Croal vs. Totilo - The Portal Letters

Today Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and MTV's Stephen Totilo conclude another of their fascinating email correspondences, this time surrounding Valve's recently released Portal . In part one, the two journalists explored the power of minimalism in gaming, and why that 'less is more' attitude worked so well. Part two saw the pair wrestling with some fundamental disagreements about the nature of character in the game. In today's finale, the twosome addresses the game's brief length, and how that made the game all the better. "What's great about Portal's approach is that suggestive spareness of the plot and the absence of characterization leaves us plenty of room to fill in the blanks with our imagination, which, when supported by a framework as precisely and elegantly thought out as it is here, delivers a more powerful final product than many other games that give us plenty of characterization and story but precious little genuine mystery ... Portal goes one step further and questions the very nature of the person thing giving us those orders; like you said, Valve's puppeteering of its players."

Comments

Not enough...sure...

[cthulu_mt]

Someone else on /. in an earlier thread about Portal pointed out that 500 levels wouldn't have been enough. But that many would have drowned out the story. I've played through Portal about 8 times now and find something new each time. That kind of craftsmanship isn't an accident.

Hopefully Valve starts releasing bonus maps or *gasp!* episodic content. [Insert Flame Here] So far the Portal community maps aren't very impressive. But the full SDK should fix that.

Shortness

[bigstrat2003]

The shortness makes the game *better? Hell no. The game is very remarkable, one of my favorites this year. It has very strong focus, but its shortness is a detriment, not an asset. While it may not have been possible to make the game longer without ruining its stellar quality, or adding useless fluff, the game should have been rewritten in that case to make it work. Portal, at $20, is the first game to make me feel ripped-off for its length, compared to cost. My God, even Heavenly Sword is longer than Portal.

Re:Shortness

[bigstrat2003]

In the Orange Box, Portal is fine. Separately, though (I bought it separately, as it was the only Orange Box component I want), $20 is just too much for what it gives you. I'd be ok with its length if the game was $10, or even $5 less. $20 is just a bit too much for such a short game, that's all I'm saying. Shortness is not a problem, it's shortness coupled with too high of a price.

Some Rules

[DingerX]

Some folks want to compare games to movies. Well, don't compare them just to features; compare them to movies in the 1940s, back when there were short features, travelogues, newsreels, and cartoons. Not everything is a long-feature, nor does it have to be.

If you are going to compare games to features movies, why is it that "leaving them crying for more" is a good thing for movies (and books, and plays, and concerts, and so on), but not for games? Why does it have to be: "leaving them exhausted, emaciated and with Post-Traumatic Repetitive Stress Disorder (aka "The thousand-yard controller thumb")?

Portal is genius. It's a game where many of the key developers (writers and the ND folks) are new arrivals to some large company that specializes in developing products through an extensive testing cycle, and it's about being a new arrival in a large company that's developing a product, and you're part of the testing cycle.

There are two cliches that HL and just about every video game in the 90s had, that really didn't work (most of the time): ubiquitous, absurd, crates (uh, nobody uses those any more. Why are they here?), and a sidekick you're supposed to love, but who's two wooden and one-dimensional for it to work. They manage to make a sidekick-crate lovable. I haven't seen a triumph like that since Vladimir Nabokov made a sympathetic character out of a pedarast with delusions of being a king in exile.

Anyway, look at me still talking...

Re:The Real Story

[Kingrames]

My favorite commentary was by the lady who does the voice of GLaDOS, when she says that everybody makes it look like everything is planned, and that everything is structured, and it's all "a big fat lie." She goes on to tell more, but it seemed appropriate to mention.

Your point still stands, though, because "disorganized" is sorta the norm all across the computing world.