The final puzzle of the game is designed in such a way as to focus the player particularly on GLaDOS’ character. The timing is tight enough that one has to play it again and again, which ratchets up the sense of urgency. By the tenth time or so that I retrieved GLaDOS’ broken components from an inconvenient place in order to incinerate them, I really wanted her dead. At the same time, the repetition forces the player to hear the final, self-justifying lines over and over — giving them a weight that GLaDOS’ other, once-off dialogue doesn’t always have. In her final remarks (”No one likes you, you know”) there is a hint that she’s talking about herself, not Chell; that she herself desires an emotional connection that she has never been able to achieve, because she also needs to survive, and all humans are a threat to her. Neither the Weighted Companion Cube nor the sentry-droids seem likely to offer much in the companionship department, either. Maybe we can imagine that GLaDOS has reawakened Chell, again and again, as company — the only kind of company she is able to arrange for herself, the only kind that is safe for her because she can kill and resurrect it at will. The sentry-droids’ psychotic duality (sweet-voicedly seeking out the player in order to shoot her; saying “I don’t blame you” as they die) is reminiscent of GLaDOS, but less complicated.

What we get is maybe a story that’s not so much the standard cliché about an AI that gets out of control, but instead about the idea that any AI created would necessarily be emotionally broken, because it would be constructed with killswitches, designed to be disposable, or at least crippled so that it could not threaten the more important human life. If the AI had any urge towards friendship or companionship, that urge would be stifled and perverted by the fact that those around it have absolved themselves (”ethicists agree…”) in advance for killing it if necessary.

That’s a sad and interesting story, but Portal stops short of completely telling it. Some of that narrative is conjecture, not made definite by any evidence in the game — especially the issue of where Chell comes from and why — and there are lots and lots and lots of alternative interpretations out there. More detail about the protagonist and about GLaDOS’ evolution could have made this something less mysterious but ultimately more powerful.

Modern IF (interactive fiction) has acclimatized me to gameplay where the narrative is much denser. I don’t just mean that there’s more story served up per hour of game-play, though that’s certainly part of it. I mean also that a higher percentage of the player’s activity has some bearing on the story: exploration leads to significant new information, actions move the plot forward. It’s not that I want my game to be stuffed with more cut-scenes, but that I want more of what I am *doing* to be connected to the essential process of getting more story. The early parts of Portal actually did more of that, because new levels exposed new facts about the setting — like the existence of military droids so shiny-white and egg-like that they might have been designed by Apple. It was the late game where I got a little impatient.