Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Finished Paper: Part Two!

This brings us to one of the most critically acclaimed releases of the last decade, Portal. Portal centers around a female protagonist, who does battle with a female villain in a world devoid of male characters. While utilizing a predominantly linear narrative structure, Portal located this narrative structure in an awareness of genre and narrative form in video games. This structural awareness allowed them to do more than just make a fun, engaging series of experiences, however. It generated an unconventional text that spoke volumes on the subject of sex, sexuality, and the way that gender, sex and power structures interact in contemporary narratives.

First, some background. Portal was a massively commercial successful puzzle game designed by a group of students from DigiPen, one of a handful of burgeoning college level game design programs, with assistance from Valve, one of the largest single game development companies currently in existence. There’s a lot that could be said about Portal, so I’m going to use bullet points to list off some important information just to bring unfamiliar readers up to speed. It:

• Played from a first person perspective.
• Utilized a very limited number of mechanics in a genre of video games where overwhelming the player is considered gauche.
• Featured no offensive weapons that the player could directly control.
• Was about two hours long, during an era when traditions demanded that games be between twelve and eighty hours in length.
• Was developed under the leadership of Kim Swift, a lady. This was unusual at the time and, it’s reasonable to say, still is today.
• Had its story and dialogue 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 “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 embeds itself, by merit of the perspective it imposes on players, in a male dominated genre of games, the First Person Shooter, and inverts nearly every trope in said genre while effectively constructing a functioning and intelligent story within its stylistic expectations.

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. Joe McNeilly, in his 2007 review of Portal for Games Radar, thought the prevailing mindset and philosophy at work in first person shooters important enough to his discussion of Portal to describe it for readers. He does a great job of illustrating the issues at work in the genre when it operates as usual:
The gun is typically regarded as a phallic symbol of masculine agency, through which power is won and maintained. In any first-person shooter, a power dynamic is reinforced between subject (the player's subjective sense of self) and object (the rest of the game world.) The player is forced to accept militarism and conquest by violence, historically masculine behaviors, as the only course of action. To play a first-person shooter is to enter into a context in which only the male perspective exists, regardless of the gender of the character or player.

Violence is the means by which players impact the world, and a refusal to commit violence equates a refusal to play. First person shooters rely on a phallic symbol to impact the world and forward the plot, and must invest themselves in these masculine and violent conventions in order to succeed and survive. Storytelling will often, in these situations, take a back seat to violence for the sake of engagement. Designers who attempt to decouple the genre from this convention of violence or remove the focus of the player’s engagement from that violence run the risk of alienating players or putting up barricades to engagement. Female characters are normally absent. If any are present they may appear as little more than tokens or, at times, damsels in distress, objects to be acted on in the world, or they are, as McNielly might put it, divorced from their femininity, made into figures who, while aesthetically different from men are pressed into a traditionally masculine role.

It wouldn’t be off to call first person shooters problematically homosocial. They’re violent games by nature, usually pitting a lone protagonist against his environment. Even if you do have companions with you you’ll often have to fight off scores and scores of enemies, far more than you have allies, and the body counts in first person shooters are usually astronomic. There are sometimes some great stories told through the genre, don’t misunderstand it. But these games are usually the exception: the majority of shooters are fairly weak tea at weaving narrative. 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 different.

Portal opens in a plexiglass prison cell. Players do not possess a weapon, or any adornment at all really. Their perspective serves as a “camera” of sorts for the game, allowing them to dictate where they’re looking, when. Aside from that, actions are fairly limited. They can pick up and manipulate the items surrounding them, flush the toilet in their room, look at their empty mug, throw their inexplicable clipboard across the cell. 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’re treated to a view of the character they control, Chell. Chell is a young woman with light brown skin, her hair bound in an terse ponytail, wearing 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 can 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 significantly act upon the world around them. Instead they’re following the prompts of a disembodied voice in order to make their way through a neutral, white walled environment. There’s really 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 intense. Adorable, egg shaped turrets 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 weapon that allows them to do this, although they may sometimes re-direct existing environmental hazards to deal with turrets. Player never directly harm any entity in the game, but they may manipulate the environment so that hazards are neutralized, either through the use of physics (the play of space and gravity through portals) or other hazards. They never get a gun that shoots bullets or rockets or lasers, just a gun that allows them to make portals on the wall. A smooth, oblong gun at that.

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

Bonnie Ruberg sums it up in her brief, wonderful essay, “Portal Is for Lesbians:”
We’re dealing with a reshaping of a highly masculine genre, the FPS. If that itself weren’t “queering” enough, there’s the whole holes issue. We’ve talked before about how the guns in first-person shooters act as phallic avatars–that is, as penises. But in a world of women, this gun doesn’t shoot bullets. It shoots orifices. Openings. Fine, vaginas. Vaginas you, a female character, have to enter/exit to solve puzzles. I don’t say this often, and almost never with so much support and enthusiasm, but that is so gay.

Much as I love Ruberg’s point about queerness in game, I don’t think I could fit a discussion of it here. But I wanted to include it for the unbridled optimism contained in her statement, and its playful inversion of a traditionally destructive term, because Portal so thoroughly bucks the traditionally phallic alloying of vision that shooters rely so heavily upon. Portal’s vagina gun, its focus on non-violence and its lack of prominent male characters all constitute an inversion of the conventions of first person shooters. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic giving Portal’s creators credit for this level of insight. Old Man Murray, Falseik and Wolpaw’s original website, consisted almost entirely of jokes about the narrative structure of video games. The pair famously conceived of the Time to Crate ratio, reproduced in The Appendix. And in Portal they turn this structural awareness to crafting a feminist narrative about the function of authority in life and the regenerative potential contained within acts of rebellion and revolution.

Portal’s story centers around GlaDOS, the ostensibly female artificial intelligence (voiced by Ellen McClain) who administrates the Aperture Science Facility and guides the player through a series of tests. Eventually the tests are concluded, and it’s time for GlaDOS to destroy her test subject but Chell, using the device and the portal jockeying skills she acquired in her journey through the facility, escapes the attempt on her life and, in her effort to escape the facility that imprisons her, destroys GlaDOS. GlaDOS is a monolithic authority figure of sorts, but she’s more than just a lady who happens to be in charge.

She 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 the very tests that prepare her to rebel, nurturing her. GlaDOS works hard to keep house: when players wander outside of the area of the laboratory she maintains it’s not pretty. Raw sewage abounds, ugly, undulating pistons replace austere hazards like bouncing white balls of energy and cute 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 playing the role of a single mom, abandoned to her situation by the Aperture scientists we discover she murdered.

In her attempt to resolve her conflicting desires to nurture Chell and 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 aggressors is by using their own violence against them. In GlaDOS’ case this is done by redirecting missiles (which are less phallic than this sentence makes them sound) fired by her back at her own chassis, knocking off orbs representing various qualities of GlaDOS’ personality and then casting them into a furnace to destroy them for good.

In their battle against GlaDOS, players are asked to somewhat literally castrate a mother figure in order to escape their home and workplace, which has become a sort of literal prison. While there’s no convention of nuclear family at work in Portal, there’s definitely a rebellion against a maternally enforced familial structure of some kind here, one largely informed by the player’s perception of GlaDOS. Is GlaDOS a nurturing maternal figure who undermines herself, consciously or unconsciously, by providing players with both a safe environment in which to develop the skills they need to defeat her? Or is she an overbearing maternal figure whose expectations of the player grow so unreasonable that players are left with no recourse but to unseat her, dismantle the authority structure she has constructed, and flee the metaphoric home in which they’ve spent the entirety of the game? There’s no right answer (though there are certainly more popular or probably answers – I believe most players would settle on the latter as their preferred interpretation) which is part of the appeal of Portal’s storytelling. Despite relying on concrete, unavoidable events, it utilizes the reader figure, and that reader figure’s ability to interpret and recast the text of the game, to give it a layer of obscurity. Players may complete puzzles and progress in Portal using imprecise or unconventional solutions, in fact they’re encouraged to do so. Players, by veering off of the intended track of the trials, can discover areas that tell the story behind the laboratory where they’re being tested. In fact if they obey the rules of the facility and follow GlaDOS’ directions, they’ll be incinerated. Portal, through its very methodology, makes players aware of an authority structure around them and then forces them into conflict with them, rewarding them for their ability not to outgun it, but to outthink it. It’s a smart, sexy, girly story about rebelling. Granted, it’s about rebelling against a mother figure instead of a father figure, but I think that’s pretty interesting, maybe more interesting.

All of this girl-on-computer-with-a-girl’s-voice action is accompanied by some of the pithiest writing to grace the halls of video gamedom. And all of these amazing robot monologues that make up Portal’s story are situated in a highly linear framework: all of that improvisation and interpretation I mentioned earlier centers around the mechanic of moving from point A to point B, and to progress in the story you must reach point B. But Portal is is great at drawing a player’s eye to where it’d like it without ever making it clear that that’s what it’s doing, providing players with context clues they internalize so it’s never tremendously clear if the game’s designers intended for players to notice a particular detail. Portal builds a narrative with some wonderful dialogue, short and sweet without a word or object out of place, and by giving players plenty of space to interpret that dialogue, and the world in which it occurs, any way they’d like.

Through this combination of writing, art and design Portal crafts a story representing a compelling a feminist discourse around concepts of authority, with some pretty strong yonic and phallic imagery accompanying it. Even the mechanics of the game serve to underpin its message of feminist anarchism. This sort of monolithic guiding theme and purpose, which is simultaneously explicit in the character development, plot and dialogue of the game and implicit in its mechanics and design, is what I see as the unique potential of games as texts. Because the experience remains a key part of the game: the description of Portal I just offered simply serves to frame my interpretation. The text itself constitutes a document divorced from me, much like Paz’s poetry in Needleman’s discussion, which can only be uncovered through interaction. And while meaning may or may not be intended within the work we, as readers or players, can imbue it with a new meaning, one generated from the experience of interacting with the poem or game.

This is what the best games do: they tell stories, and they let their players experience them and alter them as they do so. They transform reader figures into collaborative authors who re-write texts just by experiencing them. Sensitive subjects closely tied to identity can be explored and discussed in games with a degree of complexity and nuance that, when we look at some of the titles that emerged from its ignominious earliest days as a medium, it’s humbling by merit of the scale of the sea change that seems have passed to make such discussion possible. Sure, not every game is going to be capable of sustaining this kind of remarkable dialogue, just as every poem cannot evoke epiphanies. But the potential, when everything’s firing at all cylinders, is pretty incredible.