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.

Off to the Festival of Steel

Today I'm heading out to West Virginia to attend the Mannette Festival of Steel so I won't be updating for a couple of weeks.

The Mannette Festival is emblematic of how good it is to be involved in steelpan. Many of the world's foremost players and composers come to the festival to perform with students and amateurs.

Pan is a marvelous instrument, and a marvelous movement in culture worldwide. It is still an infant in accoustic musical instrument years, and much of its potential remains to be explored. It combines the possibilities of rhythm, melody, and harmony into a complex but accessible whole. The classical canon of pan, or the nearest thing to it, is calypso, a genre not so long gone that we can't still understand it and dance to it. Even the most intense competitions of skill on the instrument are festive occasions. All music has the power to move us, but perhaps none is so blatantly fun as steelpan.

It is probably for these same reasons that pan is not often taken seriously. In America we typically hear the instrument as a soundtrack for "Girls Gone Wild" commercials late at night, as generic Caribbean atmosphere in "Under the Sea" and "Kokomo*," and occasionally in synthesized form in the Super Mario games.** It's not that pan is even counterculture; it's simply viewed as a novelty if it's recognized at all. It is a shame for the instrument to be overlooked. It is a great way to get people into music - especially young people.

I'm reminded of how lucky I personally feel to have discovered this instrument. I spent a number of years without a direction in life or any connection to people outside of my close circle of family and friends, and pan played a big part in turning things around. I'm still looking for a way to sustain myself with my creativity, but I feel, for the first time, confidence and satisfaction(and this blog has become a significant aspect of the process).


*A song which mentions some ten different Caribbean islands yet manages to overlook Trinidad and Tobago...

**Not to say that these things are equally disreputable. In fact, as Mario stands for both fun and a high standard of quality, I don't object to that association at all.