Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Portal, Continued!

In Portal, there is most definitely a lady in charge. GlaDOS, the villain of Portal who has taken over the Aperture Science Facility from its (presumably male) former owners. GlaDOS isn’t just a lady in charge, however. She’s a lady in charge who compulsively creates, teaches and nurtures. She’s the embodiment of maternal instinct run amok: she is compelled to free Chell, to provide her with the portal gun and run her through a series of tests. GlaDOS just can’t help herself, even though she knows that Chell’s continued existence threatens her.

And GlaDOS works hard to keep house: we can see what the areas of the Aperture Facility that she doesn’t constantly clean look like, and it’s not pretty. Raw sewage abounds, ugly, undulating pistons replace austere hazards like bouncing white balls and cute little egg-shaped turrets. We can also see that GlaDOS was never intended to run Aperture Science on her own: she’s an emotional wreck, unstable, self-destructive and erratic. She’s essentially playing the role of a single mom, abandoned, in a sense, to her current situation by the scientists she murdered.

In her attempt to resolve the conflicting desires of running Aperture Science and nurture Chell and to free herself from her own bondage, GlaDOS not only liberates Chell, who was formerly harmlessly imprisoned, but also provides Chell with the means to defeat her. Chell, after all, has no weapons of her own aside from the portal gun. The only way she can ever actualize violence against her oppressors is by cleverly using their violence against them, in this case GlaDOS’ missiles which, to be fair, aren’t as phallic as some unfamiliar readers might assume.

All of this girl-on-girl action is accompanied by some of the pithiest writing to grace the halls of video gamedom. If brilliant minds could conceive of this new feminine paradigm, a means by which to both invert the traditional structures of a genre and power dynamics, it only seems reasonable that those same brilliant minds could put the effort into writing a fantastic story, though, I will say that Portal’s story is an extremely linear affair.

It’s aware of this fact, however. Whereas the Path is ideally built to its meandering design and approach to telling a story, Portal is possessed of a parsimonious, angular, heavily designed story, one that does all it can to draw a player’s eye to where it’d like it without ever making it clear that that’s what it’s doing. It’s a conventional narrative built around theme and wonderful dialogue, short and sweet and not a word or object out of place. Like Komunyakaa’s Grenade, there isn’t a single element out of place, and these elements form something decidedly more than the sum of their parts thanks to the adroitness of their assembly.

The sequel to Portal, the unexpectedly named Portal 2, continues this tradition of terse, atmospheric and environmental storytelling, relying on linear progression and environments, meticulously arranged to evoke specific responses from players at specific times in specific manners which, most of the time, work quite well. But Portal 2 stretches its wings, and the length of the game itself, by adding a number of new characters to the stage, including two men: the bumbling, initially affable Webley and the recorded voice of Aperture Science’s wonderfully absurd, long dead founder, Cave Johnson.

Portal 2 does little to actually change up the gameplay of the first game, and does less to introduce new themes to this gameplay that improve the feminine parallels which, all things considered, would be pretty difficult to do. Think about it: Portal gives you a gun that shoots vaginas and forces you to re-direct force and violence in order to accomplish your goals. There’s really no way it could more explicitly subvert the traditionally masculine context of the shooting genre without leaving it. But what Portal 2 fails to do in mechanics it achieves in spades with its characters.

By introducing both a former male figurehead to Aperture’s history and a bumbling, hapless male caretaker to its present (who eventually becomes the new master of the Aperture facility) and placing them alongside and at odds with GlaDOS over generations, a more complicated image of gender politics at Aperture emerges. As Webley inadvertently wakes GlaDOS then, with, and only with, the player’s help, unseats her from her role as the master of the Aperture testing facility, he showcases a distinctly male aggression, as well as a considerably less maternal approach to testing than GlaDOS’.

Webley is aggressive about his testing, his testing chambers malformed and ill-conceived. And his aggression, his temper and his vindictiveness all flare in ways that GlaDOS, while undeniably a psychotic, could never equal. Webley places GlaDOS in a potato, casts her and Chell into the ruins of Aperture science of old and has absolutely no idea how to run the Aperture facility. When he is inevitably unseated and defeated by Chell, who of course plays his own violent methods against him, he is literally castrated, cut off from his seat in Aperture and left to drift in orbit near the moon.

Webley is foil and fop, and his manner of acting as author for the player’s experiences showcases that a male touch is not necessarily a good thing: he lacks focus, organization, and he showcases how clumsily men fit into Portal’s world. His reign is so barbaric and ill conceived that when GlaDOS usurps him and returns to her rightful place ruling over Aperture Science’s testing grounds the adorable, egg shaped turrets cease their firing and lift up their voices in song. And the Webley dominated sections of play are disorganized, confused and a little bit haphazard: GlaDOS is organized, skilled at manipulation and sharp. Webley is none of these things.

Of course, Cave Johnson, Aperture’s former owner (voiced by the wonderfully committed J.K. Simmons), has a far more organized view to the testing process. If Webley is an idiot son, Cave Johnson is a father figure who established the framework by which Aperture’s future testing chambers would be crafted. And the gameplay of his sections reinforces this: art deco design reminiscent of a bygone era, direct puzzles that utilize new dynamics in familiar ways and a constant, masculine air of camaraderie which both the player and GlaDOS (entombed in a potato for Cave Johnson’s sections) cannot participate in, both in the past (as we learn that GlaDOS was once Cave’s fiercely loyal assistant) and the future, where the testing grounds are in ruins and devoid of life.

A bluntness surrounds both Cave’s dialogue and the paces through which he puts players, but in the end subversion of this system, which, like Cave’s status as an authority figure, has decayed severely, is what allows the players to progress through the game’s story. By overcoming a series of structures invented and presented by a masculine power structure, players restore a female leader figure to her authority. Granted, that authority was given to her by Cave Johnson, not just a man but THE man in Portal 2, but within the context of the gameplay no assistance is rendered: players must run through the hoops of the male-dominated Aperture Labs and step over its ruins in order to achieve their goal of realizing girl-power once again.

And while a great deal of this gameplay is shown through dialogue, just as much of it emerges through gameplay, and the gameplay is arguably more feminist than the dialogue: of the three speaking characters in Portal 2, two are male, whereas all actions in the game are, with a handful of exceptions, performed by a lone woman with a gun that makes wall vaginas. So strong female characters, established through dialogue and design, are upheld and reinforced by a gameplay design which encourages a feminist mindset and forces players to become a feminist agent in order to reach the game’s end.

Just as Tennyson’s In Memoriam takes on a sort of grueling countenance which demands the reader figure’s participation and personal connection, Portal and its sequel utilize a sort of participatory loop to reinforce a distinctly feminine domination which, in the end, isn’t even particularly dominant: players do not come to power in Portal, they merely survive, seek freedom and, if they’re good enough at aligning themselves with Chell and, in Portal 2, GlaDOS, attain it.

And there’s no shortage of critical praise for Portal 2. I’m going to slap a bunch of praise for its writing into the text at this point in the paper, along with some great stuff about its dialogue specifically. The feminism at the root of Portal 2 is great, but it’s simply part of a greater delivery system: a refined system of storytelling that utilizes both conventional narrative features and highly developed gameplay to convey what could have been a clumsy or ordinary narrative in an extraordinary way. And it’s all about girl-power to boot!