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Portal was a surprise when it was released in 2007. An inconspicuous and concise addition to the venerable Half-Life franchise, Portal was anticipated mainly for its unique gameplay mechanic: a gun that, instead of killing enemies, allowed a player to essentially draw doorways everywhere. Shoot blue energy at a wall and a blue circle appears. Shoot orange energy at another wall, or somewhere else on the same wall, and an orange circle appears. There is now a wormhole stretching from the blue circle to the orange circle. We can walk through the former and come out the latter, or vice-versa. What nobody expected from Portal was that its gameplay gimmick would be inserted into a very sophisticated example of video-game storytelling. Portal went on to win numerous accolades, including Best Game of the Year honors at the Game Developers Choice Awards, towering over many other games, some of them longer, bigger, and better-looking.

One of the most significant reasons for Portal’s success is that it understands its own briefness. Instead of telling an epic tale, the game suggests it, trusting players to absorb subtle details. Information is not revealed but hinted at: the player has to act as a detective of sorts, a detective with alarmingly few sources, whose greatest strength is his or her imagination. As the game begins, we wake up in a sealed bedroom. A computer voice asks us to wait, for a doorway will soon appear. When it does, we walk through it and find ourselves standing outside the bedroom, where we subsequently find an elevator that takes us to another floor. Soon, this computer voice is leading us from floor to floor, eventually allowing us to grab the much-desired portal gun to aid us in our quest. Each floor presents a puzzle. Our movement becomes increasingly complex as the path from entrance to exit - or from elevator to elevator - is continually broken up by obstacles and challenges. The more we advance, the better we begin to understand our general purpose.

We are apparently testing the portal gun, and the aforementioned computer voice, an artificial intelligence named GLaDOS, is guiding us through the testing procedure. Our job, then, is to solve the puzzles and, in this way, ostensibly prove the effectiveness and usability of our technologically advanced weapon. As matters are wont to be in science-fiction premises about omnipresent artificial intelligences, the situation takes a turn for the worse. To be more accurate, the situation has already taken this unfortunate turn before our arrival, at some unknown point in the past. GLaDOS does not progressively deteriorate before us. It has already fallen into glitchy, passive-aggressive, over-controlling territory by the time we are introduced into the scenario. Prior to our exit from the sealed bedroom, GLaDOS suffers a comical malfunction that has it briefly switching into Spanish, irreverently saying: “Thank you for failing.” It is unclear who is doing the failing. It could be a phrase stored in the computer’s memory banks, intended for previous testers who met uncertain fates. It could also be a self-conscious comment from GLaDOS regarding its own downfall, which would not be out-of-character for this most self-conscious of computers. This last theory is certainly a good fit with the fact that “Thank you for failing” is the first failure that GLaDOS has in our presence. From the start, then, the antagonistic artificial intelligence is ominous and broken. The conflict is a bit different from that found in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000 is an obvious and direct influence on GLaDOS, but HAL 9000 functions wonderfully at first, until it gradually morphs into a dangerous adversary. We stare in horror, waiting for the incoming tragedy. What gives Portal its mysterious fervor is that the tragedy, the computer’s rebellion, has already occurred, and so we do not wait for it, so much as examine the wreckage it has left behind. We are exploring the ruins of a now-inactive scientific building.

That we are trapped in a forgotten laboratory with a berserk computer that still believes in performing a facsimile of its job, despite an empty workplace, is made elegantly clear through evocative clues. Among these are the observation-windows scattered throughout nearly every floor, usually perched high above us close to the ceiling, sporting distorted glass-panes that nevertheless do not fully conceal banal offices with nondescript chairs and tables. We might infer the original function of these offices: while the anonymous tester fooled around inside the intricate and antiseptically white testing grounds, shadowy people - probably higher-ups, technicians, scientists, etc. - would have surveyed the tester’s progress from a distance, sitting comfortably inside one of those unreachable offices, while their human lab rat jumped through blue-and-orange hoops. Alas, just as the distorted glass-panes do not conceal the offices, they also do not conceal the eerie fact that every single office is completely empty. We are surrounded by observation-windows without observers. This gives us the impression that something very bad has transpired behind-the-scenes. We are stuck in a performing area where testers once leapt about for the enjoyment of on-lookers, except now there are no on-lookers to be found. We begin to ask ourselves a troubling question: “Who are we performing for, if our audience is missing?” The only audience we can think of is GLaDOS and GLaDOS is insane. Moreover, GLaDOS is not supposed to be our audience. Otherwise, what would be the point of the observation-windows? Our audience is supposed to be behind them, housed by those offices. These being empty, we quickly understand that we are following the directives of a computer that wants us to perform for an empty theater. Portal is a game-within-a-game. We obviously play the game itself, but within the game we also play the crazy game designed by GLaDOS, where tester and computer jointly pretend that the scientific test can continue unhindered by the lack of any actual scientists surveying the results.

GLaDOS, then, is part adversary, part game-designer, guiding us across levels in an effort to finish the game of portal gun assessment. This antagonistic artificial intelligence is a diegetic representation of the creator or director, shaping up a fiction for the players to complete, providing context, giving orders, outlining our path, introducing complications, playing around with our expectations, intentionally misleading us, and so on. GLaDOS is our ruler and general, our boss. Meta-narrative elements are not terribly common in video-games, although they are not alien to the medium. We need only look at Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty to find an especially blunt and grandiloquent example of meta-narrative. In that game, a video-game player - a covert operative who has been trained solely through virtual reality simulations, or so he believes - ultimately realizes that his first official field-mission has been yet another simulation: every battle, death, and confrontation has been meticulously planned by an advanced artificial intelligence hiding behind the human façade of an iconic military general whom the protagonist has only communicated with through Codec, a sort of radio coupled with images of talking faces. The end of the game is infamously weird, culminating as it does with the advanced artificial intelligence commanding us to finish the game by killing the final enemy in a sword-fight atop the Federal Hall. Being coerced into finishing the game by the evil, back-stabbing computer that constructed the narrative we have been playing for the past twelve hours is surprisingly repulsive. We do not have a choice to do otherwise, unless we prefer to shut off our game system. But is this lack-of-choice a departure from other video-games?

Every video-game compels us to complete certain actions in order to reach the finish line. Every video-game controls us and directs our behavior through strict parameters. Even an open-ended video-game is not completely open-ended, only open-ended in the manner and to the extent decided upon by the game-makers. Our immersion into the fiction veils our status as prisoners. Yet we are no more than prisoners, forced to do what the dictator-storyteller demands of us. Now, this admittedly makes the whole business sound much more sinister than it necessarily is - we willingly pay money to be manipulated and led by the game-makers, after all - but it is interesting to note how foreboding and uncomfortable it can be when a video-game opts to make our dependency upon the game-makers a literal part of the plot. In most any game, we would not mind having to accomplish certain feats, and more importantly, we would certainly not complain about having to kill the final enemy, since that would bring upon the much-desired denouement. Alas, in the vast majority of games, these commands are gentle, imperceptible, implied through environmental and contextual cues. Thus, we receive the commands without protest. What Sons of Liberty and Portal do is to actually tell us these commands out-loud, through an in-game director, and suddenly the conceit of freedom that video-games tend to propagate is destroyed. Most games force us to do this and that. The above two games are honest about it.

If there is one divergence between Sons of Liberty and Portal, it is that the former provides no true escape from the fiction of the in-game director. To the very end, we are following the commands of an artificial intelligence. The closing cinematic (a movie-like animation that furthers the story using film language) suggests future freedom only for the fictional protagonist. As far as our interactivity is concerned, we never oppose the computer’s authority. Our last action is to kill the final enemy, just as the computer has ordained. Portal, on the other hand, gives players the opportunity to walk backstage - to view the machinery behind the fiction - in order to confront the neurotic puppeteer.¹ Our transition to the backstage is patiently and delectably orchestrated. Careful players will have discovered traces of the backstage even before the final passages. There are spots within the testing grounds where the veil has broken. One of the more affecting of these hides behind a wall-panel that has been separated from its neighbors. Slinking past this wall-panel reveals a tiny, dirty room swathed in orange-red hues where poems and drawings have been scrawled on the walls, likely by our predecessors. They are clues that activate our imagination, like the footprints of a gigantic narrative that we never find, but which we know has passed through these lands. Each poem and each drawing could have been created by one tester or by many succeeding testers. We do not know. The only information we do know is that we are not the first to traverse these testing grounds and, if the cruel and mischievous sing-along finale is any indication, we will not be the last. Our whim can conjure up entire novels, paragraph upon paragraph of back-story that exists only in our minds. Portal wants us to write on its walls, like the ancestral human guinea pigs, except our writing does not have to be visible. It only has to be the fanciful writing of a curious reader who fills in the missing pages, following a few terse and precise instructions littered on the landscape.

Our transition to the backstage occurs when we reach the last floor of the testing grounds. The examination is over. GLaDOS informs us that it is time to burn to death. Luckily, we find that our portal gun can jettison us away from the hellish fires and up towards a secure platform. So begins our ultimate journey through the backstage and towards the computer’s hub, where we will fight the artificial intelligence and assume our dominance. As noted above, the backstage is covered in orange-red hues, obviously juxtaposed to the white-gray of the testing grounds. The dirtiness of the former and the cleanliness of the latter present several obvious and effective metaphors: an illusory and deceptively healthy front covers up a tattered and unseemly backstage. It is reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back, where we similarly go from the immaculately hygienic floors of Cloud City’s hallways to the hellish red of the cryogenic chamber. Again, cleanliness is a mask for dirty-hot colors languishing underneath, a clear visual analogue to the protagonists’ realization that what they believed to be a safe haven is actually a trap. Portal plays around with the same aesthetic concepts and adds them to its meta-narrative patterns. The backstage regions are so cramped, dark, and dangerous - in addition to the aforementioned color-changes - that the testing grounds cannot help but appear all the more fictitious and alien by comparison. In a way, the more we travel the backstage, the more we think about the testing grounds we have left behind, understanding just how much of a cheat they truly have been. This feeling is amplified as we finally enter those empty offices that had been spying us from afar: as per our suspicions, they are absolutely vacant. So is, for that matter, the whole building. Every room - including a conference room where a projector continues its slide-show - is uninhabited.

Portal gives us a game-within-a-game as well as an ending for it. Disconcertingly enough, we continue playing even after this ending, which disorients us because up to that point we had grown accustomed to the rules and parameters of the game-within-a-game. We had gullibly assimilated the given routine: receive orders from the computer, clear a floor, get congratulated by the computer, find a new floor, receive new orders, etc. Although we understood that we were stuck in a game-within-a-game, we conflated this with the game itself. That is, we forgot about the larger world that contains the game-within-a-game. To us, before our entrance into the backstage, the game was solely about clearing floors, listening to orders, carrying them out, paying attention to the in-game director, and dutifully tagging along with the appointed rhythms. These activities comprised the known reality of Portal. When we survive the ending, when we walk backstage to continue our quest beyond the geography of the game-within-a-game, we step outside what we had assumed to be the reality of the game’s narrative, a little like living our lives inside a concrete sphere and finding a door to the world outside, whereupon we look back at the concrete sphere we once thought was the whole universe to find it is now a spot in a much bigger and unknown universe.

Despite our escape, the memory of our previous containment within the testing chambers persists. We cannot ignore what the first half of the game has taught us. The remainder of Portal, although it more closely adheres to the medium’s aforementioned conceit of freedom, is nevertheless tainted by our uncomfortable prior interaction with a game-designer who has dictated our movements for about two hours until finally attempting our execution. We are wounded by the game-designer’s betrayal of our trust. This wound is ameliorated by its predictability - the coming betrayal was apparent from the minute GLaDOS thanked us for failing - yet it still causes us to be wary of our surroundings, so central have they been to the computer’s deception. We are inadvertently trained to distrust our own perceived liberty. A good lesson, given the ambiguous closing lyrics: GLaDOS proclaims that the whole spectacle - which ends with the computer’s (illusory) destruction and our subsequent flight from the scientific compound - was a “huge success.” Did we ever really subvert the dictums of the in-game director? How could our rebellious actions lead to a huge success for GLaDOS? Was our escape from the testing grounds - as well as our later escape from the scientific compound — part of a well-rehearsed plan? Or is GLaDOS merely deluding itself after its failure to contain the player?

Whatever answer we choose, the question still lingers as to the purpose of the backstage areas. Clearly, they were not intended to be a continuation of the testing grounds, given their unwieldy and claustrophobic design. This does not mean that GLaDOS might not be using the backstage areas as such. After all, the backstage areas, different though they are from the testing grounds, still work admirably as a space in which to play around with the portal gun, and indeed, the portal gun solves every complication found therein. While there is an aesthetic break from one place to the other, the nature of our interaction with the game world remains fairly consistent. We are still jumping through blue and orange hoops in our search for progress, bettering a succession of tricky obstacles. It could be that our escape to the backstage is nothing more than an entrance into further testing grounds, where the computer might assess the new technology’s effectiveness in real-world locations. This is obviously the case with Portal, the parent game that encloses its smaller offspring. We might or might not have escaped the game-within-a-game overseen by GLaDOS. We definitely do not escape Portal. Like Sons of Liberty, the self-reflexive addition of a second game nestled within the parent game makes us uneasy about both: having had a negative experience with the former, the resulting bad taste seeps into the latter.

We must constantly observe the architecture that traps, annoys, hinders, and informs us. Only by doing this can we find the opposite end of the labyrinth. Just as the architecture might facilitate our flight, it is also a participant in our entrapment. This double-edged quality makes our interaction with the environment a passionate endeavor. Equal parts savior and jailer, the environment is the middle-man in the tug-of-war between computer and human guinea pig, as each uses the same landscape to claim victory over the other. It is this battle that is the soul of Portal. The game-designer and the player are constantly at odds with each other. One tries to control, while the other hopes to achieve independence. One tries to dominate through a precise architecture that delimits movement, while the other explores his or her possibilities within this supposedly constraining architecture. The player’s performance can flower inside a confined milieu. This happens in every video-game, but this one makes it literal and readily visible thanks to GLaDOS. We wake up inside a game and subsequently form a hostile relationship with its designer. Walking beyond the walls of this game, we find a parent game with more objectives and more puzzles. We wonder if the hostile relationship does not continue, despite our perceived escape. We turn off Portal. We play something else. We keep wondering about the hostile relationship, now in a new context. Video-games allow freedom of movement while restricting its degree. In a sense, Portal is about whether this restriction is enough to stifle any sense of freedom or whether there can still be freedom within restrictions. It is a dilemma that expands to the medium at large, if not beyond even that.