If you have never heard of The Brainy Gamer I highly recommend it.  It’s one of my favorite blogs and is run by Michael Abbott who is both a gamer and a professor at Wabash College, a private mens college in Indiana.  Abbott blogs about the cross-section of video games, academia, culture, and the sciences and has many a time spun my brain to examine the ramifications or exposition of a game in a totally new light.

Most recently, Abbott has posted that he was invited by his college to participate on a committee that would design an “all college course” for incoming freshmen.  They determined they would name the course Enduring Questions and the course description reads like this,

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.

Abbott believed that his position and purpose on the committee was to identify “non-textual” subject matter from movies, music, and art.  And in the process of thinking about this, he asked himself, “What about a game?”  He says that he recalled reading Daniel Johnson’s article on Gamasutra connecting games to Erving Goffman’s work Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In the article, Johnson states that,

…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.

Abbott believed that Portal was a perfect example for the course because, “This tension between backstage machination and onstage performance is precisely what Portal depicts so perfectly – and, no small detail, so interactively.”

So Abbott convinced the committee to add a reading of Presentation of Self in Everday Life followed up by collectively playing Portal to the Wabash College freshman seminar. So there you have it folks.  We’ve gone full circle from your parents telling you not to spend all your time in college playing video games to your college requiring you to play them to graduate.