At Indiana's all-boys Wabash College, the critically acclaimed video game Portal will appear alongside The Epic of Gilgamesh, Hamlet, and Aristotle as required material for undergraduate students seeking any degree.

The game will be part of a mandatory Freshman seminar called "Enduring Questions" that will explore "fundamental questions of humanity" through "classical and contemporary works." A theater professor named Michael Abbott is among the faculty members designing the course.

Inspired by a game theory article drawing comparisons between Portal and Erving Goffman's 1959 sociology text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Abbott nominated Portal as one of the works that students would be required to experience and discuss to pass the class.

He demonstrated the game for his non-gaming colleagues and was pleased to find that they appreciated and approved the plan to assign Goffman's text and follow it up with "a collective playthrough of Portal."

The game won't be part of every section of Enduring Questions because of the potential technical challenges of making hundreds of students play a video game the university might not have the hardware for. Abbott and a few of his colleagues are testing Portal out for select classes.

Abbott said he also considered BioShock and Planescape Torment, but went with Portal in part because of its comparatively short play time.

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