Blips: She's a Robot

Source: GlaDos, The Stanley Parable, and the evil female AI
Author: Carli Velocci
Site: Kill Screen

This is a cool piece about gendered AI voices in video games by Cardi Velocci. It's no accident that Apple's Siri has a female voice since studies that Velocci sites show that people prefer to listen to a female voice over a male one. Also, as Velocci points out, listeners see the female voice as more comforting and conversational, while the male voice is more authoritative and direct. How much of those male robot associations are drawn from 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, is debatable, but it definitely seems to have set a precedent.

In games, the most famous robot voice is probably that of Portal's GlaDos, as performed by Ellen McLain. What's great about this casting is that GlaDos takes the assumptions about the female voice as a supplier of motherly assurance, and uses them against the player when her true nature as an authoritarian overlord is slowly revealed. GlaDos begins the game as no more than a glorified laboratory GPS, but gradually breaks "character" once you stop playing by the rules she's laid out for you.

When an update was available for my iPhone, I actually switched Siri to the newly available male voice, which is still called Siri. Inflection and tone plays a huge role in the way the voice comes off, and the male Siri voice sounds nothing like the menacing deadpan of HAL, but actually seems friendly and open to conversation. Mostly I just wanted a change of pace though, as so many robots have very similar sounding female voices and, for me, they've started to present as more robotic by association in such quantity. Maybe at some point we'll just go back to wanting our robots to sound like robots. I'd be into that.

Blips: Portal Don't Need No Stinkin' Bullets

Source: Games of the Generation: Portal
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: Eurogamer

Portal is the only Valve game franchise that I care about, and in a new feature for Eurogamer, Simon Parkin explains why that might be the case. Portal shook up the first person shooter genre by making your gun a puzzle-solving navigation tool instead of a killing machine. It's a mechanically subversive game in light of the commercial dominance of shooters, but it also executes on an ambitious narrative that brings those mechanics, it's aesthetics, and its characters full-circle. As Parkin notes in his conclusion, it even resists then normal sequel structure for games where the second pass is usually better than the first. Not to put down Portal 2 (a fine game), but Portal did not need a sequel; its story is a parable, not an epic.

Parkin's remark about Portal's non-existent influence on the video game industry is questionable though, but I will buy it in a very specific context. In my opinion, Portal was most influential for it's use of physics and puzzle boxes. There have even been a few games that take Portal's puzzle-solving structure and apply different mechanics, like Magrunner, Q.U.B.E., and Quantum Conundrum, not to mention more distant cousins like Antichamber, but even in games where this isn't the core conceit, the influence of Portal can be felt. Now, perhaps Parkin is referring to the mainstream, in which case the bullet-gun shooters still reign supreme and have all but ignored the larger lessons or Portal when looking at the industry's broad strokes, but I'd argue that the influence is still quite pervasive in those games; it's visibility is just a bit more subtle.

Blips: Fall Fling

Source: Untold Riches: An Analysis Of Portal's Level Design
Author: Hamish Todd
Site: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Portal's a pretty smartly designed game. I played it for the first time a few months ago, and was impressed by inventive physics-based puzzles. Portal has proven to be a tremendously influential game in terms of environmental storytelling and making your standard block-pushing minigame even more boring that it already was. There's just something kind of amazing about staring into a portal you've created and seeing an entire area, just waiting to be stepped into. It has a similar appeal to mirrored surfaces in games; offering moments where you can see your character and the world around you from a different perspective than the one offered by the game's camera.

Now, the article by Hamish Todd that I wanted to share is all about Portal's physics –specifically the "fling" technique. The picture above illustrates what flinging is all about. Basically, you set up a situation where you jump from a height through a portal on the ground, only to emerge from a wall portal with he forward momentum gained from your quick descent. The result is that you are flung forward through space. The fling ends up becoming one of Portal's core conceits, sometimes asking that you rotate or shoot a new portal in midair to change trajectory. It seems so simple, yet it hadn't really been done before –not like this anyway.

In his article, Todd walks through a number of different puzzle rooms from Portal and some of the extended challenges, showing how many different ways the fling was implemented (some great illustrative GIFs in there too). The fling was a naturally occurring phenomenon in the game engine before it became central to Portal's gameplay, as if it was something to be discovered. This reminds me of how Devil May Cry's air juggling mechanic was born out of an Onimusha glitch where enemies weren't falling to the ground after being launched above you. It's a philosophy of looking at something that happens unexpectedly and embracing it for what it is. How refreshing.