Portal: A game for tied-up lesbians?
Apparently one of the most original and entertaining games of 2007 stars a tied-up woman hanging from the ceiling and is chock-full of lesbian undertones. That is, according to two different blogs, which in today’s world means it’s as good as a fact. Game-Ism’s art below is pretty hard to argue with, especially since Portal’s designers said they were going for a “Venus hanging upside-down” look. The lesbian theme, on the other hand, is something else entirely…
Heroine Sheik makes the point that Portal features an all-female cast (the weighted companion cube is referred to as “he”, but c’mon, there’s pink hearts all over it!), and GLaDOS references Chell breaking her heart, implying some sort of relationship. I never took her comments in that light, it seemed more like the ramblings of a crazy person than an admission of romantic love.
But here’s the kicker. The FPS is a highly masculine genre, i.e. you walk around blowing stuff up and killing everything that moves using a gun that shoots bullets. Read that last bit again: a gun that shoots bullets. Get my drift, here? Portal isn’t as action driven, and even though you’re solving puzzles (a left-brained masculine activity), it’s decidedly less testosterone/adrenaline filled. And instead of shooting things out of a gun, in Portal you have a gun that creates openings. Holes. Orifices. Holes you go into to do things. Get my drift there, too? So if an FPS is masculine, Portal is, in many ways, feminine.
Let that sink it. It isn’t a rock solid assumption, as I could pick it apart with a few well-placed casual arguments, but I love conspiracy theories. It reminds me of the U R MR GAY discovery a few months back. You can bet I’ll be playing Portal very soon, but this time around it will be a very different experience.
I agree with you. I thought I was alone in this theory that the robot was just some sick, elderly robot with lesbian bsdm issues. No sane, straight girl could seriously go up to you and ask you to break her heart and them proceed to try to murder you once you do what she asks you.
It really saddens me that the rest of humanity failed to figure this out. So now we have drunken youtube viewers around a campfire practicing a moronic ritual, like some kind of terrorist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DrA0L_F0fM
I think the game was genious mostly because of the innovation in gameplay used in it. I never really made the connection with the shape of GLaDOS, actually I never really looked at it and analyzed it’s shape. However… I do believe the whole BDSM Lesbian thing is far out. I mean every time some huge game comes out it’s followed by posts analyzing the sub-culture it implies. What a coincidence too, it’s always about violence and sex.
That picture you have of the chick hanging upside down, though amusing doesn’t mean anything. First of all, it’s highly dramatized, she’s all bind up in places it doesn’t even make sense… I mean it’s just SCREAMING “look at me, this game is dirty”. It’s sensationalism at it’s best… and it’s probably so because people know that through those means they can get easy hits and become popular.
Do not forget the general psychology of the people who actually live their lives through the internet… mostly are socially inadequate, and what is the easiest thing to have access to in the internet? Porn and violence. So whenever an article like this comes up (not yours, but the one you’re based on) I mostly shrug and I am fairly sure it’s the fabrication of either an opportunist, or some poor bastard who can’t see life without spotting violence or porn. It’s just like back in the 60s you know, when everyone was a commie? You said you liked the color Red and you were a commie. Right now it’s the same… you can’t even say “hole” without making it sound dirty.
As for the GLaDOS behaviour, I don’t know why people see it as some sort of lesbian motherly figure with a relationship to the main character. It’s much more simple than that, it’s actually comical… GLaDOS was created to show human emotions, but the way it’s done is so much funnier… the voice is cold, the sentences are incoherent. You hear she’s talking about love, but you don’t feel it, it’s a machine. She’s indifferent to love but she’s stating it because it’s in her protocol.
That’s it. No lesbians, no chicks hanging upside down wrapped around belts… just a machine simulating love.
I agree, it’s easy to attach sexual meaning to anything. The designers _were_ going for a hanging woman look, but it’s very stylized and I would have never made the connection without having it pointed out to me, which I think constitutes successful artistic design. And the guns vs. making holes theory? Amusing at best.
I’ll have to take issue with your assumption that people “living their lives” through the internet are socially inadequate. I think it’s mostly (though not entirely) a myth, and the sensationalism caused by any mention of sex/violence is common to humans as a whole in any form of media. Your average office worker, politician, school teacher, etc. is affected in exactly the same way, but the anonymity the internet offers does thrust it center stage fairly often.
Either way, your analysis of GLaDOS’ behavior is pretty much spot-on. She’s kind of like Data from Star Trek crossed with Gollum, maybe a dash of cynicism thrown in for good measure!
You also forget that their are some women who like to play FPS games, like my self, and for one thing, i think i like the challenge of completing the puzzles in Portal more than shooting monsters.
I wondered how long it would take someone to hurt this game. You get a perfect game, not a SINGLE problem, and you have to warp it to make it look bad and yourself a genius for “seeing” it, yet not fabricating it. Grow up, shoot another portal, and jump in. Simple.
I honestly don’t see how this hurts Portal. It’s just a couple of people giving their interpretations. If anything, the fact that people are interpreting the game is a testament to how well Portal was made. People don’t bother to think about bad art, only the good stuff. Portal is good.