No Need to Crack a Textbook, All You Need is a Game, a Controller, and Something to Study For

After the drink-happy hours of reading week have waned and the oppressive superstructure of finals week have begun to weigh on the collective Columbian conscience, casual and hard-core video gamers alike might be tempted to throw up their arms in desperation. They might exclaim that their favorite interactive hobby just has no place in their pursuits as aspiring academics, business people, and financial analysts. What those students would fail to realize, though, is that video games can actually be a very productive means of expediting their intellectual, academic, and career pursuits.

While that may sound strange, the fact of the matter is that you need some way to decompress mid-study session so that your intellectually saturated cranium doesn’t spring a major leak. Video games are a great way to wind down while soaking up some useful intellectual and artistic tidbits of the potentially exam-salvaging nature. Either that, or they will just provide an amusing distraction without even forcing you to get off of the couch on which you’ve been carefully studying Foucault for the past 10 days.
So take a break and try out some of these academically inclined games—sorted below by pertinence of subject area—during your finals crunch, and I promise that you’ll be less stressed and will still eventually get into Harvard Law.

Exam: Art Humanities Final.
Study Solution: Okami for Wii and PS2—Capcom’s Zelda-esque adventure masterpiece stars an ancient Japanese wolf-god and is saturated with beautifully imaginative environments and a stunning watercolor visual style that truly makes it one of the most aesthetically artistic games ever released. Okami is perfect, in other words, for developing your artistic sensibility and honing your ability to “appreciate” less awesome artworks by old dead white men for your Art Hum exam.

Exam: Economics Final.
Study Solution: Bioshock for Xbox 360 and PC—A daunting mixture of free-market analyses, supply-and-demand diagrams, and federal banking networks getting you down? Bioshock’s sophisticated story line, rife with political and economic commentary, will surely help prepare you for the exam and help you do better than the inevitable class average of 32. The last boss fight even pits you against an evil capitalist entrepreneur who is enslaving and oppressing thousands of young minds in an attempt to further his own personal power trip (i.e. it will be very similar to your Econ final).

Exam: Calc III Final.
Study Solution: Professor Layton and the Curious Village for Nintendo DS—Professor Layton will prep you for your tough-as-balls Calc III final by challenging you with a series of simple geometric puzzles! Or, at the very least, the game’s mixture of adventure and mind-stimulating math problems will get your brain cells humming in preparation for your professor’s nasty essay question about gamma-variable derivative tangential equations. You can even download additional challenges off the Internet for those of you who get some kind of sick pleasure from the perpetual use of your brains.

Exam: Literature Humanities Final.
Study Solution: Mass Effect for Xbox 360—The reason I recommend this story-focused sci-fi shooter as preparation for your Lit Hum final is threefold: 1) you can woo a lover by the end of the game, so it’s a little bit like Pride and Prejudice, 2) you get to slaughter lots of big, burly bad guys, so it mirrors the Iliad’s plot pretty closely, and 3) you can custom name the main character “Plato” and thus make the game instantly relevant in terms of remembering what the hell the Symposium and the Apology were about. Add in the fact that the game’s choose-your-own-path structure is incredibly fun and expansive, and you have a game that should absolutely be incorporated into your literary study schedule.

Exam: Any kind of Oral Final Exam.
Study Solution: Rock Band for Xbox 360, PS3, and PS2—Rock Band will substantially improve your ability to verbally fabricate complete bullshit on the spot by forcing you to recite the lyrics to classic rock songs into your television screen over and over again. Sound strange? When you realize that you’ll be singing songs like “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” by Jet and “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, you’ll understand more clearly why memorizing the words to these songs would be of immense value in improvising during your Women’s Studies 101, Third World Poverty, and Social Injustices oral finals.

Exam: Organic Chemistry Final.
Study Solution: Nothing—You’re screwed in every possible way. No amount of video-game-playing, intelligence, studying, or aptitude for that matter, can help you.