EXP Podcast #96: Portal Pedagogy

For many folks, September means having to relinquish the last strands of summer and head back to school. However, trading the couch for the classroom doesn’t mean you have to abandon video games. This week, we are pleased to welcome Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer and Wabash College to the show. Michael is in the process of launching “Enduring Questions,” a course “devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community.” In addition to more traditional texts, some sections of the course will have Portal on the syllabus. We were thrilled to learn this and invited Michael to join us in discussing the course, how video games function as academic texts, and the challenges involved in teaching games.

Some discussion starters:

- Have you ever taken any classes in which video games were on the syllabus? What games would work well as teaching tools, and for what subjects?

- Establishing gaming literacy is challenging. How is critical playing best taught? How did you learn to analyze games?

- What kinds of challenges arise from using games in the classroom? How do we overcome things like generational stratification in regards to certain genres or games in general?

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Show notes:

- Run time: 1 hr 2 min 28 sec
- “Portal on the booklist,” by Michael Abbott, via The Brainy Gamer
- “Portal and the Deconstruction of the Institution,” by Daniel Johnson, via Gamasutra
- “In Search of History’s Best Video Games: Canon Fodder, Season 2,” by Stephen Totilo, via Kotaku
- Music provided by Brad Sucks