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. If you're curious to know how it happened, read on.
http://www.umfulana.com/forum/member.php?action=profile&uid=1818
http://www.podproducer.net/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=2421
http://www.mysolutionspot.com/ashley56/
http://www.buglabs.net/users/ashley56
http://forums.eyeos.org/index.php?action=profile;u=16720
http://www.la-canada-flintridge-online-community.com/member.php?u=631
http://www.pastapadre.com/forum/member.php?u=5533
Last spring Wabash faculty approved a new all-college course and charged a small committee to design it over the following summer and fall semester. I was elected to the committee as a representative of the Humanities.
We titled the new course "Enduring Questions," and we agreed on this description:
Enduring Questions is a required freshman seminar offered during the spring semester. It is devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community. Each section of the course includes a small group (approximately 15) of students who consider together classic and contemporary works from multiple disciplines. In so doing, students confront what it means to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our world.
The daily activity of the course most often involves discussion, and students complete multiple writing assignments for the course. As such, assessment of student performance emphasizes written and oral expression of ideas.
Students may not withdraw from the course. All students must pass the course to graduate from Wabash.
Our charge from the faculty made it clear that we should apply a broad definition to "readings," and I believe my special purpose on the committee was to help identify films, music, art, and other 'non-textual' sources to challenge our students to think hard about the questions raised in the course.
And so, as you might expect, a little light went off in my head. What about a game? Why not? Which one? Will they bite on this? Who knows? Let's try.
My very first thought was
Portal. Accessible, smart, cross-platform, relatively short, full of big ideas worth exploring. I played it again to be sure my impressions still held. No problem there. If anything, I admire the game more now than when it first appeared. A beautiful design.
I recalled reading Daniel Johnson's
recent essay on the game and its strong connections to Erving Goffman's seminal
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. One of the central questions of our new course, "Who am I?" is the focus of Goffman's study. He contends we strive to control how we're perceived by others, and he uses the metaphor of an actor performing on a stage to illustrate his ideas. Johnson describes it this way:
…we're acting out a role that requires constant management…of the interaction. The front stage is the grounds of the performance. The backstage is a place we rarely ever want to reveal to others, it contains the truth of our obstruction and to reveal it would be to defraud our identity in front of the audience - it simply spoils the illusion of where we're placing ourself in the interaction.
This tension between backstage machination and onstage performance is precisely what
Portal depicts so perfectly - and, no small detail, so interactively. 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.
I pitched the idea to my colleagues on the committee (decidedly
not a collection of gamers), and they agreed to try
Portal and read selections from Goffman's book. After plowing through some installation issues ("What does this Steam do? Will it expose me to viruses?"), we enjoyed the first meaningful discussion about a video game I've ever had with a group of colleagues across disciplines. They got it. They made the connections, and they enjoyed the game. Most importantly, they saw how
Portal could provoke thoughtful reflection and vigorous conversation on questions germain to the course.
And so we're playing
Portal at Wabash College.
Could I have chosen a game to stand by itself, with no accompanying text assignment? Maybe. I thought about
Bioshock. I thought about
Planescape: Torment. In the end, I chose
Portal because I thought it would make a good start. A good first impression. A lead-off hitter, if you will.
Deploying a game for an entire cohort to play at the same time requires more problem-solving than you might expect. We ultimately decided that hardware, installation, and licensing issues were complex enough to dissuade us from teaching
Portal in all sections of the course this year; so I and a group of eager colleagues will play the game in our sections to work out the kinks. I don't want our first college-wide experience with a game to be plagued with problems.
I also need time to help acclimate some of my colleagues to "reading" a modern game. They're less resistant than you might think, but they need more than my speechifying. They need sound pedagogy. They need to taste it for themselves. We'll get there. I'll let you know how it goes.
Add starLikeShareShare with noteEmailKeep unreadNot interestedAdd tags
Aug 20, 2010
JoystiqPortal 2 will triumph on Feb. 9, 2011
- OK, maybe that's not fair, since we don't necessarily know it will triumph when, according to Game Informer, Portal 2 arrives on February 9 next year. But let's say we think there's a strong poss... Aug 20, 2010
YouTubeStinson Beach Bubbles (Canon 550D)
- Bubble-smith Sterling Johnson on Stinson Beach Canon 550D T2i test footage music by incompetech.com stinson beach bubbles canon 550d t2i test footage Aug 20, 2010
Dictionary.com Word of the Dayvellicate: Dictionary.com Word of the Day
- vellicate: to touch (a body part) lightly so as to excite the surface nerves and cause uneasiness, laughter, or spasmodic movements. 6:09 PM
DestructoidMan who played Lineage II for 20,000 hours sues creators
- A man who has been playing Lineage II for over 20,000 hours has decided to sue developer NCSoft for getting him addicted to the game. Craig Smallwood of Hawaii claims that the game p... Aug 20, 2010
The LoopSteve Jobs was right, Flash fails on Android
- Many people have been giving Adobe the equivalent of “put up or shut up,” when it comes to the debate over Flash on a mobile device. The company shipped mobile Flash on Android and the first result... Aug 20, 2010
Frank ChimeroWhat advice would you give to a graphic design student?
- Design does not equal client work. It’s hard to make purple work in a design. The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel. You will get conflicting information. It means that both a... Aug 20, 2010
Scientific AmericanPsychedelic Drugs Show Promise as Anti-Depressants
- Ketamine --a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K--delivers rapid relief to chronicall... Aug 20, 2010
YouTubeThe 200 yard Gong Shot
- Challenge #1: Could David Howell, Paul McGinley, Marcel Siem or Rhys Davies skim a ball 200 yards across a lake and hit a 9 inch gong? Aug 20, 2010
Pitchfork: Latest NewsWeezer Plan Blue LP/Pinkerton Tour
- Photo by Ceilidh Madigan The newly major-label free Weezer have a new album, Hurley (aka the one with the absurd, Lost-referencing album cover), out September 14 via Epitaph. They've got a new sin... Aug 20, 2010
YouTubeBirthday Celebration Fail
- Aug 20, 2010
Motionographer | Motion graphics, design, animation, filmmaking and visual effectsWORDS
- The folks over at Everynone just released a new addition to their series of shorts in collaboration with NPR & WNYC’s Radiolab – an evocative interpretation of communication which explores the ro... Aug 20, 2010
PhoronixGmail Video & Voice Chat Comes To Linux
- For those that enjoy using Gmail for e-mail and chat but have been missing out on the video and voice chat capabilities when using this Google service, there's now official video and voice chat sup... Aug 20, 2010
YouTubeDexter Returns (Season 5 Promo)
- Dexter's carefully constructed world has been turned upside down. Will he be able to pick up all the pieces? Dexter returns September 26th. Aug 20, 2010
BBC News - HomeStudents to study muggles and quidditch
- Students at Durham University are offered a course focusing on the fictional world of Harry Potter. Aug 20, 2010
ArtsJournal: Daily Arts NewsWhy That Girl in the Bar Looks Hotter After You've Had Five Beers
- "Everyone looks better after you've tipped back a pint or two, and now we may know why. It turns out that alcohol dulls our ability to recognize cockeyed, asymmetrical faces, according to researche... 