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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!
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.
I myself have gotten it working under Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04 with minimal hassle. Worked straight out of the box aside from sound, but I honestly just experimented with audio output selections in Wine config for a few minutes, and it worked after that. Performance was comparable to that on my Windows machine, to boot. And I'm confident that any students using Linux on their school laptop are comfortable enough with it to figure out most issues they may come across.
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.
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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.
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