Breaking all previously established rules N’Gai and I are completing out “Portal” Vs Mode in overtime.
Today’s installment appears one week after the first, bringing this sordid saga to a close — though the arguments we bring up conclude absolutely nothing.
In Round 1, I listed three things that the critically hailed “Portal” does well and explained why I thought few game companies would rip them off. N’Gai offered his own minimalist take on what “Portal” gets right.
In Round 2, I affirm that “Portal”’s story and characters moved me. N’Gai then told me the game doesn’t have a story and that the person I was controlling wasn’t a character.
In today’s Final Round we further the story and character debate. I explain why I think “Portal” represents game storytelling at its possible finest. N’Gai presents a great analysis of what a player in a game really means, in terms of the characters you play/control/identify-with.
Excerpts:
Totilo: I couldn’t cast I/Chell in a movie, that’s for sure. But I can tell you some things: she’s a she; she’s a test subject; she’s willing to follow orders only to a point; she doesn’t get tired when she runs; she has 20/20 vision; she cared about a companion cube; she was willing to kill her boss/captor. Were these all traits programmed into her by Valve? Were some of these brought into the equation by me? Well, sort of. Did I really bring my concern for the companion cube to the game myself? Or did Valve cull that out of me, essentially grafting certain actions and reactions onto me, puppeteer-ing me? Where exactly, in the spectrum between “Chell”-ness and Stephen-ness, is the character I control defined? And if it’s somewhere in the middle, is that not possibly a proof of how a character in a video game is defined differently than one written about in a page or displayed on a TV screen?
Croal: I don’t have this entirely figured out yet, but it should help explain my skepticism about your insistence that Chell is in fact a character, even by the lower different standards of videogames. Take “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.” Solid is a grizzled, cynical, war-and-world-weary black ops veteran, while Raiden is an eager, impetuous, somewhat naive rookie agent. I know these things because they are depicted in the game. Can you tell me anything similar about Chell–anything besides restating either the premise of the game or simply recounting your actions during the game? You say, “she’s a she; she’s a test subject…she doesn’t get tired when she runs; she has 20/20 vision.” I say, given GLaDOS’s references to “android hell” in Portal, how can you be certain that she isn’t actually an “it”? You say, “she’s only willing to follow orders to a point” and ” she was willing to kill her boss/captor.” I say you’re mistaking game progression for character development. You say “she cared about a companion cube.” I say, where’s the evidence? I didn’t see any tears or hear anything approaching remorse. In fact, didn’t GlaDOS say that you/we/Chell terminated the companion cube faster than any other test subject?
You can read the rest of the exchange below (and, as always, it will be mirrored over at N’Gai’s blog).
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