This was a fun little riff on the tower defense genre. I remember hearing a lot about Plants Vs. Zombies, probably because (As outlined in the links in Andrew's post) of its meteoric explosion in popularity across a panoply of consoles.
The first time I played it, actually, was for about 5 minutes at the Apple store. A friend wanted to go check out the iPads (Which had just come out), so we went down there and I ended up playing Plants vs Zombies on one of them for most of the time we were there.
I'm going to kind of echo the sentiments of Derreck and some of the other posters here that I'm not entirely sure that this fits into the networked gaming category; at least, it doesn't fit in the traditional sense. For my practicum project I was reading about the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology (which I will get into more during my presentation tomorrow), and its seems to me that the immense popularity of Plants vs Zombies is most appealing to the "Socializer" gamer subtype. Though the game does not have inter-player communication built in, it's so popular that it's fairly certain you could talk about this game with other people in an offline setting (A sort of external motivation for playing single player games typically attributed to the "Socializer")
With the exception of identity, Plants vs Zombies also follows a lot of the "fun-learning" benefits outlined in the Gee reading, particularly because it's very simple in design (low barrier to entry), but becomes increasingly difficult (Rewarding learning and problem-solving skills on the fly). I haven't unlocked the survival/puzzle modes, but I assume these extend this trend.
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