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Portal On the Booklist At Wabash College
jamie passes along this quote from a post by Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer:
"This year, for the first time, a video game will appear on the syllabus of a course required for all students at Wabash College, where I teach. For me — and for a traditional liberal arts college founded in 1832 — this is a big deal. Alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching, freshmen at Wabash will also encounter a video game called Portal. "
Some people have never been exposed to WASD, but everyone knows how to read a book. Will people be expected to game to be culturally literate these days?
I'm not sure if that would be a bad thing, but it would be different.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval for the Commodore Amiga, right?
So not quite as advertised, but certainly pretty cool nonetheless.
Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record, followed by death.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Buying into how absurd this is since Portal isn't a book, I guess Cliff's Notes should publish a Youtube runthrough of the game with annotations.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I'm making a note here.
HUGE SUCCESS!
if they thought a bit they could have had Steam set them up with a local server and a bunch of free keys for Portal
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
And like the overused first post meme, so too will the professors leave this by the wayside after 30 papers entitled "The Cake is a Lie!" come across their desks.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
I bet that course is a total piece of cake
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Portal is not only proprietary, but requires a proprietary OS. I know schools also often require proprietary academic software, but it strikes me as even more wrong to mandate non-free software for a mere game.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I like the idea of having a game on the syllabus, definitely very forward thinking. My problem is with the choice of game.
Portal was short, and as the author states it's multi-platform and fairly cheap, which goes a long way toward making this kind of project feasible. But reading portal as a game of ideas is a real stretch. The comparison to Goffman's Presentation of Self is baffling when the game allows no genuine self-expression (it's completely linear) or self-portrayal (no dialogue options), the subjects of Goffman's book. It's a fun game with a single intriguing character, but it's as deep as a kiddie pool.
It would have made a lot more sense to start with interactive fiction- essentially, text-adventure games. IFArchive.org is a great place to start, and in no time you can find lots of innovative contest winners and other pieces expanding the genre. These are easy to play on any computer, they are of variable length and complexity, and they allow for an easier transition for students- the tools they use to analyze literature will be largely applicable.
All in all, this is a cool effort. But look into interactive fiction! It might surprise you how well the genre is suited to your project.
Any other candidates for a course like this? I thought Braid had some pretty deep storytelling.
Oxford: AD1610:
"In addition to ye Greeke and Latin Classics and learned tomes of divinity and medicine, freshmen shall this year encounter Hamlet the work of a vulgar modern playwrite..."
Well I hope they lvl up the students before letting them encounter Gilgamesh (http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Gilgamesh).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...today's sign of the apocalypse.
How will they deal with students who have physical disabilities? I'm thinking oh, paralysis, cerebral palsy, or anything else that leaves manual dexterity impaired. Or what about visually impaired or blind students? Remember this is a required course for all incoming students. Sounds like a half-baked idea from this distance, and yes, I did read the article.
Let's hope Wabash doesn't get into a heapload of trouble for not complying with the ADA, like losing any Federal grants they might have.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
.... Do you get a party followed by cake?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
If this class is meant to "[engage] students with fundamental questions of humanity" and completely skips over the realm of science, that is a huge blunder. You can't have a full picture of what it is to be human without the insight that science brings.
This would have been a great class to introduce students into an appreciation of science, particularly since most students will never get that out of "normal" science studies. Should have had them read Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, then check out Symphony of Science. Shame.
the other 2 games are windows only now what if steam get port blocked?
Don't think that that will not happen.
There was this one college that blocked gameing web site and they had a game coding courses at the same college.
Now you're thinking with Wabash!
If you go with the "You can't require any non-proprietary software," attitude you'll find you don't go very far. In the business world this is particularly true, they'll tell you precisely what you are going to use and you'll do so or get out. However university is the same way. I work at an engineering college they teach students on what is used in industry. Students use Cadence, Matlab, Solidworks, Office, and so on. We have labs, of course, since much of that software isn't licensed for use on non-university equipment. However you WILL use it to do your homework or you WILL fail. That is life. We aren't interested in philosophical debates about if information wants to be free, we are interested in teaching the tools companies want to help students get jobs.
Now I understand Portal is rather stupid as part of a curriculum, the whole thing sounds like what happens when you get a bunch of English majors together and they start overanalyzing everything. However it being proprietary is not a problem, not unusual.
If you go to university they will tell you what you have to get, and it often requires spending hundreds of dollars on particular books, using certain software packages and OSes and so on. That is life. You do what you like at home on your own time, but you don't get to tell your professor how to teach class, or your boss how to run a business.
I could think of many better games for discussing existentialist philosophy. But as a physics professor, I've toyed with the idea of using Portal to discuss conservation laws in Intro Physics. For instance:
Which of the following physical quantities are conserved by an object passing through a portal?
Speed
Momentum
Kinetic Energy
Total Energy
ENGL 407 Studies In 20th Century Lit: Hypertexts and New Media
In a class last semester, everything from Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley & Herself to Interactive Fiction, like Nick Montfort's Winchester's Nightmare were part of our syllabus. I think the only two things purchased for the class were PG and Moulthrop's Victory Garden ~$20. The rest of our reading was all available free online.
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
This one time at band camp....
The first game to be included in an academic curriculum should've been Deus Ex. I'm disappointed with you, America. :|
... with all this taxpayers money we have develope a fully functional full duplex barn-computer interface.
With this technology no children will be left behind, followed by brain control.
due to food allergies we can't have cake
We aren't interested in philosophical debates about if information wants to be free, we are interested in teaching the tools companies want to help students get jobs.
Yeah, Education for the Future!
Actually, real colleges are EXACTLY the place where you want to have philosophical debates about EVERYTHING so you don't become one of those idiots who think the University system exists to service Industry instead of building developed minds capable of critical thinking...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Many non-gamers get motion sick when playing an FPS, especially Portal. This sounds like a bad idea.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
you insensitive clod
I use Dvorak, you insensitive clod!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
These days, thanks to the prevalence of video sharing services, there are quite a few playthroughs readily available for pretty much every popular game. This gives the option of experiencing the game in a non-interactive fashion. Yes, the interactive feel is lost, but it seems that watching a playthrough would be a reasonable alternative if for some reason the student is unable to actually play the game.
Ok, I'm an alum from the early 90's. First you idiots cheapen the Wabash experience by dumping C&T (definition: C&T was Cultures and Traditions a campus wide class in which all sophomores suffered equally regardless of major; C&T was where many a good and a few great lawyers learned to argue a point.) Next you upgrade the freshman replacement class with a game an consider it innovative; it smacks of intellectual laziness. Sad to say, but now I have to seriously consider asking my two boys to skip over Dear Old Wabash in a few years. Time for a TWR. The irony abounds; the captcha for this is bachelor!
American Universities. Daycare for young "adults". Confirmed once again.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
I won't name my employer, for various reasons, but it is a Tier 1 research institution. We bring in some big research dollars and we grant PhDs. A diploma mill this is not.
If you want to have philosophical debates that's fine, then go take some philosophy courses, we have a pretty good philosophy department too. Though I'll warn you even there as an undergrad you are expected to learn what they choose to teach you. You will be reading philosophers who's opinions you don't agree with and if all you do is argue, your grades will be poor. You aren't expected to agree, but you are expected to understand and analyze their point of view, something that many who claim to want a "philosophical debate" seem to be bad at.
However the engineering college is for training engineers. In particular, undergraduate work is largely based around getting people jobs. Most people only come for undergraduate degrees and they want to be employable. That means teaching them the theory of whatever kind of engineering they've chosen, and teaching them skills on the tools they'll use in the real world. If you don't like it, well then too bad.
You want more self directed research? Fine, come get a masters degree and then a PhD. Then you get the freedom to work more on what you are interested in, then you get more choice in the tools you use. However undergraduate degrees are for laying basic theoretical groundwork. To do that you are going to have to use tools. You cannot teach someone how to use an oscilloscope without actually giving them one to use. You can't teach how to so a Spice circuit simulation without actually running simulation software. We choose to use the tools that industry wants. Why? Because it helps our students get jobs and that's what most of them are there for.
If you want a liberal arts degree, fine get one. The university offers a great many. However don't try and demand that all program should be that way. Some are very practical in their orientation of teaching, and research. Those are also some of the large ones. It brings in the big research dollars, and many people want to leave university with a degree with practical applications. Philosophy is fine but don't expect it to help you get a job, you'll need skills outside of that. Engineering will go a long way to getting you employed in the same field.
Oh and PS, I DID do liberal arts in university (an interdisciplinary degree in cognitive science) I'm just very aware of how useless that is. My skills, and work history, in computer support got me my job here, not what I learned in university. It was interesting and I don't regret it at all, but then I didn't need training for my career, I had it already.
WTF. You're supposed to be off to an engineering college getting ready to become the next batch of engineers and scientists. Also, it won't matter that you can't pick up chicks because there won't be very many of them in your classes. The ones that are will look like ugly guys.
For one I don't go to a university, I work at one. For two if you think that any place that dares actually use real tools to teach must not be a "real" university then it speaks extremely poorly to the quality of your education.
Let's try it with computer science since so many people here are (or at least think they are) programmers:
So you go to get a CS undergrad degree. This is going to involve learning fundamental computer and computer programming theories. The idea is to teach you how a computer works, and how to communicate ideas to that computer to make it do new things. Well to do this, you are going to need to actually, you know, program. You will not gain a solid understanding just through listening to lectures. You'll have to actually try programming a computer, see how programs work, make mistakes and correct them, learn how coding is done. So, how should the school teach it?
1) Using actual, real, computers and programming languages used out in industry. Have you write programs for Intel/AMD computers and use C++, C#, Java, Python, and so on. Basically, use tools that you'll actually use while teaching you the theory so you learn not only a useful theory, but useful practical knowledge as well.
2) Using artificial, "for education only" stuff. Create their own computer architecture that you run in an emulator, and create languages that are not actually used outside of the environment. Teach you the theory in an isolated setting, without real application. Have the tools you learn be useless outside the walls of the university.
Me? I vote #1. Much better to learn on tools that people will ask you to use than to learn on than to learn on something that isn't useful to your future.
If you want to insist that everything in an academic environment should be done free of commercial context for some ideological reasons, well go ahead, but don't expect my support.
I won't name my employer, for various reasons, but it is a Tier 1 research institution. We bring in some big research dollars and we grant PhDs. A diploma mill this is not.
...
However the engineering college is for training engineers. In particular, undergraduate work is largely based around getting people jobs. Most people only come for undergraduate degrees and they want to be employable. That means teaching them the theory of whatever kind of engineering they've chosen, and teaching them skills on the tools they'll use in the real world. If you don't like it, well then too bad.
At Cambridge University Engineering Department, which is probably a Tier 0 research institution, almost all teaching is carried out on OpenSuSE workstations; the mandatory programming labs are taught using Emacs/GCC and Octave, rather than Visual Studio and MATLAB; and coursework is accepted on paper (I wrote much of mine longhand) or in PDF format, and LaTeX is encouraged. They even used to hand out live DVDs with the department's standard Linux setup on them, but that seems to have stopped nowadays.
This seems to have no impact whatsoever on the ability of graduates to find jobs. My hypothesis is that because the course focuses on teaching people to think, to solve problems, and a large amount of theory, it really doesn't matter what piece of software is eventually used to generate or present the results.
Pirate Party UK
When I went to Bluffton College for undergrad, our Humanities I teacher let us play Civilization III for assignment credit. The game was on reserve at the campus library for students to check out! I for one welcome our new video game homework overlords. :-)
I agree completely with your post except for one thing - I don't think watching a recorded demo would be the same as actually playing it. This is a game that I think was meant to be played by yourself, in one sitting (it only takes a couple hours as I recall).
As you note, there are emotional and philosophical elements that are very important to the "experience". The power of these, though, comes from you "being" the character, not from watching the character. It's so interesting because you can definitely evoke these same thoughts in something passive like a movie, but not in the same way - and I don't think you can evoke emotional attachment to the companion cube by watching someone else becoming attached to it.
On the other hand, the power of the game doesn't really come from the puzzles and game mechanics (for the most part - it definitely contributes, and it being something completely new means the process of discovering how it works is very satisfying). You wouldn't have a course just on the game mechanics (although now that I say that I'm sure you could find examples of courses on e.g. Tetris). So if a student really couldn't figure out how to play - and I definitely know people who no matter how much practice are just terrible at games - they could watch a demo recording so at least they could try to participate in the class discussion.
However, it would be like trying to discuss a book in the class after only having seen the movie.
From the article "I thought about Bioshock". Would you kindly explain why it wasn't chosen?
What is this mysterious portal thing? A quick "apt-cache search portal" doesn't reveal much of interest besides:
dotlrn - e-learning portal system based on OpenACS
liblemonldap-ng-portal-perl - Lemonldap::NG authentication portal part
My wife really wanted to play American McGee's Alice, but I ended up playing for her while she watched and told me what to do because she couldn't really watch the screen close up for any length of time. Even so it ended up being one of he favorite games, but she likes the weird creepy stuff.
It's also academics, geeks, skilled computer users, video gamers, social scientists, and many others.
Get over yourself, go find some newer engineering trade rag and rant forum where you can have a circle-jerk with the rest of your anti-social, depressed, misanthropic engineering and information technology buddies, if you can't handle the fucking idea that this is not your personal holy ground and anyone can read the articles and comment on them. Seriously, you people piss me off, get lost.