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. "

Comments

Coordination?

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Coordination?

[cappp]

Yeah requiring manual dexterity introduces some new and interesting challenges. I wonder how they'll ensure every student is able to finish the games, or if that is even important enough to consider. The stats suggest that most of the upcoming generations have access to gaming systems, and play games of one kind or another, so they shouldn't be too out of their element.

As for cultural literacy...perhaps. You're expected to be able to engage with literature, academic text, cinema, the visual; performance; and oral arts, and so on at college - video games are just going to get added to the list. Entertainment has always been political and fundamentally positioned to reflect social and cultural attitudes, the more tools we develop to analyse what play means, the better.

convenient but useless

[Dr. Hellno]

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.