We’re more than one week into the semester and already knee-deep in required reading. Not exactly exciting, right?
Well, it could be.
During a normal semester, students at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., will read Gilgamesh. They’ll read Hamlet and the poetry of John Donne. Soon, they’ll be playing the acclaimed 2007 video game Portal.
Michael Abbott, a theater professor at Wabash, found himself on a faculty panel designing a new required course at the school, and he posted about it on his blog, The Brainy Gamer.
In the required freshman seminar called Enduring Questions, Abbott said, “Students confront what it means to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships and our world.”
So how does a video game land on a reading list? And why does Portal work?
First, let’s get up to speed on Portal.
Players control Chell, the human lab rat in a research facility. Instructed by an artificial intelligence called GlaDOS, Chell learns to use the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device — the portal gun, as I like to call it — to solve puzzles that require creating “portals,” or connections between different parts of the level. Walk through one and come out of the other.
It seems simple, but it quickly becomes complex. The puzzles get harder, and GlaDOS has motives that are slowly revealed.
Besides the fact Portal is fairly short (about four hours long) and its concept is straightforward, Abbott wrote that Portal has strong connections with Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It asks questions such as “Who am I?” and describes how actions affect perception by others — very much like the Chell-GlaDOS relationship.
“Goffman would have found a perfect test subject in GLaDOS. Bingo! Assign students Goffman’s Presentation of Self and follow it up with a collective playthrough of Portal,” Abbott wrote.
Abbott isn’t the only one thinking this way. Nathaniel Poling, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review about his new course, 21st Century Skills in Starcraft, which uses the real-time strategy game to supplement teaching about “managing a lot of different units and groups of different capacities.”
“It’s not a stretch to think of that in the business world or in the work of a health-care administrator,” Poling said.
Imagine a philosophy class where you read a book such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and follow it up by taking a week to play BioShock, which explores the ideas of a failed utopia based in collectivism.
How about an English class in which you discuss the concept of an unreliable narrator and then try out Heavy Rain in class? Four player-controlled characters attempt to solve the mystery of a serial killer, and each has his or her own motives that twist the story.
There’s more where that came from: Bayonetta and religion. Dante’s Inferno and classic literature. Animal Crossing and communication.
There are a few roadblocks: Professors have to want to incorporate games. We need open-minded educators to push this through. Schools need the hardware to offer this experience to students, and that can cost quite a bit of money. There are also issues Abbott mentioned, such as licensing problems and teaching faculty to understand the games.
Students would also have to want to engage in this for it to be successful. Contrary to popular belief, not every college student is a gamer.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that video games are an interactive medium that, when used properly, could be an engaging supplement to learning from books. A hands-on approach could spur in-class discussion.
We are a generation that latches on to new media, and games could have a place in academia with the right resources and preparation.
Oh, and no cheat codes. Those might break the Code of Academic Integrity.
