The Value of $60: Motivation and Rewards in Portal 2

Okay, so a LOT has been written about Portal 2 and it's almost 3 years old now (that's 300 in videogame years), but I just got to play through it for the first time a couple months ago and I knew I just had to say something about it. So here it is. Oh, yeah, and ***MAJOR SPOILERS***!!!

Definitions of the word game elude standardization and universal acceptance, but that has not kept many a scholar from trying. Among the more prominent attempts of late come from Jesper Juul and Jane McGonigal. According to Juul, “A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” McGonigal’s definition is simpler; she claims all games have “a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation” (21). Both of these definitions highlight obstacles and rewards—supposedly, the fun of a game comes from the player “exerting effort” toward the goal and receiving the feedback indicative of the higher-valued outcome. Portal 2, the first-person puzzle-platform game released by Valve Corporation in 2011, actively challenges traditional game reward and motivations systems, and openly questions what motivates not only gamers but humanity in general. Time and again, Portal 2 invites the player to consider exactly what drives him or her both in and outside of the game circle.

"That's Not a Game!"

A couple nights ago around 2 a.m., I finally finished season 1 of The Walking Dead by Telltale Games. When I credits stopped rolling and the epilogue tag showing little Clementine alone in the countryside faded out, I stumbled in daze back to my bed. Before I could roll over to sleep, I couldn't resist the impulse to put my arm around my sleeping wife and hold her tight for a moment. Perhaps more than any other media I've ever encountered, The Walking Dead opened my eyes to my relationships with other people, especially my wife and family. I was intensely grateful for the love I've been so lucky to feel throughout my life, and the forces of order that have made the path of my life relatively smooth and easy. As I felt all this, I concluded that The Walking Dead is really one of the greatest games I've ever played.

Except there's one problem. The Walking Dead isn't a game.

"Playing" Prospero

This post was originally written for a Shakespeare class blog. See it here.

I've been thinking about my post of "The Tempest: The Video Game" and my point at the end about how the player could play Prospero and be forced to enslave Caliban as a new way to interpret the themes of the play. There's something much bigger in that idea than I thought at first.

Clint Hocking, an influential game designer, was quoted in the New Yorker in 2011 as saying,

Clink Hocking's online avatar

"Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters." 

Like my suggestion in my post, he was talking about how the mechanics of the game could enhance the art of the author and designer. However, in a post on his blog he altered this quote ever-so-slightly but importantly to say, 

"Finding a way to make the dynamics of play support the creative expression of players—to me that’s the only question that matters."

A lot of the art of theatre comes from actors coming up with new interpretations for characters, or in the subtle differences a certain actor gives to a script by the way they he or she plays it. Why can't it be the same with video games? Taking that same scenario from above, a player could choose to try and avoid enslaving Caliban, or that same player could enslave Caliban the second he/she meets him, before the reasons to enslave him are even clear. Just like an actor or actress, the gamer could "play" Prospero however he/she chooses.

That's good art.