Portal 2 quibbles

[bolson]

I played it and was amused, but it left me with a couple unsettled thoughts:

1. GLaDOS's trash talk mostly consists of insinuating that Our Heroine is fat and an orphan. Overdone? Unfair hits? Wheatley calling me stupid while being a bumbling idiot himself was easier to accept I guess.
2. Mockery of Science. The complete disregard for the wellbeing of the participants got to be an overdone gag for me. Partially this is in character with the retro-futurism where in the bad-old-days of science there really were things like "let's expose people to radiation and see what happens" and "let's expose people to syphilis and see what happens". Also, poor experiment design. What are they really testing? The portal gun itself turns out to be well established technology that Aperture Science has had for many years. So, this is all about psych tests on the human subjects? How many rats do they need to run their mazes? To what ends?

Eventually I realized that bad-old-science can be excused because it's done by the villain, an insane AI. GLaDOS is in the same company as HAL 9000 and Skynet. On the other hand, that tradition started back when the place was run by people. The recordings of Cave Johnson are just as dismissive of the participants, ready to exploit and discard them.


The actual game play and new puzzles were pretty nifty and well done, and all the art and architecture are quite impressive and pretty too.

Comments

[crs.livejournal.com]

Right. Once the testing on the gun was done, proving the portal gun a solid, reliable piece of technology, the AI was compelled to keep making tests (the programmers made sure that this compulsion was pretty rigidly enforced)... and the only thing left to test was the people. So the AI started coming up with ... intelligence tests, I guess.

There must be some inherent compulsion to make the tests passable, too.

I found the game clever, pretty, and funny. Best Game Ever.