Portal's metalinguistic speech

The patterns that are used in videogame design to generate entertainment are built on the same patterns as board games use. They're always composed by a table (“space”) and one or more tokens (“characters”).

The game designer's most difficult task is not about creating the table and the tokens as well if there's not a specialized writer to face this work, but defining the choices the player can take and their behaviors to allow him to create a plan predicting the consequences in order to reach a goal.

Game design’s backbone:

Space = the territory where the action takes place.

Tokens = the entities that allow the interaction with the space

Choices = the actions that the tokens can execute

Behaviors = the responses of the space or tokens to your choices

Consequence = the function of a behavior to create a plan

Plan = the set of consequences combined to achieve the goal

Goal = the purpose of your plans

Those are all the mental stages that every player crosses trough in every action, consciously or unconsciously. Let's see a couple of examples where the scheme is applied that may ring you:

1.

You are the player with white tokens planning to move the "h7" rook in the last move left to execute chess mate.

There would be 13 movements (choices) in total, but let's focus only in the three directions.

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2.

Unlike passive games like the one mentioned before or turned based combat RPG’s, the real time action generates a different game design scheme every single frame per second. As the majority of all the choices you can take are inconsistent in order to create a plan, let’s just focus on a few of them.

As the industry have been evolving, the branch of possibilities in each stage has been expanded by different titles.

Massive spaces:

Different tokens to control with complex systems:

Choices that increases exponentially while you progress:

Multiple behaviors that change depending of the place you make a choice or even the space state:

Unpredictable consequences that favor or disfavor your plan:

Freedom to create your own goals:

With the physics refinement, randomness events and derivatives, the industries’ potential has expanded its possibilities exponentially, cutting its nature from the root that ties it to the past. So the less ingrained to the classic scheme are the rules, the more variety of resources you have to surprise the player increasing in that way his emotional response.

But there’s a game with a formula that goes farther than just detaching it from the game design archetypes.

It starts stablishing a classic game design conception with the mechanic of portals as a distinctive.

Space:

Token:

Choices ( to move, to jump, to grab, and to open portals) :

Behaviors:

Consequences:

Plan :

Goal:

The structure is a succession of levels that increases its difficulty curve progressively. Apparently an average buildup of puzzle solving with the difference of the level menu absence, which creates spatial continuity and the chance of adding integrated narrative. In that case, a female robotic voice that laugh at your intelligence deficit subtly to generate a tone of confrontation.

After solving certain quantity of puzzles becoming used to its pattern, you start to suffer a connotation of monotony. Until you discover this covert room:

A second dimension of the space is revealed. This is the first note you receive to inform you that as you were focused on the puzzle resolution, you were missing crucial information about the context. Then you create a mental division, one part is struggling to keep solving problems and the other is agonizing to figure out what was the meaning of the previous room. So what at the beginning was a pure puzzle game with a conflict layer forged through a simple voice, now starts to acquire a thriller touch invading your mental state with questions until you arrive in this other room:

Then the antagonist declares her intentions and the goal changes from overpassing tests to fighting to get out of this place alive.

So this is what PORTAL is doing with its design’s backbone:

Half part of the game is built to make the player to stablish mental limitations around the space. An exercise of monotony to trick your conscience and hold you into a conceptual inexistence frontier. The moment where it allows you to cross that imaginary line rapes your expectations because you’re accessing into a place that your conscience has never considered. This feeling is one of the most powerful sensations that we have experienced as players, not just because of the buildup that precedes the disruption but because of the elements that accompanies it. The fact of being a presence challenging you mentally and a message of someone that has been there before confirming everything is a lie, are dramatic elements that mixed with the room discovery, opens a new perspective of everything you’ve played until this moment.

That’s why the most boring games in long-term are corrupted by monotony generated by the philosophy of just expanding choices tied into a common pattern. Because every expansion is inside your control for following a logical evolution. So the real game design’s potential it’s not about logical statements because real life it’s not formed by rigid rules neither. There’s infinites of them able to change in a snap of fingers.

And that’s the main difference between table games and interactive language. The first are created with physical materials that has one unique form. So the design’s conception is about establishing rules that never changes neither. The same tokens to play with, the same choices, the same behaviors for each choice, the same consequences of them, plans based on the same set of consequences, and the same goal. But with technology we have acquired the ability of mutation. Every internal or external form of the screen can change for complete its nature in a blink. We’re not bounded to the written rules anymore.

If we apply this philosophy in a three common game design stages of the sandbox genre, the behaviors and consequences get closer to reality:

-Shooter: you’re in the middle of a shooting covered. A bullet penetrates your good arm so when you press the trigger you don’t have strength enough to fire it. To execute the action, you must change the hand you hold the weapon with, increasing in this way the accuracy difficulty. You can’t shoot again until it’s healed.

-Racing: there’s a character that always drives when you must go to a specific place to start a mission. If you shoot through the window with no warning, he gets distracted increasing the chances of having an accident. If that happens, he curses you and starts to look for a cab to make the plot advance.

-Activities: you join a poker table in a bar. After a few matches, the player that has been drinking the most, spills a jar full of beer over the cards. Then you have to wait until someone goes to find another deck, or you keep playing with less cards, or they just beat up him…

So the real speech behind this title is not about level design, mechanical application or integrated narrative. It’s about telling us that the limits of the medium are imposed by our own selves, and that we choose to be prisoners of them. They’re laughing at us for being a conformist herd during the whole game and probably the rest we’ve played, to then put their hands over our shoulders and tell us that this industry has only just begun.