Games No Longer Too Cool for School, Portal Becomes Required “Reading” at a College

Posted 08/26/2010 at 3:59pm | by Nathan Grayson

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Have you ever heard of some awesome class about Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or why Lord of the Rings is totally better than Harry Potter, so suck it, losers, and thought, “Man, I sure went to the wrong college”? Well, you're not alone. Because unless you count yourself among Wabash College's proud few, odds are, making GlaDOS eat her hilarious words isn't doing your GPA any favors.

“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,” wrote professor Michael Abbott, who you may recognize as creator of the fantastic Brainy Gamer blog.

The course, titled “Enduring Questions,” is one of a few freshman seminars required for all freshmen. Its main focus is on the nature of humanity as depicted by a number of “classic and contemporary works from multiple disciplines.” And so, what better work for brainy college students than one of gaming's greatest brain-benders?

“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,” Abbott wrote.

So, best college course ever or greatest college course ever? Now then, if only we could get our “Crowbar Physics Taught by That LHC Guy Who Looks Kinda Like Gordon Freeman” class off the ground. The practical applications are – as you'd expect – innumerable.