Ernest Reid
Staff Writer
More Canadian universities are incorporating video games in their curricula. At Montreal’s Concordia University, students will be studying the science fiction role-playing game Mass Effect in a course on contemporary Canadian fiction in 2011. Since Edmonton-based BioWare developed the complex game in 2007, it technically fulfills all the requirements.
The course director, Darren Wershler, finished his PhD in English here at York University in 2005. He has taught video game studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and was the former senior editor at the famous Coach House Books. He is also a principal researcher for Artmob, an online public archive for Canadian art here at York.
Wershler told the CBC that Mass Effect’s plot offers opportunities to discuss non-linear fiction and branching narratives. Gender issues are also present since players can choose to be male or female and form sexual relationships in-game.
Wershler believes that we should expand our ideas of fiction, and that English departments need to start considering the internet and video games. “To keep pretending that we can leave out of the classroom, I think, is a grave mistake,” Wershler told the CBC. “[Gaming is] not a marginal pursuit anymore. We’ve got to start thinking about games with all the tools of analysis that are available to us.”
Learning about video games is not only happening in post-second- ary schools in Canada. U.S. colleges are adopting video game studies, too. New students at Wabash College will have a little variety in their required readings this year, thanks to the inclusion of hit video game Portal in a mandatory freshman course. They are one of the many schools in North America that are now teaching actual video games in the humanities.
Freshmen at the small American liberal arts college are “reading” the video game alongside the works of Aristotle and Shakespeare in a class dubbed “Enduring Questions.” In designing the course, Abbott wanted students to think about “fundamental questions of humanity” as they appear in mediums, old and new.
The video game Portal was released in 2007 by Valve Software to critical and financial acclaim. In it, players must solve puzzles using the game’s real-world physics.
The player creates portals between two points and bends Newtonian laws of motion to get to the next level, offering a challenging new way to explore a 3D space.
Portal’s unique gameplay is supplemented by some very clever writing and eccentric humour. The game revolves around the player solving problems in a test lab for the enjoyment of an insane artificial intelligence.
In his course, Abbot compares sociology readings against Portal playthroughs. Students examine how private lives relate to public performances using Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The “tension between backstage machination and onstage performance is precisely what Portal depicts so perfectly,” Abbot wrote on his website brainygamer.com
A video game on a university book-list raises many practical questions. How does a student “read” a video game? Are online walkthroughs the same as reading summary sites like SparkNotes? Are cheat codes a breach of academic honesty?
There are also loftier artistic issues – how can we compare the pleasures of Wordsworth to the pleasures of Warcraft? Teaching via video games raises a whole host of dilem- mas, and it won’t be long before we’re confronted by them.
