Portal on the reading list at Wabash College

If you come here often, you know how I feel about Portal. Basically, I’m pretty sure watching my first child’s first steps will pale in comparison to playing Valve’s masterpiece from beginning to end for the first time. Sorry, future Greenhough Jr.

And now, I need to enrol in college again. Why? Because Portal just became required ‘reading’ for all students at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Excellent!

Is this the first time a videogame has made the book list at a higher education facility? Possibly! Either way, as a famously brainy game, Portal is a great choice. Other games that were considered for the course included Planescape: Torment and BioShock.

Portal’s inclusion is all thanks to lecturer Michael Abbott, who also edits The Brainy Gamer. Abbott says Portal will be a “core text” of a new course called “Enduring Questions”. This is a required course, so all students at the college will have to take it.

Apparently, Enduring Questions 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 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.”

[Via The Brainy Gamer]