College Professor Requires Students to Study Portal
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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The award for best teacher ever has just been awardedTerrorist_school_drop-out said:
My faith in humanity is now over 9000. This is the most forward thinking genius i have ever seen in the education system. Hazar! Enter the glorious new age of appreciation of games.
If I were a professor I'd put Ghosts n Goblins on my required reading list. And the students would have to BEAT IT. HAHA!
I'm honestly not sure why some people are so concerned that potentially having to play through Portal with a more academic focus is a bad thing. In my school experience, I found that sort of focus actually made me love something I already loved even more. For example, I had to closely examine various works of Shakespeare in several different media forms (notably Hamlet). Rather than burning me out on Hamlet, I found myself enjoying it on an even deeper level than I had after simply seeing a single performance of it. The same thing happened with 1984, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Romeo and Juliet, etc.
This is brilliant.
We here know that video games are a developing medium of art. Almost all art, Shakespeare, Orwell, Van Gogh, Kubrick, Mozart, and the like, are developed as a means to entertain and emotionally enrich. They serve no practical purpose, yet we are required to study them. Ergo, adding in the works of Valve, Team Ico, or Tim Schafer is no different.
If a person doesn't play video games, and is required to play Portal, it is no different than a person who doesn't often read being required to read Hamlet, or a person who rarely listens to music being required to analyze Bach. Learning the controls and solving the puzzles and learning to appreciate them is the same type of difficulty as learning to fully understand Shakespeare's writings. Once you've gained to ability to understand it, you start to appreciate its beauty. It helps that Portal is filled to the brim with artistic merit, is short, is cheap, and isn't very hard. A newbie getting into Portal will be the same as someone reading 1984. I'm not saying that Portal and 1984 have the same merit artistically, but that's because writing has had millenia to develop while video games are just getting started.
This is wonderful, and I applaud you. Not because "I wish I had a teacher who'd give me video games as homework" but because you're bringing new people into appreciating the brilliance of the art of a new medium.
We here know that video games are a developing medium of art. Almost all art, Shakespeare, Orwell, Van Gogh, Kubrick, Mozart, and the like, are developed as a means to entertain and emotionally enrich. They serve no practical purpose, yet we are required to study them. Ergo, adding in the works of Valve, Team Ico, or Tim Schafer is no different.
If a person doesn't play video games, and is required to play Portal, it is no different than a person who doesn't often read being required to read Hamlet, or a person who rarely listens to music being required to analyze Bach. Learning the controls and solving the puzzles and learning to appreciate them is the same type of difficulty as learning to fully understand Shakespeare's writings. Once you've gained to ability to understand it, you start to appreciate its beauty. It helps that Portal is filled to the brim with artistic merit, is short, is cheap, and isn't very hard. A newbie getting into Portal will be the same as someone reading 1984. I'm not saying that Portal and 1984 have the same merit artistically, but that's because writing has had millenia to develop while video games are just getting started.
This is wonderful, and I applaud you. Not because "I wish I had a teacher who'd give me video games as homework" but because you're bringing new people into appreciating the brilliance of the art of a new medium.
I question the value of using Portal as an example. Playing games can be integrated into learning (Isn't that what game theory is about?) but I think using portal is a bit of a stretch.
*Rolls on the ground laughing*
The awesomeness has me laughing so much that I can't write a proper comment. Now if you would excuse me.
*Continues aforementioned action*
The awesomeness has me laughing so much that I can't write a proper comment. Now if you would excuse me.
*Continues aforementioned action*
