Still Alive: Understanding Femininity in Valve’s Portal Games

Portal and its sequel Portal 2 are not the first videogames that come to mind when considering the Gothic.  As videogame analyst Ewan Kirkland points out, the games ‘high-tech world of white, featureless test chambers, artificially intelligent super computers, laser targeting security robots and the portal gun itself, an elegant device allowing the player to pass through one flat surface to another, has none of the imagery commonly associated with Gothic culture’ (Kirkland 2014, 454).  However, beneath the sterile, technological veneer, lies a narrative of female imprisonment, trauma, and emancipation, something Gothic fiction has been concerned with almost since its inception.  The narrative of these games is achieved through an underlying—or embedded—history that exists alongside the games ludic puzzle solving structure.  Like a number of other games, the player can, if she chooses, explore the narrative through audio and visual cues, as well as through the interactions between the games characters.  It is this narrative that defines the game as Gothic, with the antagonist—GLaDOS—taking the role of the traditional Gothic female, the Gothic monster, and the postfeminist Gothic woman.

The Portal games have two female characters, Chell, and a Genetic Lifeform and Digital Operating System—GLaDOS.  The player controls Chell, a human trapped in the Apeture Science Enrichment facility.  GLaDOS, who controls the facility, wakes Chell and compels her to complete ‘tests’.  These tests make up the ludic elements of the videogame, and are a series of spatial puzzles, in which the player guides Chell from point A to point B.  To do so, the player uses a ‘portal gun’ that allows her to place pairs of portals that allow instant travel.  With this gun, the player has to assess trajectories, speed, and use lateral thinking to complete a series of progressively more difficult mathematical problems that involves placing portals, to reach the exit of each level.

Chell is a rarely seen character, which along with the games first-person perspective allows the player to identify herself as the protagonist.  This is aided by the game’s discourse, a one-sided conversation in which GLaDOS repeatedly taunts Chell, something I want to return to later.  This monologue blurs the distinction between the player and the character being controlled: after a couple of hours of hearing GLaDOS say ‘you’, it starts to appear that she is talking to you the player, not you the fictional character being controlled.  

GLaDOS is a computer/human hybrid, and as I said, is in control of the long abandoned enrichment facility, which is itself part of the larger, fictional, Half Life universe.  At first GLaDOS appears to be a guide through the game, a popular videogame trope, but the player gradually becomes aware that the disembodied voice is not simply a programmed series of commands, and appears to be a narcissistic, passive aggressive, insane female.  The embedded narrative of the game allows the player to discover the origins of GLaDOS, to understand her insanity, and ultimately (as it is a game) to bring about the postfeminist conclusion to the narrative.

Gothic fiction frequently begins with trauma, and the Portal games are no exception to this.  Piecing together the narrative through pictures, audio clips, and memories, the player learns that the human use to create GLaDOS was Caroline, the personal assistant to the CEO of Apeture science Cave Johnson.  Whilst the GLaDOS program was originally designed to house Johnsons consciousness, he left instructions that if he was to die before it was completed, Caroline was to take his place in the program, even if she refused. Like many other Gothic heroines before her, Caroline ‘an innocent and blameless heroine [is] threatened by a powerful male figure and confined by a labyrinthine interior space’ (Brabon and Genz 2007, 5)—literally disembodied, her consciousness is bound inside a computer and this incarceration drove Caroline insane.  Like many other Gothic heroines, Caroline suffers a complete mental collapse because of her treatment, and her first act as GLaDOS is to attempt to kill the Apeture Science employees in revenge with a neurotoxin.  This causes her to be, literally, turned off, until the Apeture Science team can fathom a method of controlling her –and force her to submit to their will.  Whilst this is enough to signal Caroline as a Gothic heroine, her incarceration at the hands of the employees of Apeture Science is compounded by the implantation of several ‘dampening spheres’, designed to stifle her intelligence and decision making abilities.  Tellingly, for the gendered narrative of the game, all of these spheres are male.  At the end of Portal, Chell attaches several of these to GLaDOS to make her malfunction, and then at the beginning of Portal 2, another of these spheres, Wheatley—designed to be the ‘dumbest moron who ever lived’ revives Chell from cryogenic hibernation, setting off the events of the second game.  GLaDOS then, lives in a place where ‘the damsel in distress cannot escape her painful fate.  Masculinity defines and contains her [and her containment is] a process almost invariably violent’ (Williams 2007, 88), her body is taken from her, and her mind and consciousness is undermined by the men who want to control her – even after she kills them.  Caroline is clearly the victim of patriarchal power, literally reduced to being ‘a set of mechanical functions’ (Williams 2007, 90) by being placed inside a computer system, and losing control of her own thoughts and feelings.

For me, one of the most chilling discoveries I made in the game was when I realised that GLaDOS inclusion in the digital operating system as the genetic lifeform part of the program would mean that she was included in a periodic backing up of the system, just the same as my computer does.  Just as with my computer, this would mean that if anything went wrong, GLaDOS could be reinstalled from a backup copy of the program she is encased in, her immortality ensured as long as there is sufficient power to run her hardware.  In creating a backup of the GLaDOS program, the human within the program is denied death; her personality and memories are stored to allow her to live forever.  Even if there is a malfunction (such as occurs at the end of Portal, when GLaDOS is beaten by Chell and appears to die), GLaDOS (and therefore Caroline) is still denied death, as there is the possibility of the program being restarted by a third party, which is exactly what happens in the second game: GLaDOS is reawakened by one of the dampening spheres created to supress her intelligence.  Whilst there is certainly an exploration of the use of Posthuman technology in the game—considering the ramifications of a corrupt artificial intelligence on the humans around it— I was disturbed by the realisation that there is no possibility of escape for this woman, even death is denied her.  This is heightened when GLaDOS relates her perspective of the final battle in the first game, stating that a feedback loop in the backup of the program caused her to repeatedly relive her death until she was reanimated by Wheatley.  Like her Gothic predecessors, Caroline is not only ‘physically and psychologically constrained’ an ordeal that leaves her ‘scarred by madness, and locked into monstrosity’ (Stein 1983, 123), but there is no rescue for her, no means of regaining her body and her life.

Donna Heiland notes, in Gothic and Gender that to ‘inhabit a woman’s body is to be a Gothic heroine’, before going on to say that this is the case, unless ‘we change the story’ (Heiland 2004, 158).  This change forms the basis of the second part of Caroline’s Gothic incarnation; being taken from her body and imprisoned in the computer changes her from being a Gothic heroine, a victim of patriarchal oppression, to being a Gothic monster, as Caroline becomes GLaDOS.  At this point, the modest, innocent Caroline, along with the predetermined and monolithic understanding of femininity as nurturing, maternal, and protective is exchanged for the contradictory understanding of the female as antagonist, with GLaDOS insanity and need for revenge transforming the positive feminine virtues for their transgressive opposites.  Femininity takes on a darker, distinctly monstrous aspect when GLaDOS floods the enrichment centre with deadly neurotoxin in revenge for her incarceration, refuting her status as a Gothic heroine and resulting in her deactivation. 

Once reawakened and along with being implanted with the male dampening spheres, GLaDOS memory is also inhibited; her ‘human identity [is literally] stolen, wiped out and replaced with a grim purpose that denies [her] previous identity’ (Dryden 2007, 161), she is no longer Caroline, and even her humanity is taken from her.  It is this version of the character that exists throughout the first Portal game, and during the first part of the second game.  As the antagonist and the Gothic monster, GLaDOS takes on a distinctly anti-feminist role, with Chell being taunted by GLaDOS.  Throughout Portal and Portal 2, GLaDOS makes repeated comments designed to undermine Chell’s self-worth.  These include comments such as ‘This plate must not be calibrated to someone of your…generous…ness.  I’ll add a few zeroes to the maximum weight’, and ‘Here come the test results.  You are a horrible person.  I’m serious, that’s what it says: a horrible person’ and even ‘the birth parents you are trying to reach do not love you’.  Chell’s femininity and humanity is scrutinised and belittled by GLaDOS, whose thoughts, as we know, are controlled by the implants in her operating system, which dampen her intelligence, and by extension her femininity.  This changes at the point GLaDOS becomes PotatOS – the third incarnation of the Gothic female in this game, which I will return to in a couple of minutes.

As PotatOS, the dampening spheres are removed from GLaDOS programming, and it is GLaDOS herself that articulates the futility of insulting Chell as a woman, and as a person.  Here again, we see the influence of male influence in the game universe, as well as in contemporary culture.  Rosalind Gill considers that women are as much to blame as men for ‘the monitoring and surveying’ of the female body and it is through this that we judge ‘the performance of successful femininity’ (Gill 2007, 155).  This self-surveillance is found throughout contemporary media, especially in television and magazines, in which ‘bodily shape, size, muscle tone, […] home, finances etc. are rendered into problems that necessitate ongoing and constant monitoring and labour’ (Gill 2007, 155).  ‘Women’, Gill writes, ‘simply cannot win’ (Gill 2007, 157), suggesting a gendered competition that involves the use of women to vilify the female body and to reinforce the traditional, male notion of what constitutes a successful woman.

The third incarnation of Gothic femininity occurs when GLaDOS is once again removed from her body, this time the computer system that she was originally imprisoned in, and changed into PotatOS.  Usually, release from imprisonment would signal the emancipation of the Gothic female and a return to normality; in Portal 2, this is complicated by the fact that GLaDOS is returned to the Gothic female state, through re-imprisonment—in a potato.  Whilst this appears far-fetched, the premise of the imprisonment is factually correct.  A potato can be used to create enough energy to power a clock for example, and since the game’s release, a working PotatOS model has been created, that uses an actual potato as the battery to power the model.  However, the energy produced by the potato renders GLaDOS incapable of more than thought and speech, she is no longer in control of the Enrichment facility, and is rendered completely powerless.  This incarceration as PotatOS, then, signals a loss of power for the monstrous GLaDOS; she is left completely passive and helpless in this incarnation, and it is through this helplessness, her reliance on Chell, and the loss of the dampening spheres that modify her very thoughts that GLaDOS is able to rediscover her original personality—Caroline, her femininity, and her humanity.  Here the player sees the game not only as a critique of female oppression by a patriarchal society, but offers a redemption of the female character as she refutes the masculine traits imposed on her, and ‘resignifies her feminine position [and] regains control over her life’ (Genz 2007, 75).  GLaDOS, as PotatOS, is stripped of her omniscience and power, and in rediscovering her original personality come to terms with her treatment at the hands of the long dead, oppressive males of Apeture Science, and also with her own behaviour as GLaDOS, the Gothic Monster.  This is most clearly symbolised in the epilogue of the second game, in which GLaDOS, who has been returned to her monstrous body, releases Chell instead of killing her, telling her ‘thank God you are all right’ and that ‘all along, you were my best friend’, her humanity, and her ability for empathy restored. 

During this third part of the game, GLaDOS gains what Fred Botting calls ‘a “posthumane” identification with the other’, meaning that ‘from female abjection and otherness, from corporeal destruction and rebirth, a new subject appears to be resurrected, with an ethical, compassionate spirit’ (Botting 2002, 290-291), and whilst the reinstated GLaDOS continues to refute this compassion as part of her character, her actions in rescuing Chell from death, and releasing her from the enrichment centre show her as having compassion for another human, granting her the freedom that GLaDOS still cannot have, despite her emancipation.

In the Portal games, the representation of the female figure is explored through the paradoxical role of the same character as the Gothic heroine, the Gothic monster, and the liberated woman.  Claire Knowles writes that

the potential for feminine empowerment has always existed within the heroines of Gothic fiction, […] but, whereas earlier heroines […] are constrained  in their actions by the limitations placed upon them by the patriarchal society in which they live, twenty-first-century women are constrained only by their perception of their own limitations (Knowles 2007, 149).

This is the stance the games take; GLaDOS is able, through her return to the role of Gothic heroine, the loss of patriarchal control in the form of the dampening spheres, and her collaboration with a strong female, to come to an understanding of her own feminine power and this frees her from the subjection that she has been held in thrall to, and allows her to come to terms with the loss of her body, and her immortality, noting that she ‘had a pretty good life’ as she does so. 

            The Gothic has always been a forerunner in exploring female empowerment and considering the presence of patriarchy within culture.  This game, despite its appearance, can be placed within the Gothic exploration of femininity and the understanding of being female, both within a fictional capacity, and within the wider cultural remit of feminist studies.  Using the antagonist as the principal character within the narrative, the player is forced to consider the role of the human trapped inside the computer as the Gothic heroine through the embedded narrative, as well as the Gothic monster and the empowered female who has shaken off her male oppressors and established herself as a symbolically free entity, although she will forever remain trapped by her long dead male captors as a genetic lifeform and digital operating system.