As Foretold!

This is my first post in a long time, as a quick date check will make abundantly clear. I could go on about the reasons why, but this is a blog of intellectual discourse, not twitter, so... screw that!

I promised to write about rules this time around, and I'm a little scared, because this is my first post in a long time; I feel out of practice, and rules are a huge deal in my conception of 'game'. So big, in fact, that I'm going to back out of my previous promise, and write about something a little easier first. But fear not! I'm finally going to talk about a game.

Today we are going to talk about Portal. If you're not familiar, your life is a sad sham, and you have my pity. Go play it! If you are familiar, let's rehash details. Okay, and those of you who I told to go play it and are still reading, I guess you can use this rehash as a reference point.

Much has been said of Portal's simple game play premise, its profound creativity in execution, and its general tone of black comedy. The game's sales speak for itself; its super fun. But I want to talk about the game play insofar as it is informed by, and in turn informs, that funny-horrible tone.

Now, I'd love to properly cite the person I'll be grossly paraphrasing here, but I simply have no idea how to track down their work right now; if anyone recognizes it, please tell me. I want to give credit where credit is due. But a very clever analysis of Stephen King identifies three kinds of fear used in literature and art.

-The most basic is horror, which relies on visceral reactions, blood and guts, the grotesque, the vile. Dead Rising and other zombie horror works rely on horror.
-Next is good ol' fear, which is based around suspense and release - a tense, shivering violin, a dark corridor, then POW something jumps out at you! Resident Evil employs this kind of scare tactic often, as does (appropriately) FEAR.
-Last is terror, which relies on the fear of the unseen, unknowable or truly alien. It's the most complicated category, one that is closest to what Freud calls 'the uncanny' which is the feeling a familiar thing made suddenly unfamiliar.

Terror is the most interesting, and is what I'm going to talk more about. Freud's uncanny is actually, in German, 'das Unheimlich', which literally translates to 'un-home-like'. It is the realization that something you thought you know well contains terrible, hidden depths, or has somehow been replaced. Dopplegangers are his favorite example of an uncanny terror.

How does this relate to Portal? One of the most unsettling forms of uncanny terror is that which carries a hint of humor. Black comedy is, by its nature, tied to the uncanny, just as it is tied to parody, because it takes a familiar thing and points out qualities that we don't often think about. And Portal's scariness is invariably run through with humor.

Take what may be the game's most memorable line 'The cake is a lie'! Scrawled by deranged test participants, it's chilling, certainly, but it's also absurd. That anyone would consider risking serious injury and death for the promise of cake, however delicious and moist, is patently insane, but the reward of cake is the only motivator that exists in the closed world of the Enrichment Center. The betrayal of trust in the cake being a lie serves to underline the unspoken betrayal of the cake's very inadequacy. And, ultimately, it's not like you even have much of a choice. Look forward to the cake, because what else have you got to look forward to? The philosophical implications are broad: how many cakes are we offered in our own lives, a diploma, a bonus, a raise, even the afterlife? Portal isn't heavy handed with it, though. It's funny, and its dark, and it leaves it at that.

But the aesthetic doesn't end there. There are so many other particularly funny/dreadful lines, like the particle field 'emancipating' teeth, the idea of 'truth enhancement', the 'companion cube' which is, much as I try to make myself forget, just a weighted storage cube with hearts painted on it. And the dreadfulness comes from that most uncanny of idioms, the euphemism. Each creepy turn of phrase is a gloss placed over the more honest, grim truth of your predicament. And rather than making the glossed danger less frightening, it makes it more so. Or, rather, it makes it more complexly frightening. It stops being mere fear, and evolves into terror, because we all know the motives behind our own government's 'emancipations', and we all know what 'enhanced interrogation' really means. We'd like to think that we are cleverer than the labels and lies, too, but I know I felt genuine guilt when I destroyed my companion cube. Who made me bond with an inanimate object, and who made me feel like a callous beast for overcoming that bond?

The answer, in Portal, is GLaDOS, one of the most brilliantly conceived AI characters since System Shock's Shodan. Your only real companion throughout the tests, she is the funniest and more terrible part of the whole funny, terrible game. The question I have, though, is what is more awful/funny: her implacable, cheerful, saccharine corporate euphemism, or when that facade breaks down and you see the seething, passive aggressive insanity underneath it? What's more unsettling, the droning 'cake' module, or the snarling 'rage' module?

The answer is neither: they require each other to create the unique terror of Portal. GLaDOS is most frightening when you realize that the hyper-rational, inhuman and heedless structure of corporate euphemism is inseparable from the all-too-human aggression that necessarily lies beneath it. The system GLaDOS maintains, in the lifeless halls of the Enrichment center, is so rational and clean that it is crosses over into the pointless and irrational. What is the purpose of any of these tests? What would they even demonstrate? Is it the device that's being tested, or the test taker? And what would GLaDOS learn from either? Machines frighten us because they lack emotion, because they perform their task without knowledge of that task, and that is why they do it so well. But the result is an irrational excess of rationality, a droning recipe, a seething rage, that is more human than humans like to admit. GLaDOS is terrible, uncanny, not because she is unlike a human being, but because she is much too much like humans all of us know. The senseless tasks of the Enrichment Center is way too much like the bullshit desk jobs so many modern people perform. And why do we keep at them? Because we're promised cake at the end, along with grief counseling, to help us recover from the loss of our own lives.

Is there any other option? That'll be next post's topic, the promised discussion of rules!