We are not sure how this will affect the “Are games art?” debate, but gaming has just had a little boost in academic circles with the news that Portal is now on the reading list at a US university. Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana has added Valve’s first-person puzzler to the list of required ‘reading’ materials for first-year students.
Wabash specialises in the liberal arts and Portal finds itself among such titles as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the works of Shakespeare and the poetry of John Donne.
The idea came from Michael Abbott – a teacher at Wabash who also runs a website called Brainy Gamer. Abbott read an interesting article on Portal at Gamasutra that examined the way the game deals with the concept of the self. This tied in with aspects of Abbotts’ course so he thought his students should get to grips with some Aperture Science.
This got us thinking – what other games are worthy academic study? Super Mario might be useful on a Mycology module, Final Fantasy VII might do well on a Classics degree (it is practically Greek Tragedy, after all) and surely any Home Economics GCSE is incomplete without Cooking Mama? Let us know what games you would like to see get the Brodies Notes treatment, in the comments.
