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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."
Joking aside, you should listen to the audio commentary inside the game. I think too many people make the assumption that a brilliant little game like Portal just somehow 'happens.' You hear time and time again how many iterations to the levels / puzzles were made based off of serious playtesting, or how artists worked to draw the players' eyes to a specific point of interest through through geometry or lighting techniques, or how the programmers worked to solve various technical challenges involved with getting portals to work inside the game. Just because a game is limited in scope doesn't mean those involved didn't work hard to make the experience as fun and engaging as possible.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
How is this hard to understand? No offense, but it's spelled out right at the beginning of that particular level why you're being referred to as an android. The room with all the turrets is a room designed for testing androids, but because of a problem with the human testing counterpart to that room, you're forced to complete the android version instead. Of course, there is the deeper question of whether the room actually was designed for android testing or if GLADOS is simply messing with you, but on the superficial surface, the whole android thing is pretty clear.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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...