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Portal isn't really in the same universe as HL2, though - I mean, it is, but not in the sense that the two will ever cross over in any way. The portal device may, but the worlds they inhabit are slightly skewiff from each other. I'm trying to think of a comparison to something from another medium, but the best I can currently come up with is Alan Moore's various ABC series: they're all theoretically in the same universe, but even when they do slam against each other (which is pretty much only at the end of Tom Strong and Promethea), they do so on their own terms.
I've been thinking, Portal might have finally solidified what it is that makes videogames completely different from any other artistic medium: there's no fourth wall. For a while, I was thinking that maybe it was that games always break the fourth wall, even if accidentally (like, having one character in a game explain to another how they're supposed to do something, but framing that explanation in terms of button presses and the like), but now I think that it's more that the fourth wall doesn't even exist. There is no reality barrier between the work and the audience. There can't be.
And I think the reason that Portal's made me come to this conclusion, more than any other recent game, is because of the basic premise. The portal device itself is something that can only ever work in a game - you could show it in a film, possibly, but without the ability to control the point of view, the audience is never going to *get* it. It's almost an interactive version of an Escher staircase drawing.
The reason portal has no fourth wall is because it's all a play on its own reality. At every single point, you are a player, you're breaking its world. It's like somebody built an entire game around another game's level editor feature. But what's odd about it is how it never makes this explicit, but instead gives it all a storyline and a purpose - that'a a very American and, I think, very PC developer way of framing games. The inability to allow something to remain completely abstract, the need to provide a narrative. It makes it an even odder, more unique experience than it would be otherwise, and I have my dooubts that this was entirely intentional. If it had been a Japanese dev team that had created it, it'd have been a pure puzzle game, and somehow less rewarding for that.
The moment that it stops being a series of challenges that are defined as such is the moment that it turns from a clever idea into a tiny work of genius. Thhat's half to do with the way that this is all integrateed into that strangely out-of-place plot, half to do with the fact that it shows real imagination in placing the portal device into something other than abstract tests, something with more of a solid reality to it.
For all its originality, though, I don't see the game having a huge impact on the wider medium. Not in terms of its mechanics - I'm really struggling to see how you could possibly transplant the portal device into a full-on FPS (multiplayer, possibly, due to the lack of constraints on the reality of multiplayer levels) - but maybe in terms of aesthetics.
Although, that said, I'd love to see what a company like Capcom or Nintendo could do with it.
Rambling, vague thoughts, these - I've not really managed to construct a decent post out of them, I know. |
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