Game-Changer
You are a robot. You stand beside a sealed door. In your hand, you hold a gun. A gun that doesn’t shoot bullets. Instead, it shoots…portals. Doorways that allow you to teleport, instantly, between two distant locations. You have to get through the sealed door. But how? When you flip that switch on the other side of the room, the door opens — but it closes by the time you can get to it. You sit and think. What if you shot a red portal on the wall next to the door, and a blue portal on the wall next to the switch? Then you could flip the switch without getting too far from the door. You try it. It works. You just beat Level 1.
Portal 2 is probably the best video game I’ve ever played. It didn’t just blow my mind. It changed my life. In case the rambling and incoherent paragraph above this one didn’t give you a good sense of the gameplay, feel free to watch this charming commercial for it: http://bit.ly/glKiuW. If that’s not enough, try this one: http://bit.ly/glKiuW. If you didn’t click either of those links, just read this: it’s a puzzle game. You use your “portal gun” to reason your way out of one sealed room and into another.
But describing what the game is doesn’t convey how it feels, and that’s the part that changed my life. In short, it makes you feel like a genius. Like a true, empirical, scientific genius — as if someone combined the brains of Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla and smushed it right into your skull. When you look around that sealed room and suddenly, it all clicks, and you know exactly how to point that laser at that mirror and refract it through those portals – you experience something transcendent.
The experience was particularly transcendent for me. I’ve been playing video games for a long time, but I’ve never bought a “puzzle game.” That’s because the left side of my brain has always been a little scrawny. High school math gave me posttraumatic stress disorder. I once asked my Dad how many quarters there were in a soccer game (which he politely pointed out was “idiotic on a number of levels.”) Needless to say, the idea of a “puzzle game” appeals to me about as much as the idea of a Phil Collins concert followed by back-to-back screenings of Notting Hill. If I ever played a game like Zelda or Resident Evil that unexpectedly had a puzzle in it, I’d just turn the controller over to my sister. She’d solve it in a matter of seconds, and then I could go back to blasting my way through the Zombie apocalypse.
Portal 2 changed all that. It wasn’t the dark humor, the voice acting, or the graphics, all of which have received extraordinary praise. It was the sense that only you could have devised that solution. Only you could have perfectly manipulated gravity, friction, and momentum to get through that sealed door. It wasn’t like other games. It wasn’t a puzzle in a world. It was world that was a puzzle.
For the first time ever, I was relishing an opportunity to flex my weakest neurological muscles. I learned to love something I’d always hated. Because I was good at it.
Moral of the story?
The best creative doesn’t make you think differently about things. It makes you think differently about you. And only one medium can really do that. We call it “digital.”
- by Peter Weinberg
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