College Credit for Playing Wii

I get that playing Wii for 20-30 minutes twice a week might constitute enough physical activity to grant college credit at the University of Houston.  I get that.  The Chairman of Health and Human Performance put it this way:

"The goal here is that there are people who may be interested in physical activity, but maybe they’re not confident enough to join a regular yoga class … and what we’re hoping through the Wii is that this can serve as sort of a gateway class," he says. "That if they have a positive experience, let’s say … with Wii yoga, then maybe next semester they’ll join the face-to-face class."

Completely defensible, really.

Why is it then that the idea of giving English or history credit for playing games like World of Warcraft seems so unimaginable?  And yet, if we wanted to, we could easily rattle off certain discipline-specific skills that students could practice while playing certain games. 

The reason it works for gym and not for the other subjects is because of the limited way in which we still conceive of what it means to "study" academics.  It’s much more cut and dry with gym: if the heart rate stays up for a sustained period then it’s physical activity.

If, however, we imagined studying English as a study of texts that we consume and produce, as Robert Scholes discusses, then giving college credit for creating and analyzing a video game text seems at least possible, if not probable.