An Essay on Portal 2

There’s a subtle element within Portal 2 that sits, like a mental time bomb, in the front of my consciousness. Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture Laboratories, is a character in Portal 2 who is never given physical presence but who is ever-present in the series of hanging portraits and recorded voice prompts that post him up (unknown to him) as a somewhat comical narrator through parts of our journey. Valve uses several photographs to depict an aging Cave Johnson. They also use a series of his voice recordings to both act as a narrative voice (when Wheatley and GLaDOS are indisposed) and to create a dense passing of time in a short amount of space. The photos and the voice prompts, working in concert with the progression of years marked like serial numbers on the outside of major underground structures, give the player a sense of advancement in a short amount of time. What could feel like a linear walk through corridors, on catwalks, and on the precipices made by buildings in ruin actually feels like a giant’s gait through history. I witness Aperture Laboratories forever captured in the years 1956, ’69, ’78, ’82, and so forth. This is a linear path, but the effect of the sounds, the pictures, and the non-sequential dates makes me feel as if I’m skirting through decades of idealism, hard work, a bit of corporate narcissism, and, to a large part, the somewhat condemingly charming nature of the male-centric language and mentality that dominated the American 1950s. To a large degree writing is a lot like this. You know my topic, the general elements that go into a review, and that a game like Portal 2 is more than likely going to be a critical success. But the details I chose to include and the language I use to communicate those details make this article a little journey in itself; it’s part me, part Portal 2. Just as Portal 2 is part FPS, part puzzler, and part the collective personality of all its contributors. And it’s these elements, along with touches such as voice acting, script writing, and the subtleties that Valve employs to gently nudge the player toward the puzzle’s solution, that, divvied in precise amounts and applied at calculated times, coalesce to make a fantastic player experience.

I will now talk about narrative.

Most video game protagonists suffer a lack of identity, particularly in FPSes. The general formula is that you are humanity’s (or your own or someone else’s) last chance for hope and that your success is almost wholly a triumph of the individual. In Portal 2 you play the same essentially-face-less woman who destroyed GLaDOS in the first game. You have no voice. You have no real discernible history. And your chances for success hinge on your character’s athleticism, the player’s wit, and the activity of progressing action. These three generalities collectively form your identity within the game. While that is no great break from the genre’s form, what differentiates Portal 2 (and to a lesser degree Portal) is the context surrounding these general attributes: that is, you are a heroine within the structure of a Western European myth that’s flavored by a wasteland motif. And what I mean by this is, you (the human character), akin to Roman and Greek tales of gods, heros, and the common man, operate under the scrutiny and whims of the god-like forces of GLaDOS and another. They watch you, play with you, make challenges for you to overcome, all from a position of utter and misguided authority. While there’s clear logic behind their actions (GLaDOS is known to say she likes “testing” and essentially wants to advance science, which is an inherently good thing, right?), those reason rarely align with our superseding principles of freedom and individual expression. And because these values conflict, we players feel a sense of tension that’s not overtly broadcasted in the game. (There is superficial tension in the game [which I’ll get to later], but this isn’t what I’m talking about.) It would be easy to hate an overarching power who maliciously puts us in puzzles solely for the sake of entertainment. But we’re not here for that purpose. We are, as the game suggests, volunteers who want to advance humankind through the discipline of science. Our present need for escape came from our past need for advancement. One process is born from the other, but the two thoughts are in conflict with each other. The thing I first equate this to is the broad tension between multiple generations. One generation may uphold values like hard work and moral purity; the other may value freedom, expression, exploration, and authenticity. It’s not that the first generation doesn’t value nor doesn’t embody the things that the second generation clings to, but that the youth express these values in a different way because of their experiences under the guidance of their elders. And that’s a tension not easily verbalized even though it can act as a base in parent-child or grandparent-child differences. What makes this worth pointing out is that this tension’s subtleness allows it to be miscommunicated into backwards-thinking-versus-forward-thinking analogies, or something like moral prudishness versus moral relaxation. When art employs under-the-surface tension then the experiencer of that art bonds with the unseen on such an underlying, subconscious level that it validates the surface tension she consciously sees and associates with. That Valve accomplishes this in Portal 2 doesn’t necessarily prove anything to me, but it sure is damned nice to see such feats of thinking when looking back on the games I’ve recently played.

That said, I still haven’t answer much about the narrative.

Distilled, Portal 2 is a story about escape and the reclamation of things human. We are in a space completely separate from nature, controlled by artificial intelligence, and devoid of human contact (minus that brief waft of humanity we see through Wheatley’s and GLaDOS’s programming, and minus the paintings and voice recordings we discover about Cave Johnson). Like most stories, Portal 2 puts us against what looks like overwhelming odds challenging our success. And since these odds are non-human entities that act like deity figures, our desperation for anything human is that much more realized. Puzzles are products of humans, but these puzzles are filtered through the hands of GLaDOS, pushing the human element just one more step away. The things we desire most are the things closest to us that we still can’t have. And so when GLaDOS teases us about sunlight or having seen a deer or even another human, our goal of possible escape seems farther away because she has made us conscious again of their existence.

There are some interesting overtures of polytheism mixed with a bit of voyeurism that feed into the myth structure I mentioned above. I don’t have much to say about this other than they came up in my notes when playing the game, and that the voyeuristic element is in the same flavor of a scientist staring down at a lab rat, and that, like myths, the functional design of Portal 2 (as with almost every video game) has you crossing thresholds of no return (mostly for technical reasons, of course), and that these thresholds mirror the typical myth structure because, in a myth, the hero is often in a position where he can never return to his starting point, at least in the same state he left it. What gets me interested is how the wasteland motif of narratives deal with survivalism, the search for humanity, and the preservation of human values. As Patton Oswalt wrote in his essay Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (which is the title essay of his great book), wastelands are generally the most optimistic of these three narrative types. You believe the human species is worth fighting for and saving. Destruction has already acted and left, so you search about to discover or rebuild civilization. In Portal 2, humanity is also worth fighting for, if not for the moments of sympathetic bitterness seen when GLaDOS, through sarcasm, verbally defends herself from your previous destruction of her. Had GLaDOS been a shell of an AI, this affect would have been lost. Had she been replaced by, say, a mad scientist named Frank Bermer who sits atop a golden spire, spitting fire, creating puzzles, and flicking lights with the pull of one of a thousand levers, this pursuit of humanity would have been sullied. I’m not saying all this was calculated by Valve (which it probably was), but that they were at least aware of it because we players can subconsciously sense that anything or anyone other than GLaDOS (with her written dialog, with her voice acting, with the synthesized effect that elicits the slightest bit of emotion from a purposefully flat delivery) would fail the essence of Portal and Portal 2. This is an example of a well-crafted character who fits the need of the narrative. What else could I ask for? Valve, if you’re listening, some cream cheese perhaps?

I’ve successfully danced around Portal 2’s narrative without specifically addressing it. For that I am sorry, and all I have to say now is that narratives of epic length or, as the case is here, narratives that want to capture the feel of an epic’s scope need a prelude to allow the player a chance of connecting with her character and to allow this player some sense of narrative baseline to compare her adventure against. Though we are thrust into action (or more apt, jarred awake from a deep sleep), much of Portal 2’s opening unfolds at a chronological and tension-wise slow pace. And this pace is what allows us players to either learn for the first time or reacquaint ourselves with the mechanics of the game. And this pace is also what allows us the time to connect with our character, her environment, and to realize the game’s surface tension—which is “escaping a series of repetitive patterns”—that causes us to take our first real actions. And by “first real action” I mean our conscious decisions to escape Aperture beyond the impromptu escape of our sleeping room, which is dictated by necessity and a narrator who ushers us along. In fact, I’d like to take this definition of surface tension one step further and say that these patterns we escape are on the whole unproductive. While the puzzles make for great play experiences, they are, in essence, ridiculous obstacles for our protagonist to best because they don’t add anything to her as a character other than being a series of hoops and circus tricks that stand, often dauntingly, between her present captivity and freedom. And this lack of productivity plays back into the idea of the under-the-surface tension that legitimizes the more obvious tension of escaping entrapment. Repetition is a thing that computers do well. Innovation is an act of humanity. To break these patterns is our natural desire, yet the game is constituted by a series of puzzles where we must employ some level of pattern recognition to best, and use some level of innovative thought to make possible. It’s a marriage of the artistic right hemisphere and analytical left. But the specters that loom over left and right thinking can be translated into computers and their ability to iterate and humans and their ability to assess. Now the conflict is somehow internalized! And so the moments when we circumvent these puzzles by scaling ruined buildings that potentially hold more (or by taking catwalks between, say, the 1978 and 1982 buildings), well, these moments are like brief pockets of pure, clean air in an underwater cave. We surface only to gobble them up, knowing damned well that the narrative will submerge us again in this internal conflict that we can only sense. It’s funny how these moments have us scaling the tops of buildings, walking up stairs, always moving in a upward-pressing motion, only to be taken farther down when we reach the next elevator. Is there a slight twitch of Icarus’s wing somewhere in all this? Is our desire to go up, even though our visible destiny is going down? I’m not making any assertions here. I’m not saying all of this was coldly calculated, though I do believe in a narrative thread that somehow connects all of humanity—past, present, and future. But it’s these things that sit on the outer-most cusp of my consciousness when I play Portal 2, whispering some song of validation that’s difficult to hear against its louder, more obvious elements of success. Valve, we are listening to your song. Will you teach others to sing?