N'Gai Croal
|
Nov 19, 2007 08:01 AM
In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer)
on Valve Software's Portal, Totilo explored the business that might
prevent other Portal-alikes from making it to market while making the
creative for why developers should persevere nonetheless. We praised
Portal's minimalism. In Round 2,
things got more heated as Totilo insisted that Portal had characters
and story; we kept it minimal and said no. In today's Final Round, the
discussion goes haute middlebrow as Totilo makes his case more
forcefully and we rebut his argument with dictionary definitions,
category lists and a little help from our friends. Excerpts:
Stephen 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?
N'Gai Croal: The
thinness of Chell's characterization is mirrored in Portal's narrative,
a word I've been deliberately using instead of "story" to describe the
events in Portal. My choice of words prompted reader tilt3daxis to
write in my comments section, "I'm slightly confused, N'Gai, about your
distinction between story and narrative. Is it simply a matter of
semantics or is there something deeper that I'm missing?"
As I see it, a narrative is a series of events, one after the other, as
in, "this happened, then this happened, and then this happened." A
story contextualizes the events in a narrative by including
perspective, context, point of view, backstory, etc. Now GLaDOS could
be said to provide all of those things...but by her own admission, she
lies, so the only events we can trust are the ones we see through
Chell's eyes. In other words, all we can trust is the gameplay. We don't even know if we can
trust the "facts" described by GLaDOS on the lyrics to "Still Alive."
Are there people who are still alive? Is she experimenting on them? We
didn't see any other people--even if we want to believe Portal's
embedded narrative of the person(s) who scrawled notes and messages and
posted photos on walls inside of Aperture Science, how can we be sure
that GLaDOS didn't plant that graffiti herself--so how do we know that
they in fact exist. Portal, then, is "The Usual Suspects" of
videogames, with GLaDOS as its Keyser Sose.
To read the Final Round of our Vs. Mode exchange in its entirety, click on the link beloe.
More
Loading Menu