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Why Is Portal Taught In College?
We played our fair share of video games during our college career, but we never received college credit for them. We must have gone to the wrong college, because students who took the class "Enduring Questions" at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana got to play through Valve’s puzzle masterpiece Portal this last year.
Professor Michael Abbott had a vision to include more video games in college coursework and spearheaded the charge to include Portal in his syllabus for this last spring semester’s introductory freshman class. The class reaction varied from enthusiastic, to introspective, to wanting portal guns to be more destructive.
Could Valve’s recent release, Portal 2, be on the required reading list for next year? “In Portal, there's enough ambiguity about it, [that] it's primitive compared to the second game in a kind of beautiful way,” says Abbott. “There's enough left to your imagination that, I think, it makes [Portal] a bit more fun to use as a teaching tool."
Giant Bomb interviewed Abbott for, what turned out to be, a fascinating article. Check it out here.
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