set of rules for players to structure gameplay and produce a particular sort of play experience that may value competition, aesthetic or narrative creativity, boundary testing, or more (for video examples, see the side bar). Challenges provide noteworthy examples because they rely on the ecology's shared system of ideas to produce meaning from shared experience and understanding. In both pieces, Hayes and Gee track Yamx to examine how she develops and mediates content that other users can experience and reproduce. Yamx draws from multiple realms of experience to create a "challenge" to modify her gameplay and the play of others (Hayes and Gee 70). In Yamx's composition, she challenges her fellow Simmers to recreate the experience detailed in a book about living as a low-income, single mother.

Yamx's ideas are shaped by her familiarity with multiple texts. She draws from her contact with another text to shape her initial idea for the challenge: "This challenge was inspired by, and is named for, the book Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich...The idea is to mimic, as closely as possible, the life of an unskilled single mother trying to make ends meet for herself and her kids" (Hayes and Gee 70). Hayes and Gee claim that remediating a text into a simulation game is "a particularly innovative type of design knowledge, the ability to hybridize, or draw from multiple genres to create a new form of meaning-making" (72). While their analysis is correct, when considering the system of ideas, Yamx isn't just drawing from different genres of content; she's combining and negotiating experiences of contact to create new meaning. The knowledge created and shared in this challenge is informed by Yamx's familiarity with Ehrenreich's book, the game's engine, and conversations with other Simmers. The process allows her to shape the challenge rules in a way that constructs new significance for specific, otherwise nonsensical boundaries (such as her rule about not selling the genie lamp, for which the article is named) to adequately recreate the theme depicted in the book.

A key acknowledgment I'd like to add to this system is the following: successful content creators work to position their content in relation to the system of ideas by drawing from and contributing to it. This knowledge is a result of contact with that system and their lived experiences. In theory, this enables each content creator to incorporate their unique perspective and identity into their work while fostering an environment in which they can emerge as influential. However, this is not always the case. That being said, Cooper's model provides us with a way to track this negotiation: "An ecological model of composition lets us have it both ways; it encourages us to pay attention to both the individual and social aspects of authorship and, perhaps more importantly, to the interactions between them" (Turk 5.1) The interplay between individual and social as weights at the end of a composing scale determines the amount of personal narrative and external influences that Simmers bring to their composing processes; if the incorporation of the personal or individual off-weighs the perceived balance of the "social" or communal value, Simmers may receive resistance or lack of response.