PORTAL

Admittedly, I didn't give Portal much of a chance. Having caught wind of it from various friends, and then imagining what seemed to be the latest in a seemingly endless tradition of first-person shooters, I really didn't care to try it. Having matured far beyond my days of blasting Nazis in the antiquated Wolfenstien 3D demo, I viewed the whole genre as a playground for those with reflexes. I was its counterpoint - the man without reflexes. Nerves aside, I was coaxed by my friend Alex to give the game a shot. Having been intrigued by the massive hype-engine surrounding the game, I acquiesed. Back in 2001, I was fascinated by The Strokes for months before I had even heard them, only to be moderately pleased by their breakthrough US single "Last Nite." Similarly, Portal delivered - but I was left wondering if it really lived up to the hype.

First a light summary for those who haven't played the game. In a way the plot focuses around mysteriously finding yourself in a laboratory, and then being trained to use what is referred to as the 'Portal Gun.' Once mastered you are able to fire it against any two flat surfaces, and create a spacial portal between those two points. This singular feature is then utilized by your character to solve various ingenuitive puzzles. It is also illustrated in the screenshot above, where the portals are aligned in such a fashion as to create an infinite loop. Really cool - really science. A bit after you've mastered the gun, the game takes a steampunkesque turn and drops the sets which seem recycled from Rare's 1997 smash for the N64, Goldeneye. This new steampunk feel propels the second half of the game and allows it to take on overtones borrowed from George Orwell's 1984. Mostly, your character realizes that she must escape the laboratory in which she is imprisoned. After a good bit of puzzle solving and consideration of curious messages about cake scribbled on the walls, you battle a deranged robot, the mastermind pulling your strings. Yes, with a little bit of sobriety and resourcefulness this entire journey takes about three hours. This places Portal, in a realm of cinema alongside movies like Lost In Translation; there are a few scenes of really engaging action, but many more long stretches of puzzling narrative in-between. It's true!

At the end of the journey you are rewarded however, with an even more confusing allusion to 'the cake,' and finally the most rocking indie track to ever grace a video game - Still Alive by one Jonathan Coulton (See YouTube video above). Coulton who spends most of his time blogging about his weak heart being broken by 13 year old kids flaming him, and composing wacky songs for his internet fans, was really able to get into the mechanical brain of the robotic mastermind in Portal. Seasoning the game with the perfect human spice.

A reading of the lyrics to Still Alive explain how the robot is predictably 'still alive' somewhere. They make various allusions to the player, cake and game itself. The evil robot queen in Portal is indicated as getting her kicks through her robotic immortality, versus the player's flesh given mortality. What is really interesting however, is how definitively 'Indie,' the song is.

Coulton, clearly a Brooklyn hipster, and questionable internet celebrity is writing for an audience which seems separate from Brooklyn's dense history of lo-fi bands, and quasi-intellectuals lamenting the days of Sonic Youth gone by. Has the gaming audience grown to desire a more cultured music than the 8-bit sonatas of Mario Brothers, and the low brow techno grinds of Final Fantasy VII? Apparently gamers are growing up, crossing that threshold when one leaves home and seizes their indie-pendance.

Still Alive is brilliant, as is Portal, which means that Valve (The games production company) has latched onto a key concept boasted by most hip communities - irony. It is ironic that Portal derives its sense of suspense mostly from lonely, poorly furnished rooms which draw on a claustraphobic sense of Orwellian fear. It is ironic that video games now feature bulky computer queens which croon sentimental / nefarious indie songs. It is ironic that Valve, with their breakthrough game Half-Life ushered its pioneering independent mother-company Sierra Entertainment to the grave. Finally, it is ironic that an artist like Jonathan Coulton who was previously only respected by shut-in World of Warcraft players, would gain notoriety for penning the closing track to Portal. None of the above are really ironic: they are instead just symptoms that Portal is a game in line with the times.

If Micheal Cera can sing a Moldy Peaches song in 2007's indie film hit Juno, Valve can design a computer that croons narcissistic indie songs to the player. Independant music is a genre which thrives on the tastes of the individual as opposed to the tastes of the masses, simillarly Portal is a game that emphasizes isolation and entrapment above extroverted exploration. Instead of placing the player in a dense world with numerous other characters, they wander around Aperture Science Labratory alone. What better audience for Still Alive could there be than Portal's player? - Found delving into isolation deep within a Minotaur maze. And yes, there would be ASCII hearts...there would be rockin' tunes, and of course...there would be cake.

Still haunting me is the line:

We do what we must because we can...

DEFENDER / TARGET:TERROR

It all started back in 2004 on a nasty January day with a couple of bottles of beer kicking around in my dorm fridge. With nothing to do my buddy Ben came over and we fired up the old PS2; we played an arcade classics compilation. About an hour in we stumbled into an old gem called DEFENDER; it was love: the handling was superb, and the depth was unbelievable! How deeply could I swoon for this simple video game?

OK - So perhaps this story sounds a bit exaggerated. If you glance at the image on the right, the game appears neither superb nor deep. Certainly not unbelievable. If you squint close enough you can barely make out a white spaceship on the left and a green alien vessel on the right. Our inebriated eyes could do no more than that on my 10" TV either. What blew our minds was the pace and the plot.  Speeding around haphazardly, control of the spaceship "Defender" was difficult, this only added to the realism...I felt like I was in that little sucker and I had flunked out of the training academy. Zooming about, saving little pixlated citizens of what appeared to be a desert world really brought me a sense of purpose. Later in life, my friend Lars would flounder across America in search of a purpose with only a Rites of Spring tape in his walkman, and a hole in his heart. If he had realized earlier the joy that was Defender, he would have known better what he was searching for. He could have hit the hyperspace button.

SO WHY IS THIS ALL IMPORTANT

Really, what makes Defender such an enjoyable game are it's messed up game mechanics. Say what you will about arcade games being designed to consume money and encourage player continues, Defender was certainly the meanest of the bunch. To keep the player busy, if an alien manages to bring a citizen of this desert utopia to the top of the screen, that citizen then mutates into another alien just as vicious as any of the other creatures careening around. This gaming concept came to wunderkind inventor Eugene Jarvis in a dream. In Defender II the mechanics were improved. Instead of only having smart bombs to rely on in emergency situations, Jarvis adds a hyperspace button which blasts your ship to a random location on the game field. This may indeed transport your ship into part of the terrain or onto another ships bullet, but the sentiment seems to be: When you play Defender - you play for keeps. Just another one of Jarvis' death or glory sentiments peppered with vigor into his video creations.

Now to speculate on Jarvis' sanity is plain mean. This icarian game developer burned bright before succumbing to the final throws of madness. It is clear however that his creative tactics have more to do with maniac Glenn Danzig's technique of lyric writing than Sierra Entertainment Ken William's approach of game-developer-as-rock-star. This is not to say that the esoteric ideas involved in Defender don't work. In fact, they really do! What is important is that the satisfaction I derived from this insanely difficult game comes from the very place in me that catalogues all mad acts of genius. Sure Jarvis's is presently designing games which are trite pieces of middle American drudgery, but at the same time he is politicizing the exact 

concept which Defender thrived upon. In Target: Terror, instead of blowing up aliens you are blowing up terrorists. There is a key difference however, in Target: Terror you can eventually win by saving the inhabitants of the White House. In Defender there is no winning, there is only persistance. No matter how many aliens you blast in Defender, you'll be firing until you're overwhelmed / dead. 

Perhaps it is time to ironically note the Danzig penned Misfits song TV Casualty. "Zenith's grazing at your grave," is a coda where Danzig cites enigmatically the death of the TV watcher. In his voice there is pride and triumph during his shouts of "We're allright," in the chorus.  This is the same pride one feels when persevering against all odds in Defender.  The real sense of doom in Defender is what makes Jarvis' death or glory formula work. Just as Danzig sang to thousands of disaffected New Jersey youth drooling their way to their graves in front of the television, Defender was a song devoted to those drooling in the arcades. 

The sense of purpose keened from Defender is the same keened from Danzig's romanticization of the slacker. Lars travelled across America to gain a sense of purpose and perhaps Jarvis found his with the reactionary Target: Terror. What I wonder is if the abstractions of Defender just are still enough to provide purpose. They got Ben and I through that rough January night with gusto, but have they held up in the long run? Can I find fulfillment with America's beer swilling rubes in a hipster bar blasting deer in Big Buck Hunter (Another game from Jarvis's company Raw Thrills)? Or is the answer a little more frightening, and as video games become more realistic do they take more specific/ and crazy/ political stances? It is hard to imagine acquiring a gun in anticipation of a terrorist invasion after a play of Target: Terror; however the implication that perhaps I should remains buried in the subtext of that game. Many of Eugene Jarvis' games have been shooters, and though their premises have changed throughout the years, the idea of a future where life is earned through the barrel of a gun remains present in many of them. I like Jarvis' games, but if I ran into him at a bar I think I would be inclined to shy away. I would be terrified of the turgid waters which might lie in wait behind his placid eyes.