While I played Portal as my single player game, after completing it I wanted to better explore what the online community has created for the game. While playing the game, I was hesitant to check any site that may give me a leg up on the game as I wanted to freshly experience it. But James Paul Gee made me think differently about that strategy:
Now having further explained to me the positive use cases for things such as walkthroughs and blogs, I sought out to see what was available:
For most games, publishers offer highly colorful abad detailed strategy guides that tell players all about the game (its characters, maps, and geography of the world, weapons, enemies, objects to be found, fruitful strategies to follow, etc.). Such guides also give a complete walkthrough for the game. A number of Internet sites offer (usually free) a variety of different walkthroughs (“faqs”) written by players themselves. These sites also offer hints from players and “cheats” for the game.
These texts are all integrated into the appreciative systems associated with the affinity groups connected to video games. Different players and groups have different views about whether, when, and how to use these texts.
– James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
- Teach with Portals – This is one of the first places I landed as its linked from the Portal Wikipedia article, and WOW, what a bullseye. This is a website that is dedicated to showing you how you can integrate Portal 1/2 into the classroom. It actually has a Lesson Plan page that shows you activities you can integrate by subject. I mostly thought of Portal as a “physics” project, it has lessons for math, game design, and language arts as well. For example, one lesson is that students use the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker to create a Rube Goldberg machine.
- Portal Official Forum – This is forum on Steam. The Portal 1 forum has 40,000+ posts and Portal 2 is 330,000+. There are some threads that have half a million views which just seems absurd, but my guess in Puzzle Maker has really added an extra social component to the game. Who would make new levels and not share them?
- Portal Prelude – This is a game create, no lie, by a fan who just really wanted to create a prequel to Portal. He spent nine months doing so, added some team members that he met along the way, and released it in 2008, which landed their project on the front page of Digg and Wired.
- Lego Ideas – Now this isn’t a place where I would expect to find a community and didn’t even know this existed, but this looks like its sort of a Kickstarter community for new Lego kits. They proposed a few different kit ideas like the GladOS chamber (the last level of Portal) and Test Chambers. The idea was a hit and reached 10,000 supporters. This led to Lego having “professional set designers, product managers, marketing representatives, and other key members” officially review the project. Unfortunately, it was not approved. Still cool though!
- Unofficial Portal Wiki – This has got to be the most comprehensive information on the game itself. You can find everything from basic vocabulary (to help understand your “semiotic domain”) as well as full walkthroughs. I was impressed to see that it was mostly written by a core team of 13 members. This is also probably the most powerful example of what an online community can create as a product in response to a game.
Portal is a game that keeps you thinking about it beyond game play. I found myself literally finally coming to the correct answer in how to solve it randomly at work one morning because, for whatever reason, I was running the Test Chamber in my head. Knowing that it gets you thinking, it’s no wonder that it has a community of people who have documented the games so thoroughly, gone far enough to create new ones, and created classroom lessons out of them. Very impressive to see not only how active this community is but the unique outlets they choose to create new knowledge from it.
Imagine what a science classroom would look like where learners wrote extensive walkthroughs according to strict norms and debated when and how to use them, debates that became part and parcel of the learners’ growing appreciative systems about what it means to “do science (well).”
– James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy