I was having a conversation with a fellow educator today — a professor of computer science at another university — about the integration of computer games into the computer science curriculum. He was telling me that a number of fellow profs in his department are skeptical that computer games really belongs in a C.S. curriculum.
Yet the more we talked about it, the more we both realized that computer games are, in fact, the ultimate context for learning. Not only do they provide motivation and concrete direction for such diverse computer science topics as procedural animation, geometric modeling, photorealistic rendering, parallel and distributed processing, databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, client/server architectures, 3D audio synthesis, language understanding and scaleable simulation, but they provide so much more.
In areas outside of computer science, computer games provide a way in to the study of non-linear narrative, ludology, lighting design, camera movement and editing, set design, performance and body language, graphic design, interactive and non-linear musical composition, education and assessment, and a growing host of fascinating cultural, anthropological, philosophical, political and ethical studies that are emerging because of the development and growing importance of non-linear, interactive and social media.
In fact, one could argue that computer games are the closest thing we have to a universal core academic focus, in their ability to bring together diverse threads of intellectual inquiry.