Portal Trek (or: The Internet's 5000th Article About Portal)

There was a recurring theme in Star Trek: The Next Generation of evolution to a new stage of life, consisting of some kind of psychedelic mental energy phase that transcends space and time, dissolves all borders, and lets us soup up our warp drive engines through sheer imagination. Wesley Crusher was supposedly a mutant harbinger of this future humankind. 

This aspect of the show was summed up best by Q in the last episode: "The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. ...For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."

The individual storylines contributing to this subplot were not always good, and it had a kind of 60s naivete to it, but I always liked this idea and wish more had been done with it, including the oft-maligned character of Wesley.

There's times when I play the game Portal that I feel like I'm super future man Wesley Crusher. And these are the best moments. I step through a portal on ground level and emerge from a point high on the wall, about fifty feet up, and begin to fall. Approaching terminal velocity, I look down and create a portal on the floor below me. I slip through and once again emerge from the portal high above, only now I'm falling sideways. Before gravity can reassert itself and overcome my momentum, I've landed on a distant platform, having abused the fabric of space-time to create a catapult. The laws of physics shrug. All this is compulsory, and the game designers have cleverly arranged the levels so that you will discover tricks like this, but you still feel like a genius when you do.

Portal is the smartest game I've ever played. Not that it's challenging - compared to old-school puzzlers like Lolo it's a cakewalk.* But the way that every aspect of the design stretches the imagination is unparalleled. Even more amazing is the economy with which this is accomplished. There is only one character - a sinister computer, a sarcastic version of HAL 9000 that acts as narrator and adversary. The heroine says nothing and would not even need to have a face were it not for the fact that you often end up looking at yourself through the portals. A sparse but evocative story is told through your antagonist's witty comments and a handful of fascinating environments.

Over the past decade, a lot of game designers have gotten carried away in their attempts to make video games a serious storytelling medium, and mostly the result has been overwrought time-wasting nonsense. Portal, meanwhile, has maybe a minute or two of unskippable dialog, and everything else is icing on the cake.** Using extreme minimalism, Portal strikes the imagination such that you come away wondering about the implications of everything it showed you.

The typical rules of video games are also parodied and exploited in fantastic ways. One stage requires you to get past a series of obstacles using a box, a standard trope of game puzzles. But Portal's sinister computer manipulates you, providing a box with pink hearts on it, planting a suggestion that humans are known to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, and then callously forcing you to "euthanize" your box before completing the stage. World 5-3 of Super Mario Bros. 3 has a well-loved item that has to be given up at the end, but that game never implies that you should feel bad about reaching the end of the level!

Star Trek may be naively optimistic about humanity's evolution, but Portal at least justifies holding out hope for great things to come in the evolution of video games. If my wishes are fulfilled, maybe some time in the not-too-distant future I'll be writing an article here about how some game makes me feel like I'm Odo.

*As is well known by this point, the cake is a lie.

**You will be baked, and then there will be cake.

Trekkie Confessional

I've been revisiting Star Trek recently, following the realization that I could rent all the special features DVDs from my local public library. The Star Trek franchise is dear to me, even though it went a little off the rails toward the end. As I've been watching special features and the occasional episode, I've been contemplating things like "What went right for the character of Julian Bashir that went wrong for the character of Wesley Crusher?" and other fannish notions. I love behind-the-scenes stuff so this has been great fun for me.

It's been said many times before, but it's nice to see a future where humanity figures out the whole civilization thing and solves issues of disease and hunger. I'm a utopian at heart; I feel that it should be possible to get everyone to coexist happily if you can just kick a few close-minded people in the seat of the pants and get them to pay attention to themselves and to the world. I know, in my realist's ego, that people are too stuck in their own narrow reality tunnels to even agree on what utopia is, let along create it, but my intuition says otherwise, and it may be because Trek has defined my idea of the future.

My favorite people on Trek are the outsiders, the Stranger in a Strange Land types - Spock, Data, and Odo. Alienation sums up how I relate to most human beings, so naturally I identify with the aliens, and appreciate that they are given their place in Trek and allowed to be weird, free of judgment. And when they face some kind of threat, or discrimination, or accusation of inanimacy, their friends stand up for them. Friends who are more normal but no less open-minded.

Probably the only scifi show that strikes closer to my heart is Doctor Who, but I'll save that for another time.

Ps. Various dictionaries, via Google, are telling me that "inanimacy" is not a word, but I don't like the sound of "inanimateness."

The Internet is Star Trek Technology

In the future of Star Trek, Earth is a utopia where technology satisfies everyone's needs and desires. There is no money because nothing is scarce. There is no business because nothing is exploitable. In short, Star Trek technology makes people happier while also making capitalism obsolete. On the TV show, they rarely went into much depth about this, so there are some logical holes. How does their government work? Would we ever really run out of things to buy and sell? Does Captain Sisko's father run a restaurant simply because he wants to? How do the Ferengi continue to be unapologetically capitalist when they have all the same technology? These issues aside, the premise is a sound one - technology removes limitations from our lives, and businesses which exist to exploit those limitations inevitably die off.

The internet is the Enterprise's copy machine. It makes copies of anything, for anyone, in any quantity. A lot of money was made in the 20th century by selling copies, but in the 21st, copying information is a basic fact of life. Trying to corner the market on digital copies now is like trying to corner the market on oxygen. I'm not sure what replaces the old business model, but ignoring change is not an option.

The two things to note here are A: Star Trek technology improves life for humanity in general, and B: Star Trek technology makes business models obsolete. Maybe I watched too much Star Trek, but I think it's only a matter of time before A makes us forget that we had any concerns over B.

Ps. Another good sci-fi allegory for the internet age is The Stars My Destination.