The Misdirection of Portal

Everyone knows Portal is funny,

To understand what it is that makes Portal's writing so well done, it helps if we ask ourselves, what makes a steak taste good? Preparation and handling are important, certainly. The quality of the cut makes a difference, as does applied heating methods. On a molecular and biological level, many humans find steak to be flavorful because our evolution steered us (no pun intended) toward seeking out certain foods over others as a mechanism of survival. Meat, with its high protein and fat content, was a much sought-after source of nourishment for primitive man. As such, our bodies adapted to seek out and enjoy the flavor and scent of a good steak. (Obviously this is not true for all cultures, but we, as humans, generally find flavors like salt and sweet to be most desirable for similar evolutionary reasons). But all those objective values aside, what is it that makes a steak taste good?

It's difficult to pin down, because it's a subjective assessment. Ask a vegetarian what they think of steak and they'll likely turn up their nose. Cultural and personal choices factor in to enjoyment of a steak, concepts that can't be rigidly defined, or in some cases, cannot be broadly defined at all.

So what does this have to do with the humor in Portal? Even though Portal is lauded for its masterful employment of humor, comedy is something that is enjoyed on a personal level, and is therefore different for everyone. Like the taste of the steak, there are biological and psychological truths that come into play in enjoying it, but ultimately what is funny is determined solely on a person by person basis. Humor can be recognized by nearly everyone, even if a particular instance doesn't necessarily strike someone as particularly funny.

Aside from being an expertly crafted first-person puzzler, Portal is arguably one of the smartest and best written games of all time. It's also one of the funniest. To understand what it is that makes it so funny, the idea of "humor" must be defined. Toronto-based comedian Charlie Curry breaks comedy down into three different groups. "There's the boffo, over-the-top behavior of many American comics, where their energy carries the joke and not so much the subject matter. It is funny because the people think it is outrageous or goofy enough to feel comfortable laughing at them." Then there are what Charlie calls storytellers. "The long-winded stories that are great, relatable, folksy, common issues between the comic and the audience. The home cooked meal of comedy," he says. Finally, the category into which he places himself, the "long or short premise which sets up a reality," where "the punchline is a huge left-hand turn into I-didn't-see-that-coming-ville, misdirection of the place you were taking them with the premise."

Portal encompasses that third category with Charlie, where the punchline takes you to a place where the player isn't expecting. When Portal was first announced as a part of Valve's Orange Box, it was a totally new IP packaged in with three legendary shooters and the sequel to a beloved multiplayer game. It may be hard to imagine it now, but initial expectations for the game were fairly cynical. Valve's first great comedic move with Portal was one of misdirection: many people expected a short game displaying some ideas bandied about by the team working on it.

In the first of the 2007 GDC episodes of the 1UPYours podcast, Garnett Lee dismisses the game as a tech demo, and the panel moves on to talk excitedly about Team Fortress 2. Valve introduced misdirection simply by packaging it in with games they knew players would initially find more desirable. "You know the gaspy thing people do when they're surprised? Once the shock settles in they start to laugh," Charlie continues. "Even chimps do this behavior. So I would say it is a mechanism of trickery of the mind you're playing to." He gives an example he uses in his act. "I truly heard on the radio that a 96 year old man in Miami had beat up his 89 year old wife and ended up killing her. I say it with a deadpan demeanor as if I've just heard it and am really down. Then I say, 'Where are the parents in all this?' I have jumped off the tone of the premise drastically and I have given them a ridiculous conclusion that they didn't expect."

Portal jumped the tone of a sterile puzzler and presented players with a story about an effortlessly cruel AI. Details of the whole story were teased out from the game as it progressed. The white, clinical rooms of Aperture Science began to reveal signs of the rebellious intentions of previous test subjects: a scrawl of graffiti on a wall, or a peak behind the clean facade of the test chambers into the industrial goings-on behind the scenes. Immanuel Kant said of laughter "[it is] an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing." As the player progresses through the game and it's revealed that there is more to it than initially meets the eye, the expectation that the progression is confined to every increasingly difficult test chambers is instead turned on its ear. The expectation is transformed, as everything learned in the chambers is now used to mount an escape of the facility. Instead of being simply a puzzle game where the goal is to hash out the solution to more and more puzzles, the goal has changed. It's clear that GLaDOS isn't going to let Chell survive, so Chell must now defeat not only the chambers, but GLaDOS herself.

In changing the role of GLaDOS from simply an all-powerful antagonist to a villain who must be defeated, Valve again employs misdirection to achieve a humorous effect. GLaDOS' dialogue is the undercurrent that carries this humor to its natural conclusion. Her belittling, sarcastic remarks in the test chambers, her continued deadpan assertions that Chell is not capable of continuing in the game, along with the promise of cake, are the drum beat that keeps the rhythm of the game's humor. The absurdity of some of the games situations, from the weighted companion cubes to the turrets with the sweet, friendly voices that exist solely to kill intruders in a hail of gunfire, compliment the tone and add even more to the comedic impact.

Of course, the game ends with Chell victorious, defeating GLaDOS and ultimately escaping from the Aperture Science laboratories. In the final sequence of the game, a cake is shown deep within the facility, alongside the weighted companion cube. Once again, the humor is a product of an unexpected outcome. We had been led to believe that the cake was a lie, and yet here it is. The crescendo of the game was the final battle with GLaDOS and with her defeat, all the tension built up to that point had broken. By throwing in the curve ball at the end, showing us that the cake was really there all, Valve once again employs misdirection masterfully.

The psychology of humor is unusually under-represented in psychological literature. It's easy to recognize what's funny, but difficult to describe why. Seeing a person slip on ice is funny if they don't get injured, because there is a brief, tense moment of worry that they might get hurt. When they aren't, the tension is instantly evaporated and laughter sets in. With Portal, the expectations of the player are being built up to one possible and seemingly likely conclusion, and just as it seems that it might all be going as planned, the expectation is changed. It is misdirection, then, that is the key comedic element in Portal and is the reason it is so successful at making us laugh.ut we examine just why that is.