Monthly Archive: March 2010

Aside from being a boozer, an anti-pants activist from long before the advertising world latched onto the movement, and, oh yeah, a writer, I’m also a casual gamer, almost exclusively in first-person shooters. Maybe it’s the virtual carnage, maybe it’s the immersion, maybe it’s the fact that because of the cropped nature of the HUD I can imagine my avatar is not wearing any pants while I slaughter zombies/nazis/robots/whatever. Whatever the reason, I like me some FPS games, and Portal from Valve was no exception. Now that they’ve announced Portal 2, I’m reminded of how great the first one was.

I was dubious at first: The idea behind Portal is that you have a wormhole gun of sorts; fire it at one surface and portal A opens, fire it at surface B and portal B opens. Step through portal A and you emerge from portal B. At first glance I thought this sounded a little dull and cumbersome, but as with just about everything else, I was wrong: Portal was easily the best game I’ve played in years. One reason it was so enjoyable was the unique game concept of the portal gun, which made the game basically one huge puzzle. You weren’t just running and gunning and occasionally pressing buttons, you were solving what amounted to rich physics puzzles. This is more fun than the phrase “rich physics puzzle” might lead you to believe.

The other, equally important reason Portal rocks, though, is the storytelling.

That’s one of the things I like so much about first-person shooter games; they feel like you’re in a story. There’s usually a plot, some character development, and in the better-designed ones some branching of the story based on decisions you make. Portal has a great story, which I won’t spoil too much aside from the premise: You wake up in a “testing facility” which appears to have been suddenly and chaotically abandoned. Your only companion is a sentient computer that has awakened you for a testing session that is designed, it becomes increasingly clear, to kill you. You have to be very clever with the Portal Gun in order to survive.

What really makes the story great, aside from clever, hilarious writing and very good voice acting, is the way the entire story is Shown and not Told. “Show Don’t Tell” is a cliche of writing workshops, and should never be regarded as an unbreakable rule (just like all rules, there are times and places where breaking it is genius) but rules like this get repeated for a reason. Portal is a monument to the power of Not Telling. You only get the information you can glean – from things the computer says, from graffiti on the walls, from frickin’ slide presentations in empty conference rooms – while surviving the murderous “tests” the computer throws at you. By the end of the game, if you’ve explored energetically and paid attention, you have a pretty good idea what’s happened.

The game’s writers could have had someone show up and explain everything to you in a nifty two-minute narration, yes. And this would have been boring, and reduced the game quite a bit – though the genius of the game’s design itself would have saved things. As a story, Portal works partly because the writers decided to rely on the intelligence of their audience and let us piece together the story from what we’re shown.

A good example of this is the way you figure out, slowly, that the Artificial Intelligence putting you through your paces is not, in fact, interested at all in your safety. At first the AI speaks to you in pleasant, programmed-sounding platitudes about test subject safety, but slowly, subtly, you detect some hostility, and by the time you get to the first test chamber that has some real, actual danger for you, you don’t believe the AI when it tells you that you won’t actually be hurt if you fail the test. This is good, solid storytelling: By this point you know the AI is not your friend, even though no one has told you and you’ve only had subtle visual and audio clues. A lesser storyteller might have had a cutscene where you witness or overhear something damning, or had the AI make a bombastic speech revealing its hatred of you, but Portal commits to the character of the AI: Insane, and possibly, on some level, unaware of its own evil intentions.

Of course, in a game storytelling is second to, you know, the game, and happily Portal is an exceptional game, that rare game that combined puzzle-solving with a visceral action interface. They are puzzles, sure, but since you (or your avatar) are the marble that has to be guided through the puzzle, there’s an exhilaration to solving the puzzles you wouldn’t get if they were on paper or mere models. When you jump into a portal from a high ledge and pop up from another portal, you soar into the air, disoriented and terrified. It’s great fun. Still, unlike most video games, if someone told me a novelization of Portal or a movie version were coming out, I might actually be interested. And that is saying something.

My handlers and minders don’t let me out much any more, due to ongoing litigations and my apparent inability to keep my pants on. As a result, I don’t get to the movies the way I did in my youth, and when I do manage a movie it’s usually a movie my wife, the sainted Duchess, wants to see. My wife is smart and pretty, but her taste in films is what scientists term atrocious. Don’t tell her I said that; I have enough bruises. For proof I offer up the simple fact that one of the last movies she made me see was Valentine’s Day. I rest my case.

Now and then, though, I am left on my own here at the Somers Bunker and allowed to rent movies on the magical televisual device in our living room. Whoever invented pay-per-view movies should be canonized immediately. Being able to press three buttons and watch a movie makes popping a DVD in seem like an immense chore. I mean, three buttons from across the room versus, what, 37 steps? No contest, mi amigos.

Anyway, while The Duchess was out of town this week I rented Moon, starring Sam Rockwell. I’d heard some vague things about it but didn’t know much more than the star and premise. I really enjoyed it, mainly because it was one of the rare pure science-fiction stories you see filmed these days. Most SFnal movies are genre-mixers, really – and nothing wrong with that, as my own books fall into that category. But now and then it’s nice to watch a movie that is just SF geekery, you know? And Moon falls into that category. There are no guns, no explosions, no fancy special effects, and 4.5 characters, total. The story is not exactly a puzzle; you should figure out what’s going on pretty quickly. But it takes the refreshing approach of taking its premise seriously, exploring that premise’s implications, and seeing where that takes you, story-wise. It works really well.

One reason it works really well is because it shows you a lot and tells you very, very little. This makes sense because the character is on a mining base on the moon by himself, with just a computer and some video messages from earth for company. He only knows what he knows, dig, and what he can piece together from observation and logic. No Basil Exposition[1] shows up to explain everything, and the script very smartly avoids any Moron Lines to stress things that are perfectly obvious. For example, at one point in the film a message arrives telling the main character that a rescue team has been dispatched to effect some repairs. The photos of the rescue team are all you need to see to know they are bad news. No one needs to make a speech about it, and the character doesn’t need to find damning evidence that throws us a plot “twist”. You observe the team, you put their arrival into context of what’s happened already, and you know they’re bad news. The real fun part is, the main character makes the same calculation, but internally. When he does voice his conclusions about the “rescue team” it feels perfectly natural, because we’ve all made the same mental journey.

It’s nice to see that in the age of crap like Transformers, which, frankly, gives SF a bad name, someone out there can still raise 5 million bucks, get actors like Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey to star, and put out a smart little movie like Moon. I hear the director plans to make 2 more films set in the same general universe, though not necessarily extending Moon‘s narrative beyond this movie. I’m glad to hear it.

[1] If nothing else, Mike Myers gave us one of the most inspired character names ever.