Will never threaten to stab you

Today’s entry concerns Portal, and better words to describe it.

Remember how a few posts ago I mentioned how terrible I am at keeping up with current movies? Well, I’m even worse at keeping up with video games, because video games require me to buy disturbingly expensive systems, and they’re generally more expensive than movies. That’s why the only systems I own are an Atari 2600, Super Nintendo, and PC. Luckily, not keeping up with current video games is more understandable so long as you don’t bring it up when it’s not required.

Still, I keep in touch with game reviews and people who DO know things about gaming, and thus I have a general knowledge of newer video games. This is why, when several weeks ago when I had the opportunity to buy a newer video game, I was confident I would make the right choice, that I had chosen the best possible game.

Portal*, then. I’d think most people would know about such a widely-acclaimed game, but my adventures in real life seem to prove otherwise. I would write a paragraph explaining it, but that’s the only problem with Portal: It’s hard to describe.

Pardon this slightly unrelated topic, but I find it odd that seemingly everyone I’ve met in real life that DOES play video games often has never even heard of Portal, while I, the worst person at keeping up with video games, know all about it. For instance, one time someone I know came up and asked me about what kind of video games I like to play. Knowing he did his share of newer video game playing, I felt at least slightly confident he might know what Portal was, but when I mentioned Portal this assumption was proven dead wrong. Still, he asked me about what Portal was with interest (or so it looked like), so I immediately started with what the back of the box told me, “It’s sort of a puzzle game…”

That’s when it hit me, how do you describe Portal to make it sound appealing? The reason I was so dead set on getting it was because everyone who knew anything about video games consensually agreed that it was a really great game, but when someone asks you to describe a video game for them, they probably will not find the response “Freakin’ awesome” very helpful. How does the back of the box describe it? First word is “puzzle game”, which is fairly accurate, really. The game’s purpose is to make you think until you can find a solution to a problem. The problem is that the immediate thoughts that follow “puzzle game” are not quite like this, as the guy’s response to my initial description was, “Oh. Is it, what, word puzzles?”

So “puzzle” alone is not so good a term to describe it. What about the next word the box uses to describe it, Adventure? Meh. The term “adventure” makes you think more along the lines of Indiana Jones type stuff. The only real “adventure” in Portal goes on near the end after the cool plot twist, so “adventure” didn’t seem to do that much justice, either. The last term was “action”, but the only real “action” is when you’re dealing with things that can shoot at you. I guess that’s why it makes sense to have all three words combined, “Puzzle-Adventure-Action”, but try saying that out loud in a conversation and you sound really artificial, which I guess you sort of are considering you’re just quoting the back of the box.

That leaves us with describing the actual gameplay, which doesn’t work so well, either. What do you do in Portal? Well, you solve puzzles challenges using this gun (not a good term to use with someone who doesn’t care for shooting games other than Duck Hunt) that creates these… portals. Then you’d have to elaborate on the concept of what a portal is and does. This is very difficult to do, especially if you’re one of the people who, like me, are terrible at the kinds of conversation that catch you off-guard, and in which you must mentally scramble to find the right words under the pressure of potentially looking like a doofus, which I’m fairly confident that I had done by the end of the conversation. I made Portal sound lame and childish.

Don’t believe me? To get an accurate mental image of how I may have accidentally described Portal, say this out loud in a perky voice, the italicized bits in an especially high-pitched and cheery tone, “It’s a puzzle game where the goal is to get cake!”

I blame the English language. We need a new word for “Puzzle that requires thought and is also awesome” so that Portal does not get confused with Bookworm, not that Bookworm isn’t awesome or thought-requiring. I nominate Faddlop.

*Would have bought the whole Orange Box, but I think my family would object to me coming home with two M-Rated games… though it was a really good deal…

On an off-topic note, the back of my computer chair creaks a lot. Sometimes it sounds like my mom’s voice.

God, that’s creepy.

~ by krakenzilla on July 8, 2008.