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GENERAL NEWS
25
Aug
5
Sony, Xbox, Other

Playing Portal Will Now Be Mandatory at Wabash College

RSS by Evan Elden Eller on 25 August 2010, 848 views
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Excited about Portal 2, are you?  Yeah, it's looking pretty neat.  But some of us are STILL excited about the original Portal.  In fact, some of us are so excited we can't shut up about it until everybody else has played it.  And while Portal fans can't control the universe, some of us can control college curriculums.  For the first time, it is going to be required "reading" for all incoming freshmen at Wabash College, a small, private, all male liberal-arts university in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

This is part of a new class required of all freshmen, who must pass it to graduate.  It's not part of some sort of gaming-specific elective; Portal is now part of their general education.  The course is titled "Enduring Questions," and the course description explains that small groups of students shall "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."


This means the text "the cake is a lie" will now be taught alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching.  Michael Abbot, the professor at Wabash College who came up with this crazy idea, explains it all in more detail on his blog, The Brainy Gamer.  He discusses how he came up with the idea to use a game for this course, the reason he chose Portal, how he convinced the rest of the faculty to go along with it, and why they'll specifically be focusing on the "performance" of the character GLaDOS.

Personally, if I was teaching a class about Portal, it would have to be a philosophy course about the existentialist issues regarding trust, companions, and cake.  But I support all efforts to use interactive art for science education.

Source: The Brainy Gamer

Tags Portal

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5 Comments

The Ghost of RubangB
The Ghost of RubangB (on 25 August 2010)

@maximus22, It only takes about 2 hours to beat Portal, maybe 3 or 4 if you're not used to maneuvering a character in a 3-D space while jumping and aiming.

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maximus22
maximus22 (on 25 August 2010)

Why stop there? Bioshock would fit great in any sociology, psychology or political study.

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Machina
Machina (on 25 August 2010)

Lucky them!

<3 Portal

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sirroman
sirroman (on 25 August 2010)

Heck, I really have to play this thing.

Ps.: No, i'm not going to this College.

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_mevildan
_mevildan (on 25 August 2010)

Portal must surely be one of the most overloved games of all time. Baffles me.

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