The emergence of digital media is transformative and disruptive. We must respond to the needs of the nation to engage students around issues of digital literacy. If reading and writing were the focus of 19th-century humanities, digital literacy presents the 21st-century opportunity.
We are challenged to advance the liberal arts at the places it must clearly evolve.—Professor Michael Abbott ’85, professor of theater and founder of BrainyGamer, the highest ranking single-author Web site dedicated to gaming in the world.
Twenty students in Professor Michael Abbott’s course on game design and human values took their final exams public last spring,
hosting more than 100 guests for the inaugural Wabash Game Jam in the Detchon Center’s International Hall.
Featuring original video games designed and built by the students during the 12-week semester, the festival served as a perfect final test of their efforts.
“We just had to have an opening night,” says Abbott, a professor of theater, an actor, and director. He was pleased with the range of games the students designed—from golf and driving simulations to modifications to well-known children’s games to a realistic narrative about the deadly obstacles encountered by those crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.
There was even a race to graduate from Wabash, and an adventure in which players protect the College’s traditions.
Abbott taught the course with former LucasArts and Bethesda Softworks lead programmer Brett Douville.
Douville sees games—and play itself—as often untapped portals into learning.
“Play happens to all of us early in our lives—it’s about learning to survive in the very real world we inhabit,” he says. “Whenever you’re introduced to a new idea and you’re interrogating it, we will say you’re playing with that idea. We drop that language into how we think of things.
“So these guys are used to play.”
Douville and Abbott leveraged that propensity to play to help students think more deeply about games, particularly how they shape the thoughts and emotions of players.
“We don’t want to just turn out consumers of culture,” Abbott says. “In this class we’ve tried to get them to be careful about what they’re playing, to pay attention to what the designers did there.”
“They are already professors of play,” Douville says. “Now they’re students of design.”