sounds like a pointless rant to me: Jet Set Willy is a very hard game? Sure! but there are others which are not that tough, besides it could be turned into a useful level design exercise (make it more accessible!)

Every subject can be made interesting or awfully boring by a good or bad lecturer. Things like "Zork is the first and last text based game i'll ever play" are a sign the professor completely failed to engage the class and i'm quite surprised they are saying it almost as if it were a funny thing. Why were they playing IF in the first place? What was the purpose of going through Zork? Storytelling? Evoking images? Text parsing algorithms? Did the student have a clue of why was he doing that and why it should have been relevant?

BTW, which universities have dedicated modules to the history of games? A few classes here and there across different subjects don't really count.

To be blunt, when introducing the "younger generations" to older titles, they are just not prepared for the horrors they'll encounter. And there are indeed lots of horrors, far more than what Doom could put out that's for sure! When I've introduced children to games that I played when I was younger than they were, they are so used to Nintendo DS titles through to XBox 360 titles that they are already jaded.

And as for text adventures? They are a historical footnote, and this is from someone who used to play text adventures as a youngster. They only hold nostalgia value for those who *really really REALLY* liked them as children and can't see that such games were absolute rubbish most of the time. The "I do not understand." and "What do you mean?" texts aren't myths, nor is trying to figure out what the developer(s) were smoking whilst designing the "game". Let's not forget that such mechanics were carried over to the point'n'clicks as well.

To me, playing games from the 1980s and prior is like watching an archaeology program where they find a small piece of pottery or a coin. Very interesting but ultimately its not going to teach us how to make better pottery or coins. Add to that they aren't typically usable.

It's far better to look at the games of the 1990s (everything from Commander Keen through to Thief 2) where there is a wealth of interesting titles, developments and tonality shifts. By 1995, we had Descent and Quake 1 and these games are still relevant when looking as to what's "fun" and what works and does not work. Obviously, 1998 brought the original Half-Life (a game fanboys the world over will get their underwear in a twist when I point this next bit) that was arguably one of the most polished games that got everything it done right...without actually introducing anything new. And no doubt it has had many a thesis written about it. It was also about this time that adventure games weren't being seen as commercially viable in that shift to make everything a shoot 'em up. Heck we had the original Unreal in the same year, arguably a glorified tech demo - and what a tech demo! Not universally grey or brown, but actually colourful! And look! Outdoor environments that actually look the part! Well, for the time anyway. :)

Therefore, wouldn't it be more valuable to speed through the 1980s games? Acknowledge their contributions, play no more than three titles, but ultimately look at them as what they are: highly unrefined, generally unusable today and - like the aforementioned piece of pottery and coinage - belong in a museum. Then skip to the games of the 1990s and ask the following questions:-

"Was there any baggage brought over from the games of the 80s to the games of the 90s? List any you can find."
"What, and why, was their such a tonality shift from 1990 to 1999?"
"If you were to play 3 of the top rated games from each year, what do you think they contributed - if anything?"
"If you were in charge and had three months to make any changes to a game, which game would it be and what changes would you make?"

There are more questions, but I'm not writing the course and nor am I being paid for it ;) so those above shall suffice as examples. Also, I realise it would be 30 games in total (re: third question) but you wouldn't necessarily have to play them all to completion. You certainly wouldn't have to with Quake, what a boring game that was! I remember getting to level 7 of episode 1 and I couldn't stand (sit? :P ) the game anymore...Duke Nukem 3D on the other hand... :D

Of course, if it were up to me, I'd have them playing Grim Fandango, Thief 2, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, Wolfenstein 3-D (for motion sickness and migraines if nothing else ;) ), System Shock 2 ("OMG! I only have my crowbar left! Don't mind me...I'm off to hide amongst the crates..." ;) ) and other such titles rather than "I'm going to lead you by the nose and make everything nice and cushy should you fail (but you won't really!)" type games we have today that's for sure!

I think there are a lot of great old games and many lessons current designers could learn for games of yesteryear.

What's the old saying? "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Something along those lines.

There is a lot of great things to learn from the history of game design. We can learn what made certain genres and play styles good an bad. We can learn what design mistakes failed and how to avoid them. We can learn what worked well and what can be improved upon.

I think this is a really important topic that more game designers need to learn. It is easier for those of us that were raised on classic games such as Zork and Mario Bros. But the rising generation has limited exposure to such classic game design.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin's put up his slides and notes from this talk on his blog. http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2012/03/knowing-the-past-game-education-needs-game-hist
ory/. Most of the comments above are really off-base when compared to what he actually talked about. It's not (just) about training a new generation of developers, but also training a new generation of critics and historians, as well as giving a traditional liberal arts education within the context of a society that plays video games.

I particularly liked the line "For example, if Dance Central is Combat for the Kinect, what might be the path to Pitfall …. And what might be the path to ET?" It's both a statement of hope about the future of gaming and game development, and a prime example of why you do need the kind of historical perspective that only comes with actual play to talk about these things in the first place.

Um...

["Old games are really hard," says Clara Fernandez-Vara, of the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, who says that her students have yet to meet the challenge of getting to level 5 of Jet Set Willy without losing any lives. ]

Jet Set Willy doesn't have levels: it's essentially a giant map which the player can freely explore. I'd guess that Clara meant Manic Miner - JSW's predecessor - which was level based...

I think there's a discussion to be had about whether "old" games are more difficult than "new" games. I personally believe they are more stressful, not necessarily more difficult. Not to confuse *simple* with *easy*, the two examples below have similar mechanics: move & shoot ( & don't die ).

When playing Asteroids it starts off easy enough, but gets progressively harder (more and faster targets). It's not the difficulty that stresses me out, it's the fact that if I fail and it's Game Over I have to start completely over... from the very beginning. There's a sense of urgency and finality. No save points, no extra lives, and my high score goes away as soon as the Atari is shut off.

Go play Geometry Wars and you'll likely get a similar experience, but with the peace of mind knowing that your score will be saved on your HDD and uploaded to a leader board for bragging rights.

It would be interesting to see if any educators use a direct comparing approach towards old/recent games mechanics. By direct approach, I mean taking a somewhat innovating aspect of a recent game and link it back to it's original foundation.

It's a bit like when you're listening to a local radio show and they are broadcasting the"new summer hit", which in fact is an obvious remake of an old one. Some may call me a hipster for this comment, but I love that feeling when you actually know the original song... and you know it's still better then the remix.

Inspiration is sometimes disguised as innovation to the eyes of the new generation of gamers, and it would be wise for them to know the difference. Pointing out that recent titles are borrowing ideas from an 80's or 90's game by directly comparing them together would probably help student see the point of spending time on gaming history and, of course, to preserve it.

Something I like about older games is the abstraction provided by low quality graphics. Older 8-bit games were able to use imagery more like pictograms than pictures and hence create game concepts and scenarios that couldn't be pulled off using realistic graphics where the size and animation of objects would prevent the concept from working. For instance, in real life coins and fruit are much smaller than adult people but these kinds of objects were often iconified as being the same size as the playable characters. So many older games would never had been made if it wasn't for the limitations that lead to such designs.