Embodiment and Artificial Intelligence in Valve Software’s

Portal

Abstract

Valve Software's first Portal game (2007) provides a locus for a

variety of concerns about the potential implications of AI and

games as they impact on notions of embodiment and

artificiality. Portal disrupts and intermingles the three

distinct categories of player, player character (avatar), and

artificial intelligence by deploying subtle self-referential

cues and parody which call attention to the game’s

artificiality. At the same time, this technique draws the

player into an affective relationship with GLaDOS, the

scripted AI construct who acts as the game’s villain.

Moreover, the game repeatedly points to the fact that

interacting with the game constitutes a cyborgic relationship.

As the game proceeds, the player’s perspective is repeatedly

shifted and reconstructed by these lines of rhetoric, and by

the eponymous portals which form the game’s core mechanic. The

cumulative effect is to cause the player to question what it

means to be an embodied subject interacting with the game, to

wonder what qualifies as “intelligence” (whether “artificial”

or not), and to interrogate the extent to which our

relationship with the game world makes us something more (or

less) than human.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, Portal, embodiment, cyborg,

artificiality

In order to induct the player into convincing simulations [1],

which Espen Aarseth describes as “complex systems based on

logical rules” (2001, para. 5), most single-player computer

games rely on artificial intelligence to convincingly control

the behaviours and actions of the player character’s opponents

in a variety of scenarios [2]. Recent successful examples

include the Call of Duty series and Bethesda’s Softworks’s

Gamebryo engine games (Oblivion, 2006; Fallout, 2008; Fallout: New

Vegas, 2010). In the former, the player is expected to make

strategic decisions based on the quantity and disposition of

his opponents as he fights through a simulation of a modern

battleground. In the latter games, the player is presented

with the choice of fighting or communicating with non-player

characters (NPCs) in order to achieve various goals—a

structure which Jesper Juul (2002) has referred to as “an open

game (a game of emergence) with built-in quests (progression

structures).” In both instances, the computer-controlled

characters are expected to react ad hoc to the range of actions

available (through the avatar) to the player; they are judged

based on their ability to manifest appropriate human

characteristics and emotions—including indecision, anger,

cunning and fear—in response to player input, in what amounts

to a specialized application of the Turing Test.

Manuel De Landa has suggested that “[i]n adversarial

situations,” such as those provided by combat simulations,

“being forced to treat a machine as an intentional system may

be considered as a good criterion for mechanical intelligence”

(1991). That is, if we believe that our opponents are

possessed of “mechanical intelligence” then, for the duration

of the game, they are. The ostensibly authentic behaviour of

AI encourages the player to anthropomorphize his opponents (to

treat them as “intentional systems”) in order to predict their

actions and defeat them. Simultaneously, however, the player’s

empathy with computer-controlled images (including the player

character) profoundly complicates the relativity of the AI,

the avatar, and the player. As Hans Belting (2005) writes,

“from early on, humans were tempted to communicate with images

as with living bodies and also to accept them in the place of

bodies. In that case, we actually animate their media in order

to experience images as alive.” This study negotiates this

problematic relationship with specific reference to Valve

Software's first Portal game (2007), which provides a locus for

a variety of concerns about the potential implications of AI

and games as they impact on notions of embodiment and

artificiality.

From the outset, Portal works hard to create a strong link

between the player, the avatar (Chell) and the AI (GLaDOS) in

control of the underground Enrichment Center in which the game

takes place. However, it differs from the more “conventional”

games mentioned above because AI in Portal is deployed self-

consciously to ironic effect: aside from stationary, automatic

turrets, there are no computer-controlled opponents to

interfere with the player’s avatar. In fact, despite the

frequent threats it makes against Chell, GLaDOS is essentially

a scripted character, disqualifying any potential for genuine

emergent interaction. The game disguises GLaDOS’s passivity by

emphasizing the humanity of the AI whilst working to limit

that of the player. In an interview for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Eric

Wolpaw, writer for Portal, explains that “[y]ou get to know

GLaDOS over the course of the game and, hopefully, you feel

like your actions are really putting her through the wringer

emotionally” (Walker, 2007, para. 10).

This assertion is instantiated by the final confrontation with

GLaDOS, when the AI suggests to Chell that “[t]he difference

between us is that I can feel pain.” When Chell does not

reply, the AI sulkily continues: “You don’t even care, do you?

Did you hear me? I said you don’t care. Are you listening?”

However, the player’s only available choices are either to

stop playing or to continue, the latter course of action

inevitably leading to the destruction of GLaDOS and the

completion of the game. Neither option allows the player,

through Chell, to vocalize a response to the loquacious AI;

the player is limited to entirely performative communication,

circumscribed by the capabilities of the avatar. By

privileging the AI’s sense of being whilst eliciting but

necessarily denying the expression of the player’s emotional,

verbal response, the narrative works against the common-sense

belief that “[c]omputers... have no ‘hard-wired’ motivation

for awareness [and] they do not complain if we try to kill

them” (Pepperell, 2003, p. 140). The affectivity of the AI and

the human agent is rhetorically reversed, obfuscating the

differential relationship between Chell and GLaDOS.

Portal is quick to make reference to its enactment of such

reversals, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of the Weighted

Companion Cube (fig. 1). In-game, the inert cube fulfils no

purpose other than providing Chell with a weight to place on a

button. However, once this purpose has been served, GLaDOS

forces the player to incinerate the cube in order to progress.

This is made difficult by the game’s insistence that the

player perceive the cube as sentient. GLaDOS ironically points

out that:

the symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center

testing are

superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and

hallucinations. The

Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube

will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.

The reference to (and implicit mockery of) the

anthropomorphization of AI controlled NPCs in conventional

games needs little explanation. “Enrichment Center testing”

becomes an analogy for the activity of gameplay. Our

projection onto the cube, the avatar, or more obviously

“living” AI constructs are all shown to be examples of our

irrational susceptibility to pareidolia, which is encouraged

by Portal. When the automatic turrets are destroyed, for

example, they inform the player (in a sing-song, childlike

voice) that there are “[n]o hard feelings” and that they

“don't blame you,” purposefully evoking the player’s guilt

guilt at the destruction of nothing more than simulacra in a

fictional space. Portal’s self-parody serves to illustrate the

artificiality of our relationship with objects and characters

in the game world; as Belting suggests, “when visual media

become self-referential, they turn against their images and

steal our attention from them.” As we undergo these moments of

extra-diegetic weightlessness, the game space reveals itself

as a simulacrum even as it draws the player further into its

network of “sick relationship[s].”

Figure 1: the Weighted Companion Cube (Portal, Valve Software,

2007)

One of the most crucial (and distorted) of these relationships

is that which is established between the player and Chell

(fig. 2). Laurie Taylor, examining the experience of gameplay

through the work of Lacan, has theorized that “the player in

play is present in more than one spatial domain.” She explains

that “the subject exists in multiple areas in such a way as to

be able to effect change in that (or those) other areas while

also being able to effect change in the subject's physical

space,” a state which she refers to as “telepresence” (2003,

para. 2-3). This segue from the motions of the player to those

of the avatar depends on the player’s subconscious acceptance

of the avatar as their digitized representation. However,

difficulty arises when the player is confronted by the avatar

gazing from the screen, as Taylor discusses with reference to

The X-Files Game (Hyperbole Studios, 1998). In Portal, this is

exacerbated by the physics system of the game, which often

results in the player viewing Chell, through the eponymous

portals, from above, below or behind at a greater or lesser

distance. Encountering their avatar in this way compounds the

player’s sense of uncanny displacement. Our embodiment as

Chell is at once logical—it makes sense within the narrative

of the game—and nonsensical, because in “real life” we seldom

see ourselves from behind in real time. The authenticity of

Chell’s positioning within game space is affirmed, even as the

game once again points to its own artificiality by embedding

the player vicariously in impossible situations, refracted

through difficult perspectives.

Figure 2: Chell gazes back at the player.

Telepresence also relies on the ergonomic naturalisation of

the computer interface, which must instantly and accurately

convert the analogue motions of the player’s hands into

digital signals which are then interpreted and calculated by

the computer, resulting in a change in the analogue display

produced on the screen: analogue to digital and back again. N.

Katherine Hayles has called this an “Oreo” structure. As she

poetically explains:

Wherever different embodied materialities are linked, analog

resemblance is likely to enter the picture, for it is the

dynamic that mediates between the noise of embodiment and the

clarity of form. (2005, p. 207-8)

In this view, the player character occupies a space somewhere

between the digital artificiality of the AI and the affective

humanity of the player: the disparity between GLaDOS’s

“clarity of form” and the player’s “noise of embodiment” is

mediated by Chell. In more functional terms, the link between

the player and the game is formalized by the “analog

resemblance” between the player’s motions and the movements of

their avatar. The player must contract themselves into this

complex feedback loop in order to interact with GLaDOS. In the

same way that the player anticipates and reacts to in-game

events, so too must the game program appear to react to the

player; the convergence of both is crucial to the production

of an “authentic” (and therefore enjoyable) game experience.

In Donna Haraway’s locution, this feedback loop constitutes a

cyborgic relationship. She writes:

It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation

between human and machine... One consequence is that our sense

of connection to our tools is heightened... The machine is us,

our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. (1991, p. 177-8,

180)

The player and the machine become interchangeable in the

moment of play. Because there is no definable cutoff point

between human and tool (“the machine is us”), there is no

fundamental difference between the embodiment of the avatar

and that of the player—they can both be understood as modules

interacting in a fluid, autopoietic system. Portal displays its

awareness of this problematic notion by depicting Chell as a

cyborgically modified human (fig. 3), a metaphor for the

player-in-play. The mechanical enhancements grafted onto

Chell’s legs are integrated to the extent that they have

become an extension of her body, no different from the orange

jumpsuit she wears. The flowing metal curves mock the shape of

her legs, altering (and improving) her posture and allowing

her to fall from great heights without sustaining damage. The

Aperture Science Handheld Portal Gun is similarly integral:

the gun is the only part of Chell which is constantly visible

to the player. Hovering persistently at the bottom of the

screen, it becomes an “aspect of our embodiment,” a vital tool

controlled by the player’s manipulation of the computer mouse.

Joel Dinerstein, reading Andy Clark, has suggested that “[i]f

the thought of moving a prosthetic leg creates motion in it,

the mind accepts it as part of ‘self’” (2006, p. 585). It is

no great leap to suppose that the player’s control of the

portal gun, through Chell and the computer interface, leads to

a similar acceptance of the external, artificial tool as a

naturalized constituent of the embodied “self,” ultimately

rendering the player’s body boundary as permeable, shifting,

and subjective.

Figure 3: Chell the Cyborg

This blurred identity in the instance of play is further

confused by GLaDOS’s bizarre addresses. Once Chell has passed

successfully through Test Chamber 16, the AI congratulates

her: “Well done, android. The Enrichment Center once again

reminds you that Android Hell is a real place where you will

be sent at the first sign of defiance.” This statement at

first appears to be a glitch in GLaDOS’s programming, an

example of the fallibility of an AI fed with incorrect data.

Considering the player’s position in light of Haraway’s

conception of the cyborg, however, it can be read as a shrewd

comment on the synonymy of man and machine as increasingly

recognised by post-Enlightenment scientific/ philosophical

discourse. To GLaDOS, Chell is no more than “a mathematical

error” in need of correction. The AI claims to have Chell’s

“brain scanned and permanently backed up in case something

terrible happens,” and once the backup is deleted, she assures

Chell that her destruction is final: “You’re still shuffling

around a little, but believe me, you’re dead. The part of you

that could have survived indefinately [sic] is gone.” GLaDOS

gives voice to the computational view of the human mind, which

describes brains as “processors of encounters and observations

that can be reprogrammed or even erased” (Seaman, 2007, p.

248). As Fred Dretske writes:

Brains have their own coding systems, their own way of

representing the objects... with which its (or our) thoughts

and calculations are occupied. In this respect a person is no

different [from] a computer. (2005, p. 284)

Given GLaDOS’s position as a “strong AI” construct and the

epitome of (proper noun) Science, its adoption of this stance

is predictable. The AI’s assertion that Chell’s body might

have been replaceable—its destruction is irrelevant if her

brain can still be uploaded, downloaded or copied—verbalizes

Portal’s questioning of the importance of fleshly embodiment,

which has so far remained implicit in the formal structure of

gameplay. As Myra J. Seaman writes, the “alternative, or

extended, human... reveals certain cultural anxieties about

embodiment – perhaps most especially when that embodiment is

rejected or overcome in the attempt to release a supposedly

‘pure’ cognition” (2007, p. 247). Portal exploits such anxieties

for dramatic effect. At the most frantic moments in play (the

final action sequence is intensified by a countdown), when the

player’s awareness of their own physicality is overridden by

the mental demands of telepresent interaction, GLaDOS

describes (and instantiates) an alluring alternative to human

embodiment. Even as the player manipulates the “flesh” of the

avatar in order to destroy the AI, we are led to believe that

GLaDOS will be able to transfer (or resurrect) its programmed

consciousness into a new form, effecting a return from the

dead which has been made unavailable to Chell [3].

Further comparisons between the AI and the player in Portal can

be explored if we read the concept of emergence in Artificial

Life (alife) systems back into the experience of gameplay. In

her analysis of Karl Sims’s “Evolved Virtual Creatures,”

Katherine Hayles notices that “in some runs of the program

creatures evolved who achieved locomotion by exploiting a bug

in the way conservation of momentum was defined in the world's

artifactual physics” (2005, p. 195). This is an example of

emergent behaviour which was not predicted by the designer but

which, to the creatures, constitutes an acceptable adaptation

within the rules of the program: the creatures cannot know

which are “good” (intended) exploits and which are “bad”

(unintended). Comparatively, given the amount of players to

which any computer game is exposed, it is inevitable that

emergent solutions will evolve which creatively (and often

aberrantly) overcome obstacles set within it. Jesper Juul uses

the examples of “[t]he teamplay required in Counter-strike [sic]

or the advantage of working in groups in EverQuest,” and also

“[d]ominant, complete strategies” which “will always lead to

victory” (2002, p. 326). Portal indulges the player’s drive to

adaptively interpret the rules by setting illusively

“impossible” puzzles: GLaDOS describes Test Chamber 9 as

“unsolvable,” informing the player that “quitting at this

point is a perfectly reasonable response.” By stubbornly

completing the puzzle, we are encouraged to believe that we

have broken the rules of the game, when in fact, like an alife

organism, we have merely worked within them in an apparently—

but in this case not actually—unforeseen way.

The final third of the game, in which Chell ventures “behind

the scenes” of the Enrichment Center, is designed to evoke a

similar sense of rebellion, as is the destruction of the AI.

Throughout, however, GLaDOS (and, by extension, the design

team) remains in control as the omniscient and omnipresent

narrativising force of the game. In Hayles’s analysis, “we

anthropomorphize [Sims’s] virtual creatures while they

computationalize us” (2005, p. 194). When applied to Portal,

this dynamic of a reciprocal relationship becomes more

complicated. Due to the idiosyncrasies of gameplay, we

(functionally) become computationalized creatures. At the same

time, we are expected to empathize with an AI which effusively

delineates our affectivity as an inauthentic response to

artificial in-game events. In this (admittedly compelling)

atmosphere of confusion and reversal, boundaries between AI

and human intelligence are effectively dissolved. If we must

anthropomorphize images, then Portal (through the figure of

GLaDOS) insists on interrogating the object of our projection

and, perhaps more disturbingly, the subject from which

projection occurs.

It is difficult to provide a comprehensive assessment of the

shifting definitions of artificiality and authenticity caused

by AI/ human interactions. As Robert Chodat states, “[n]obody

denies that since the middle decades of the twentieth century,

research into artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped our

accounts of meaning, mind and consciousness” (2006, p. 686)

and we cannot doubt that it will continue to do so. Given the

relative novelty of the computer game medium (and the critical

framework surrounding it), it is more difficult still to

assess how gameplay affects embodiment through telepresent

interaction. Nevertheless, games such as Portal can at least be

used as sounding boards for the depiction of AI in popular

media. If computer games continue to provide us with a

spectacle driven by market forces, then several assumptions

can be made: the application of AI will become increasingly

refined; errors in the medium which draw our attention away

from the image will be ironed out; computer interfaces will

become increasingly intuitive (as the Nintendo Wii and

Microsoft’s Kinect already demonstrate); and graphics will

improve, all of which will lead to a greater depth (and ease)

of anthropomorphization.

The most apt conclusion can perhaps be drawn from analogizing

the final moments of Portal, which sees Chell’s triumphant

emergence from the Enrichment Center—the success of the

embodied, (mostly) human subject—marred by the resurrection of

GLaDOS as a series of sinister, eyeball-like orbs. The

successive updating of AI in increasingly sentient, integrated

and disembodied guises must be accommodated by paradigm shifts

in what constitutes authentic interactivity (for example,

between two bodies, between a body and a computer, or between

a body and itself). We must also ask what it is that marks the

game-world as artificial; how far our body boundaries extend

into, or are made permeable by the game; and, ultimately, what

it is (if it must be something) that signals the difference

between human and computer intelligence.

Notes

[1] My own conception of a simulation in this essay is

elaborated from Jean Baudrillard’s definition of simulation as

“the generation by models of a real without origin or reality:

a hyperreal” (1988, p. 166).

[2] The terms ‘player character’ and ‘avatar’ will henceforth

be used interchangeably to describe the same thing: the

embodied, in-game representation of the agency and actions of

the player/user.

[3] Indeed, this is confirmed by the song “Still Alive” which

closes the game, featuring a highly emotive GLaDOS “doing

Science.” GLaDOS also returns in Portal 2 (Valve Software,

2011).

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