Portal bucks masculine first person shooter trends

"Ultimately, Chell incinerates the Weighted Companion Cube, symbolizing a mental unburdening from the need for approval from a father figure."

What kind of bullshit conclusion is that? I want my five minutes back.

This is only the journalist attempt at validating a flawed belief structure constructed from a flawed education. psychoanalysis is only a starting point and should never be used as a conclusion. If you use "hard and fast rules" the you can deduce I have an Edifice complex due to the fact that the breast is my favorite piece of chicken.

Please stop perverting other people's works of art with pseudo science. They wanted to make a game that stands out and they did. They say as much in their interviews.
Check your facts and enjoy a great game.

im sticking with the "sometimes a banana is just a banana" idea.

Where's the point WCC betrays your trust by stabbing you? I mean they assured you WCC would not stab you yet lies about cake, associated with feminine of course. It totally points to a man gaining trust of a woman before raping her.

Do NOT TAKE ANY OF THIS SERIOUSLY!

The author may go overboard but at least he put some thought into it. I'd much rather read a critical analysis like this, even if I don't agree with everything, than another review which only goes over the superficial aspects of the game (and was probably written by the marketing department anyway). Film and literature journalists have been doing this kind of thing for ages, the gaming media suffers from too many reviewers and not enough critics.

Well obviously, they've never heard of Metroid.

Let's try that again:

"I'd say a slingshot loaded with white (vanilla?) Jell-o would probably be more accurate.

Still a bit of a stretch though (har har)."

Damn my masculine brain, apparently too preoccupied fantastizing about animalistic sex and bludgeoning people with blunt, "phallic" objects to construct coherent sentences...

VAGINA. There I said it.

yay for the word, "vajayjay!"

Aren't machines usually referred to as being feminine? Like boats and cars and stuff?

Feminism fail again.

this article is dumb

what a smoke screen of a troll - you can see how the pieces of the writers logic is shoved into place to support his overbearing theories.

The Cube is a father figure?

Power of the feminine? Didn't Lode Runner do similar things decades ago?

The writer wanted to have a complete overhaul and doesn't metioned that there are chicks who are part of the design team so there are going to be some influence. It isn't at all as far reaching as he dreams it

I dunno about this type of retrospective analysis. None of the development team thought like this, they thought they were reshaping the FPS archetype for sure, but the the gender shift seemed to be a last minute alteration. They had a male model created for the game, as evidenced by the trailers, up till the point of release it seemed that's what they would use. However the decision to use the female model should not indicate a "revolution for the perception of females in a male dominated medium", but a design choice by the developers to take their revolution a step further from the norm.

Portal was a masculine game with a female lead. The oval shape of the portal was the prime shape to pass a human through without actually being a human shaped portal. A rectangle would waste space, as would a perfect circle. Humans are taller than they are wide and the oval mimics this while keeping the general round shape that's found all over the universe. It's mathematically sound and practical.

Spatial relationships exist all over the game. This is generally a male quality. It gets even more male when you throw in motion and the quick recalculations needed to move around in a 3-D space. If Portal had gone so far as to have patrolling turrets, it would get even more male. Take a good look at mathematicians and the current leaders in String Theory and just try to tell me the women outnumber the men.

Freudian psychology is dead... why do people keep talking about it?

My favorite is when she says Chell taking out sentries with portals represents women's power to take down aggressive males without force. i.e. with vaginas? o.o

I'm not sure if anybodies notices this yet.. but Portal is far from being a "FPS". Yes you do "shot" at building structures, and yes, you can carry around any sentry gun and point it at another. But here's the thing, outside of the missle launcher (which you can't pick up, destroy or "drop" thru a portal to break it), there's nothing to shot at! No Nazis. No spawns of hell. No crazy faceless goons. No mercenaries. No sweaty gun/laser weapon carrying barbarians. No ZIP. This is not a "(F)irst (P)erson (S)hooter". The closets genre I'd put it in would be a FPP/A or 1st Person Puzzler / Adventure.

When are we going to stop being stunned that we're actually playing a female avatar? Samus should of been the first And last time to be amazed.

Seeing that the female avatar in Portal had "gravitational" assists in hauling overweight items. It was hard to realize that you where ever of the fairer sex. Seriously, can a woman of average height and weight carry oversized blocks about and jump bone breaking heights without a sweat on the brow?

Heck, if your avatar was a 120 pencil of a male geek. You'd still be able to do what the female character did with those contraptions on her. So in the end, do you care what was shown? Why?

The avatar had NO psychical aspect that gave her any advantage to the puzzles (except of course your own brain!) in that game, and outside of being smaller in size as a woman to be able to crawl thru air ducts- ........ But I can also crawl thru air ducts in a big Over-sized "TIME" suit in Timeshift so even the size issue is mute to boot.

The avatar was inconsequential for this game. Using logic to Delve into the aspect of being a female in all.. well. Is useless.

Feminism, Freudian, etc.... all bullshit stinks the same.

I can't stand this. The main character just happens to be female, there's no other significance. I've seen way too many critics "dissecting" the fact that Chell is female. It obviously comes to them as a surprise that men aren't the only ones capable of picking up a gun.

Oh, and that's not to mention that since GLaDOS is an AI and Chell is most likely an android, the fact that they sound/look female is completely irrelevant.

Notice how the article ignores the end (spoiler) where Chell and the portal gun are unable to defeat Glados without redirecting the rockets fired from the turret. So I guess under the author's logic the point of th story is that women can progress up to a certain point on their own but ultimately need the help of men (and their penis shaped rockets) to succeed. Or maybe a game is just a game.

This article ignores all the stuff the companion cube says to you, and is consequentially bullshit

This is really interesting. I, and many feminists, don't buy into the psychoanalytic crap like "the portal is an image of the female sex organs: oval and receptive", but the portrayal of men as overmasculinized and women objectified in video games (and film) are, I think, very true.

...Having to destroy the cube was a decision made to avoid players taking it to the next level. Nothing more...

Something about education in literature has people making ridiculous claims just to make it sound like they learned something useful. These concepts are to be absorbed; not poured over every story under the sun!

hmm, and here the exact amount of time I spend thinking about the Portal character being female was .02 seconds, in which I thought "oh hey, its a chick" ... *continues the portalating*

Wow. The GUYS who made Portal must be thrilled to find out they are secretly seriously subversive feminists!

[Warning: The text you are about to read contains shoddy pseudo-intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone with an IQ over 100, who may see through its falsehoods or may be made queasy by the sophomoric discussion of lesbian film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers. Liberal arts students are of course, exempted.]

Since its release two months ago, Portal has met with overwhelming popular and critical success thanks to its quirky physics and dystopian humor. Yet beneath the mainstream success lies the most oppressive first-person shooter (FPS) ever created. Portal is essentially a moist, wet, lesbian critique of the FPS genre, shamelessly executed from within the margins it assails. Gender politics just got a whole lot more aggressive.

Deconstructing the term "first-person shooter" reveals two fundamental concepts of the game mechanic. "First-person" is a personal pronoun that provides context, or origasmosis, to enable dis-intercourse. It is a perspective. "Shooter" describes a fe-man met in a bar in … no wait…describes the discourse that is to occur, specifically the shooting and ultimately killing of the other participants. Thus, a "first-person shooter" is easily identifiable by its specific perceptual presentation of game events, and the presence of a gun or other weapon. (Tongues don’t count)

The gun is regarded as a phallic symbol of masculine agency, typically by women who have too much time on their hands, mainly because they are not making me enough sammiches, through which power (or lunch) is won and maintained. (More sammiches, bitch) In any first-person shooter, a power dynamic is reinforced between subject (the player's subjective sense of self) and object (the rest of the game world.) The player is blessed with being allowed to bathe in militarism and conquest by violence, historically survival behaviors, as the only course of action. To play a first-person shooter is to enter into a context in which only the correct perspective can exist and triumph, regardless of the gender of the character.

The playable characters in first-person shooters are almost always men. In the rare event that a female character is playable, she is usually portrayed in the artist’s most appealing form, as a perfect object of fantasy and her interactions with the game world are rightfully forced through the survival-oriented lens described in the previous paragraph. Blessedly, playable female characters are sometimes presented in third-person action games (think Lara Croft, oooooh baaaaaby) -- again reinforcing the proper visual power dynamic that in this case furthers the perfection of the female form by a predominantly feminized audience of men who need constant reminding of what they should be seeking in a mate. Rather than the player assuming the identity of the heroine, she becomes a controllable other. (Something they will never attain but always lust after)

From the outset, Portal tries to establish new FPS archetypes. The protagonist is an unattractive woman named Chell. Rather than skintight latex or a chainmail bikini, she wears a plain orange jump suit that is fondly reminiscent of those worn by prisoners in most county jails. This adds weight to the common perception that most ugly women will eventually end up incarcerated. We're offered no backstory; she shows no hint of personality. She is being held captive in a lab and is subject to teleportation experiments by the female AI who operates the "Enrichment Center." (A brief pause here to applaud the creators of this work of art; what better use could there be for a female of Chell’s type) As the player, you're barely even aware that you're a woman even after you catch a glimpse of yourself in the third person through a portal. The shocking presentation of this, *ahem* female protagonist tries to qualify as a male gender perspective on the player as is the norm in FPS games.

Chell is released from her tiny, kitchen-like cell and put through a series of tests involving an experimental technology. Each test requires simply that she move to the exit, like a rat in a maze.(Not wishing to tax her mental capabilities too heavily) She acquires a Portal Gun for use in these tests; interestingly, the gun's lesbian symbolism is showcased by the fact that it shoots portals rather than bullets. She is naturally disappointed, but she perseveres. Portals are oval-shaped tearings in the fabric of space and time; a much more destructive device than she first thinks. The Portal Gun creates connections as well as destroys life. (A twofer, woohoo!) It is through innovative positioning and excessive placement of these portals, that goals are achieved or enemies overcum. A psychoanalytic reading would likely conclude that the shooting of your portals everywhere is an image of giving yourself away to anyone and/or anything in an attempt to overcome your actual lack of any redeeming physical attributes and find…safety, acceptance, security, maybe a sugar daddy. Oval and receptive, it is also a metaphorical pleasure palace through which the protagonist is constantly being lead into new misleading orgasmic temptations.

Another subversion of FPS norms takes place in the presentation of conflict. The primary antagonist is an “emotional” artificial intelligence named GLaDOS, a maternal female construct who tortures Chell for her ugliness. She antagonizes you/Chell not through physical brutality but through emotional manipulation; just like a real woman! Some of Portal's best dialogue occurs when “reason/logic” holes appear in GLaDOS' programming while she's in the midst of especially cloying or manipulative statements. (Also just like a real woman, wow these guys really nailed it!) In one example, GLaDOS congratulates Chell by saying, "You, ugly useless female number 237, must be the pride of N.O.W." These malfunctions call attention to the fact that GLaDOS was programmed to respond empathetically but doesn't actually feel emotions the way a normal, heterosexual woman does. As such, she comes to represent fe-man's attempt to construct an idealized mother figure through the whacky logic of lesbianism. The resulting entity is a jumbled mess of cross-dressing purposes and psychic detritus who attaches more value to the Portal Gun than to human life. You must outsmart, rather than outgun, this enemy to escape with your life.

A secondary antagonist manifests in the form of security turrets scattered throughout the facility. These turrets speak in robotic voices and open fire immediately upon seeing such an abysmal female specimen. Their dyk-ish voices and small stature makes the turrets seem inconsequential, however they are deadly and can tame Chell very quickly. The turrets reintroduce the traditional lesbian themes of fear, misery, and control, but in an unconventional way. Turrets will make statements such as, "Hello, pussycat," "Can I have you?" and "Dispensing two-faced lies, aggressive recruitment wordings, and false affectations." The purposefully cute, non-threatening dialog belies a latent destructive purpose. The turrets are easily deactivated by screwing them over, which is accomplished through the clever placement of portals to, “rendezvous points with other friends”. The power of the feminine overcomes aggression without the use of actual force.

Another non-traditional character, the Weighted Companion Cube, represents a male identity in Portal. Though it is an inanimate couch object, the Cube is referred to using the pronoun “Dear or Honey.” The Cube is used to hold down giant, taxing “jobs” that open doors around the Enrichment Center, and features pink hearts emblazoned on each side. The Cube must be brow-beaten around one entire level, and is resistant to change despite its usefulness. GLaDOS encourages Chell to avoid developing emotional attachment to the Cube, despite its utilitarian function of performing many jobs and fulfilling her hearts desires. Ultimately, Chell incinerates the Weighted Companion Cube, symbolizing a mental breakdown of her natural defenses to the brainwashing, and from the need for a proper male role-model.

Portal successfully reinvents both the "first-person" and the "shooter" elements of its genre in a manner that celebrates the empowerment of the psychotic lesbian rather than subjugating it to objectification by the male gaze. The force of its message is amplified through its unconventional deployment of adversaries and genre archetypes. In doing so, it despairingly yet powerfully points out to the entire industry that games needn't exist solely to service the libido. Unless it’s the proper libido.