Portal is a parody of us.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long while now and have wanted to make some long winded fancy and detailed explanation, but I never will. I just can’t be bother doing academic like work again. Not now anyway. So instead I’ll just blurt it out as best I can.

Portal is a masterpiece. Well duh… but hear me out.

Portal is a parody on gaming as a whole. It’s the supreme gaming in joke. It’s subtle, so I think most gamers that played it aren’t even aware of it. Maybe even the developers weren’t aware of it, but I think they were. I think it was very deliberate, at least with the story side of things.

Maybe I should just get on with it.. Think about the age old debate about on rails versus off rails gameplay, basically cutscenes versus don’t take the gameplay away from the player. This has been discussed in a number of places recently. I agree cutscenes suck, but it it’s not just about cutscenes. After playing a promising, but disappointingly limited game, we’ll say we want more freedom, non-linearity and control. Developers on the other hand can only ever provide the player with the illusion of control. Even if the illusion is a sandbox GTA style game.

There is a direct analogy of this tension between developers and players in Portal. Chell is the player, GlaDOS is the developer. The puzzles GlaDOS puts Chell through is Chell’s game. Throughout the whole game GlaDOS controls the player, funnelling them through the various puzzles, placing her in more and more danger with no concern for her well being. She pretends to praise Chell’s progress, but all the while not so subtly mocks her. As the trust of GlaDOS wanes escape is the goal.

Then of course there’s the constant promise of a reward at the end. There’s always the promise of cake in a game. Every game promises something, a grand story arc completion, the final boss battle of doom etc etc. Yet how often do we reach the end of a game and find the ending a let down? There is no cake…

Portal’s ending is without a doubt one of the most satisfactory endings in any game. Why is the ending so good though? What is it about it, really?

Maybe this is getting too analytical, but I love this stuff so here I go…
There are people working towards developing a body of gaming design theory. Games are starting to get serious attention in the academic world of media studies. Recently Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture published it’s first issue. The article Translating Narrative into Code – Thoughts on a Technology-Centric Model of Digital Games as Programmable Media by Werning, is highly worth reading. It goes into the various attempts at game analysis so far (such as attempting to adapt theories from other mediums to games), then goes onto expand on the most promising one.

I might be massacring the concept here, but an emerging paradigm is the idea that the player’s relationship to the game is as a bodily extension of the feedback loop dictated by the gameplay. That is, the player essentially interacts with the game as programmable device. So the player is getting programmed by the game. This seems natural since the task of at least the early stage of most games is to train the player to learn how to interact with the game. Werning expands on this idea and suggests that games can be best analysed within an object orientated model. He calls this Object Orientated Narrative (OON) as analogous to Object Orientated Programming. The cool thing, as he suggests, is that ultimately perhaps games really are just a mirror of their makers. If a programmer could create art, what would that art resemble? A program of course.

The developers relationship to the player is thus far more direct then we like to believe. No wonder they don’t really appreciate the players telling them how to make games. The developer doesn’t just program the game, they program the player. This seems to me a pretty powerful concept, it seems the core of the reason games are special. It’s pretty clear things don’t always go to plan though, people aren’t easy to program and they aren’t direct either it takes iteration. I don’t think it’s a one way street either. In a good game the player doesn’t feel like they being dictated to, they feel they are doing the programming.

Back to Portal, it’s clear that GlaDOS isn’t just experimenting on Chell for the sake of it, she isn’t just trying to kill her. She is fundamentally trying to do science, she is programming Chell (i.e., the player) to perfect a method of training for the use of the Portal gun. It’s like valve took the idea that the developers are programming the player and embedded it directly into game as the story.

When GlaDOS starts going awry, it’s like when a game starts to break down into noticeable defects and bugs. All in all though the training goes rather well, except for the fact that there is ultimately no cake. Chell has been warned by other players that the game she is playing doesn’t end well, it’s best not to finish it. She’d like nothing more than to escape the confines of her game to explore and do as she pleases, obviously taking the bits of the game she likes with her (the portal gun). Just like we demand of developers to give us the freedom to explore the world with all the cool bits left in tack (is this stretching things?).

When Chell escapes, she (we) tracks down GlaDOS and destroys her. Which is perhaps what would happen to developers if they adhered to the whims the players? See, it’s a parody of the relationship between the players and the developers of games. Laughing at the tensions in the industry has got to be a healthy thing.

This is why I think everyone loves Portal so much. We’ve all already been programmed to play games in certain ways, we recognise certain themes in the industry subconsciously. It’s not just a clever twisted play on the ubiquitous science lab seen in so many games. In essence all games are lab experiments, and we’re the rats that have been convinced to enjoy them Yet Portal has so much symmetry that it’s also appreciated by people that wouldn’t really consider themselves gamers.

It’s also pretty cool that while the narrative of Portal is that of striving towards freedom, Portal as a game is in fact the years supreme example of why a linear, constrained and controlling game experience can be a excellent (and the best thing for us). That is Portal’s cake and it’s triumph!

One last thing. I’m convinced that this theory of games as a programmable media was at least in some way embedded into the minds of the people who wrote the game. Thus the important conclusion is, Portal isn’t just a work of art, it’s science…

Please comment on anything at all. I may have spent way to much time thinking about this, but more is always better.