Just now, on Kotaku, someone commented on an article reporting that the popular puzzle game Portal will be "taught" at Wabash College. More accurately, it will be part of a new curriculum "engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community." The commenter was using an Internet meme to joke about Portal being "art". Not being familar with the meme, I had to add my academic background to the discussion.

Video games as art is another debate saved for the likes of Roger Ebert. What matters in this context is that Portal is a literary text. If you don't understand what I mean by that, but want to, I suggest reading Jacques Derrida, who argued that "everything is a text". While the playing mechanic of Portal isn't too valuable in this scope, the story, thus GLaDOS, is very valuable in a discussion of ontology.

Of course, someone had to go and ask what values Portal could have in an academic context. While I should have been doing real work, I came up with this ten-piece nugget set that explains how the game can be analyzed in a literary and philosophical context.

The ramifications of the:
1) First person narrative...
2) ... silent protagonist, who...
3)... through the efforts for self preservation (at any cost)...
4)... effect the stages of grief in...
5)... an artificial intelligence, who...
6)... resents humanity for giving it life and trying to extinguish it, by...
7)... forcefully placing the protagonist in a survival environment, in which...
8)... the environment (or reality) must be altered to fit one's needs, and...
9)... the artificial must be sacrificed for the real (person) to survive, all under the pretense...
10)... that there will be cake. Which is a lie. 

What I love about this news is that videogame blogger Michael Abbott, who was chosen to join the committee for designing the curriculum, was reminded of an article on Gamasutra and thought to include Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life into the reading list. He's not just making students play a game because it's a head scratcher. He's integrated an interactive, non-literary material into a course that is based around reading books from guys who've long been dead. Students need the material to be accessible to them or at least have the instructor go out of their way to bridge the gap between the students and the material. It took me three attempts at a rhetorical studies class before I passed, all because of a grad student (who shall not be named) integrated The Matrix into the material. I get The Matrix. And I can identify tropes and other values when assisted. Once I've digested that, the academic studies and essays become so much clearer when I was guided across gap instead of thrown over it.

Your homework: Play Portal. You don't have to beat it; you just have to think about it. Then talk about it.

Source: The Brainy Gamer via Kotaku