I'm surprised at some of the hasty comments here. Sure, the article is wrapped-up in obscure academic language, but the main points are valid.
Portal is not like any other FPS. (This is obviously true, if you know anything about Portal.) The main claim is that FPSs tend to be "masculine", in many ways, and that Portal is unlike FPSs in those ways.
1. In FPSs you have a gun that's meant for killing. In Portal you have a gun that doesn't inherently kill (but can be very powerful if used cunningly).
2. FPSs typically have military or monster themes. Not so Portal.
3. In FPSs you typically play a male character. When the lead is a female character she's super-hot and sexy and is meant for teenage guys to drool over. (Think Lara Croft.) Not so Portal, with a not-particularly-sexy female character, and she's not even on screen enough to drool over much.
4. In FPSs you typically shoot bullets. In Portal you shoot portals. (And here the author makes an admittedly lame joke: "Heehee the bullets are penises and the portals/holes are vaginas".)
5. In FPSs, the enemy typically wants to kill you. In Portal, the AI wants to emotionally manipulate you.
6. In FPSs, you kill the enemy. In Portal, you outsmart the AI.
7. In FPSs, you typically kill monsters/Nazis/terrorists. In Portal, you disable these cute little turrets by kicking them and knocking them over.
8. In FPSs, your sidekick is some guy who's your best buddy. In Portal it's an inanimate block.
What the author is trying to get across is that Portal is unlike any other FPS, which is indisputable. The author's take is that Portal takes the quintessential "masculine" videogame, the FPS, and makes it a little less "masculine". I don't think that's too controversial.
I assumed the article was a joke. Yea it sounds about right but it draws no meaningful conclusions. Anyway, if you look at something like Metroid Prime you can see most of the assumptions don't really hold up across the FPS spectrum.
PS: Be careful when using "tend to be X" because you often end up saying thinks that are logically equivalent to "blue cars are blue."
"Rather than skintight latex or a chainmail bikini, she wears a plain orange jump suit that is eerily reminiscent of those worn by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay."
Way to read too much into the game. Half-life features a hero called Gordon Freeman who wears an orange armor body suit thing. She is trying to escape the lab, and Freeman was trying to escape the lab as well.
"The unobtrusive presentation of the female protagonist doesn't force a male gender perspective on the player as is the norm in FPS games."
What is the writer talking about?? In most other FPS games you can't tell if the character is a male or not either. All you can see is a gun and hands. How is that forcing the male gender perspective on the player?
"she comes to represent man's attempt to construct an idealized mother figure through the cold logic of science"
Ok, I'm done reading that clap-trap. Science always gets the shit end of the stick when lay-people discuss it. It's either evil and responsible for very bad things, or it's cold and it ignores people, or it's unnatural.
I'm not down on the humanities - I double majoried in CS and History. I love the humanities - art, literature, history: these things are important.
Women studies are not among the "real" humanities - this is a made up, politically correct, politically slanted body of "study" that, without justification, denies the importance of most of the useful arts and sciences, an simultaneously congratulates itself (and its practitioners) on being far more clever-than-though.
Witness the very first sentence of the review:
> Warning: The text you are about to read contains heady intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone made queasy by the discussion of feminist film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers.
Oh, yeah, that review was chock full of "heady" intellectual discourse all right!
In fact, it was filled with the four or five common tropes of feminist / culture studies "deconstruction". I could write this crap in my sleep. Throw around the word "symbol" and "signifier", the word "privelege" or "Other" (must be capitalized) or "hierarchy" (or better yet "hegemony"), and talk about how up "subverts" down, wet "subverts" dry, red "subverts" green, and drop in one or two entirely irrelevant political references to the conservative devil of the hour (in the 1980s, this meant Reagan, in the early 21st century, it meant Rumsfeld or Bush, now it means Cheney or Bush, etc.), mix in a half cup of cheap Freudianism, and away you go.
> Women studies are not among the "real" humanities
It can be, it just depends whether you base conclusions on a respectable level of evidence or non-falsifiable mumbo-jumbo. There's lots of bad work done in more established humanities as well. I'm often entertained by suggestions of such things as "modern techniques in history".
It's clearly a very forced analysis, and, like you said, just drips with cliched, volumeless argument. That being said, I'm pretty sure it was posted with some degree of self-referential humor.
The idea of analyzing Valve games critically is pretty good, though. They're one of the few studios which makes games worth analyzing! I'd like to see articles like those.
I can make a forced analysis of System Shock 2. Starting also with the broken pseudo-maternal AI that guide you through the first half of the game before spoilerspoilerspoiler.
Within my limited experience with talking to artists and poets, I don't think artists deliberately set out to include specific symbols inside a work. Too much left-brained stuff. Which I find funny as a deconstruction essay requires you to spell out exactly what it is you are talking about. Kills the mood.
Yet most artists that are any good at their craft easily tap into something that hits you in the gut. I think Portals is one of those games. I have not played it, but I bet it does mess around in your head in ways beyond just messing with your sense of space-time. I wasn't too hot on playing it, however, after reading the article, I want get a copy now.
I never particularly liked the modern methods of "deconstruction" in the humanities. It gets geeky very fast, yet there's nothing solid underneath. Unlike code, you're only talking about symbols -- whose power lie solely in their ability to push emotional buttons in people.
Most of the less obvious and academic-y stuff is contained in the later parts of the article. Shooting portals that opens up to another part of the map is pretty obvious for anyone familiar with Freud. Less obvious is the broken AI that has a pseudo-maternal personality, the robots that speak in voices of little boys that can easily kill you, and the gigantic cube that you carry around. You only use that to flip switches, and you are encouraged by the AI to form an emotional attachment to it.
Seen in that way and having read the article all the way through, I agree with the author that most FPS force a male gender perspective on the player ... though I find that idea rather unsettling.
Sung by a passive aggressive AI who you kill in the end. The AI and a weighted companion (an inanimate cube) are the only other characters in the game.
Excellent observations, however I think it's particularly cumbersome to attempt to explain its novelty in terms of masculine and feminine. It confuses both the game itself and the meanings of the term "masculine" and "feminine."
Portal is revolutionary but not for it's gender roles. It's revolutionary for turning FPS into a puzzle game on crack. Go back and play with the developer commentary.
Look at me still talking when there's science to do...
If you've got better things to do (like working on your startup), but want a satisfying 'pick up put down' diversion, Portal's the best thing you could probably pick.
Portal is not like any other FPS. (This is obviously true, if you know anything about Portal.) The main claim is that FPSs tend to be "masculine", in many ways, and that Portal is unlike FPSs in those ways.
1. In FPSs you have a gun that's meant for killing. In Portal you have a gun that doesn't inherently kill (but can be very powerful if used cunningly).
2. FPSs typically have military or monster themes. Not so Portal.
3. In FPSs you typically play a male character. When the lead is a female character she's super-hot and sexy and is meant for teenage guys to drool over. (Think Lara Croft.) Not so Portal, with a not-particularly-sexy female character, and she's not even on screen enough to drool over much.
4. In FPSs you typically shoot bullets. In Portal you shoot portals. (And here the author makes an admittedly lame joke: "Heehee the bullets are penises and the portals/holes are vaginas".)
5. In FPSs, the enemy typically wants to kill you. In Portal, the AI wants to emotionally manipulate you.
6. In FPSs, you kill the enemy. In Portal, you outsmart the AI.
7. In FPSs, you typically kill monsters/Nazis/terrorists. In Portal, you disable these cute little turrets by kicking them and knocking them over.
8. In FPSs, your sidekick is some guy who's your best buddy. In Portal it's an inanimate block.
What the author is trying to get across is that Portal is unlike any other FPS, which is indisputable. The author's take is that Portal takes the quintessential "masculine" videogame, the FPS, and makes it a little less "masculine". I don't think that's too controversial.