Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Enter Portal!

There are games, though not as many as it seems like there should be, that have well developed and well rounded female characters paired with more conventional narratives than The Path (Tale of Tales has illustrated that the intellectual process surrounding The Path has a sort of nebulous ars poetica surrounding it, shrouding it in mystery and relying, to some extent, on players to imbue or discover meaning within the game). In fact, one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed releases of the last decade, Portal, centered around a female protagonist, who did battle with a female villain in a world devoid of explicitly male characters.

For those unfamiliar with games (I expect there are a few of you here, since this is targeted at an academic audience, and academia is nothing if not adept at insulating itself from the influence of popular culture which has not yet been filtered through the system academics have constructed to reduce anything earnest or genuine to a point where it can be received without risk of intellectual contamination by the reader) Portal was a mass-released puzzle game, roughly an hour to two hours in length, designed by a group of students from DigiPen’s game design program. It was revolutionary in a few senses, which we’ll address in greater detail as we look closer and closer at it, but just so we’re all on the same page it:

• Played from a first person perspective.
• Utilized a handful of mechanics to fulfill a number of goals through environmental interactions.
• Featured no offensive weapons that the player could directly could control.
• Was about two hours long, during a time when games are usually between twelve and eighty hours in length or were considered anemic by most critics and players.
• Was originally attached as an element of the Orange Box, essentially emerging as a freebie along with the purchase of other, more conventional mass market titles (Footnote about the Orange Box here).
• Kim Swift, a lady, was the lead designer of Portal. This was unusual at the time and, it’s reasonable to say, still is today.
• Portal’s story and dialogue was written by Erik Wolpaw and Chet Falsiek, humorists who came to Valve through their work on the seminal internet humor site, Old Man Murray.

These “fun facts” or “factoids” or “fact chunklets” all make Portal an interesting enough artifact to investigate on its own. But what’s cool about Portal, really fucking cool about it, is that it effectively imbeds itself in a male controlled genre of games, the First Person Shooter, and successfully inverts every single trope in said genre while effectively constructing a functioning and intelligent story within it.

In a first person shooter you nearly always control a faceless, voiceless male protagonist whose perspective functions as the game’s “camera”; you see what the protagonist sees, hence the label of first person. There’s usually a gun fixed to that camera as well, which forms the primary means by which you can interact with the world around you. Play usually consists of moving from one place to another and firing your gun in order to eliminate threats or damage your environment in order to open new paths of motion and play. You essentially utilize a phallic symbol to impact the world and forward the plot. Female characters are normally absent. If any are present they may appear as little more than tokens or, at times, damsels in distress.

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call first person shooters a little bit gay, or, more correctly, to refer to them as problematically homosocial. They’re violent games by nature, pitting what is usually a lone protagonist against his environment. In the event that you have companions with you you’ll often have to fight off scores and scores of enemies, and the bodycounts represented in first person shooters are usually astronomic. There are sometimes some great stories with deft treatments of theme and gender in FPSes, don’t misunderstand me (Bioshock is a stellar example of an intelligent, well crafted shooter with a fantastic story) but the majority of shooters are fairly weak tea in these categories. They’re usually focused around a power fantasy, wherein you are a strong tough guy who, when the chips are down, kills everyone and then saves the day or, barring that, elegantly sacrifices himself in order to save the day.

Portal is a little different.

Portal opens in a prison cell crafted from plexiglass. Players do not possess a weapon, or any adornment at all really: their perspective is simply a camera. They can pick up and manipulate the items surrounding them, flush the toilet in their room, look at their empty mug, throw the clipboard inexplicably left in their cell across the room. A clock counts down soundlessly, and then a tinny female voice fills your ears, informing you that testing will begin in five, four, three, two…

At one a blue portal opens up in the lone white wall of the cell. An orange portal appears outside of the cell. If players take the time to look through either of the portals they’ll immediately see the character they control, Chell. Chell is a young woman with light brown skin, hair bound in an terse ponytail and a formless orange jumpsuit. She also has a pair of metal protrusions attached to her boots, a pair of sturdy struts which, as play will instruct the players, prevent her from taking damage from exceedingly long falls. If the player attempts to look down hard enough they’ll catch sight of Chell’s legs and arms pumping as she moves.

Already, we see some inversions of the tropes of first person shooters. Players are given a view of their own body right off the bat. Not just that, they’re informed that their body is female, and a bit of a looker at that (though she’s by no means provocatively dressed). Players are unarmed and unable to act on the world around them. Instead they’re simply following the prompts of a disembodied voice in order to make their way through a neutral, white walled environment. There’s no action to be taken, and certainly no violent action.

As the game unfolds players acquire the Portal Device or Portal Gun, an item which allows players to open up portals on any white surface in the game world: a floor, a ceiling, a wall, anything goes. These portals allow players freedom of movement and allow players to toy around with the physics of the game world in order to solve puzzles and avoid hazards. If there’s a pit of toxic sludge, players will be prompted to cross it by firing a portal at a wall on the side of the pit they’re already on and then open a destination portal on the other side of the pit.

As the game becomes more complicated the hazards become more direct. Adorable, egg shaped turrets begin to emerge, talking in robot voices, firing their machine guns wildly, and players must find a way to either disarm (by knocking them over) or evade (through artful evasion) these turrets. Players never receive a gun that allows them to do this, although they may sometimes re-direct existing environmental hazards in order to deal with turrets. This is the shape the game takes: players may never directly harm any entity in the game, they may only manipulate elements so that they harm one another. They never get a gun that allows them to harm anything else, just a gun that allows them to make portals on the wall. A smooth, circular gun at that.

That makes holes. In the walls. That allow passage.

As people have noted, it’s basically a gun that shoots vaginas.

That would be inversion enough of the masculine archetype, but Portal goes farther with its manipulation, a lot farther. It doesn’t have a single explicitly masculine character except arguably the companion cube which, as Heroine Sheik’s author points out, is referred to as “he,” is destroyed by a female power structure and is, long before that, covered in adorable hearts, effectively sissified by the designers of Portal. It’s a woman’s world in Portal, and as a result there are a lot of deliberate, feminist threads that run through the story.

Next week I’ll get deep into those, but I’d like to set them apart from this week’s SNS, which is essentially an introduction to Portal and its varied tropes. Suffice it to say, this feminine structure falls into a relatively loose narrative framework which, all the same, is more structured and self-contained than the structure within The Path. It’s also linear and has a lot of pre-set dialogue and characters that the player can’t exert too much influence on, aside from guiding them through their expected paces.

But the deftness of writing and the well written dialogue and plotting that makes up the play of Portal makes its treatment of sex and sexuality and power within these structures effective. Really effective. And I’m going to try and discuss just how this happens next Sunday. Portal 2 is likely going to be a part of this, just so you know.