Portal

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Portal is the most subversive game ever

This modern masterpiece shakes the FPS genre to the very core

Words: Joe McNeilly, GamesRadar US

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Dec 7, 2007

[Warning: The text you are about to read contains heady intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone made queasy by the discussion of feminist film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers.]

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 subversive first-person shooter (FPS) ever created. Portal is essentially a feminist critique of the FPS genre, flawlessly executed from within the margins it assails. Gender politics just got a whole lot more fun.

Deconstructing the term "first-person shooter" reveals two fundamental concepts of the game mechanic. "First-person" is a personal pronoun that provides linguistic context, or origo, to enable discourse. It is a perspective. "Shooter" 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.

The gun is typically regarded as a phallic symbol of masculine agency, through which power is won and maintained. 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 forced to accept militarism and conquest by violence, historically masculine behaviors, as the only course of action. To play a first-person shooter is to enter into a context in which only the male perspective exists, regardless of the gender of the character or player.

Above: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

2 Comments

Kittie - 23 days 15 hours ago

Did this "guy" even play Portal? My brother, boyfriend, and I ALL played Portal together.

The turrets had FEMALE voices, OBVIOUS female voices. The woman who voiced GLaDoS also voiced the turrets. And how the hell was destroying the stupid companion cube a male figure? It was a pixelated box you needed to get through the level, so you HAD to depend on it, otherwise never get through the level.

And those who play first-person shooter games are not "forced" to like violence, it's how the game is designed. I'm female, and I've played Halo 1,2 and 3, Perfect Dark (N64 version), and Gears of War. I didn't love violence when I played those games, and I still don't love violence.

The game was anything BUT what this guy reviewed it as, and anyone who's looking for even a half-decent review should look elsewhere.

The guy who reviewed this needs to go back and actually play the game, then write a better review.

Portal was a fun and interesting game, not the feminist trash he reviewed it to be.

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low_growl - 16 days 12 hours ago

Alright. Last things first.

The guy above enjoyed Portal. He found it refreshing and a great take on today's gaming industry.He didn't say anythying about it being feminist trash. If you were implying that you thought the fact he thought the game was feminist, and therefore you think he degraded the game through your narrow standards, then your comment was voided by a subjected opinion without looking at both sides of the argument. Feminist isn't bad, it's just different.

The 'love for violence' thing was bringing attention to how a majority of new games involve simply killing the target, puzzles and entertainment restricted wihtin the gaming environment by how the game was designed, so, in part, you were correct. He was merely stating that he found Portal refreshing in that it didn't need to fall into menial stereotypes of what constitutes a 'good' game to entertain. In other words, you didn't just have to kill to have fun.

And the symbolism of the companion cube being male directly stipulates from the article, pulls itself from the already-discussed issues. It's a logical argument that anyone should be able to follow.

Personally, I really liked the article, even if I don't personally share all of the views. It was a clever and psychological approach to a clever and psychological game. I believe that, while some of the elements were present, the freudian approach to some of the views expressed above are a little outdated, and we live in a developing society with new ways of thinking emerging and the old 'sexist' and 'feminist' views are slowly begins to be uprooted by monogonous views that have no need to express sexuality.

The game itself was great, so all in all all three representatives have the same opinion, just in different thought scructures.

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