When Games Get Too Popular: The Portal Effect

I have a very particular fascination with portal portal one specifically the sequel is an incredible game in its own right don't get me wrong it defined a sense of humor on the internet for years which not a lot of games can say they've done but the first game just does something special that I don't think any other game before or after has replicated the first portal is a game filled with Jank at the scale that you would only really get from an indie project but with design and Technical Innovation that belongs only to a AAA title everything about this game from how it came to be how it actually works because yes the fact that this game plays as smooth as it does is an absolute technical Marvel to the impact that it had on the internet as a whole is just so abnormal in the craziest and Most Fascinating way but a lot of people tend to overlook it because it's just kind of this presence now I began writing this video long before that one Twitter post started circulating about how portal 2's humor was filled with dated referential humor when in reality humor during that time was largely in reference to Portal 2 and that's kind of the perfect example of how ingrained into the internet's culture portal was and still is today it literally defined a sense of humor that when those who weren't there at the time look back at it think portal was the one pulling humor from pre-existing comedy when in reality portal was defining that humor portal was one of the many aspects that defined valves designed Zeitgeist that took place during the mid to the early 2010s and in many as specs portal was one of the titles that really kicked it off in its largest form because it was the first title from valve that kind of Osmosis its way into pop culture to the extent that it did halflife 2 would go on to do roughly the same thing with the Cliffhanger and halflife 2 episode 2 but largely portal did it first and to a greater extent than I think anybody really realizes which is what fascinates me so much about this game okay let me ask you a quick question to demonstrate this in Portal 1 at what point in the game are you supposed to realize that the cake isn't real or alternatively at what point are you supposed to realize that glattus is lying to you this is the point I first realized when watching lead head's Incredible video portal cracks in the system where she points out the fact that the designed to narrative experience of portal is something that is kind of lost to time to people in 2007 who had just bought The Orange Box and booted up portal for the first time the concept that this voice over the intercoms that had been guiding you through the tests was not doing so in good faith and in fact had the intention of killing you at the end was a reveal that had been slowly but effectively built up through the course of the game much like how your understanding of the mechanics are built up slowly between tests as you familiarize yourself with the game and its atmosphere you begin to realize that some things are just not right people are not watching you when you suspect that they should be Aperture Science as a building is in disrepair and you start to find the ratman dens where we get our first mention of the phrase the cake is a lie it's this incredible video and the observation that this whole reveal is something that's uniquely lost to time since everybody in their grandmother has heard the phrase the cake is a lie that sparked my interest in Portal in this way because the game does something that I think is so uniquely valve while also being something I've seen pop up a couple of other times in the past when you think about it portal coined a phrase that for all intents and purposes spoils the end of the game but it did it in a way that was so effective and marketable that it became a meme to the highest degree creating some major shifts in pop culture a phenomena that I like to call the portal effect after portal came out and people began to discuss the game online realizing this neat packing game that came with halflife 2 and Team Fortress 2 was actually really good the phrase the cake is a lie began to spread around between people as a tongue-and-cheek nod to those who had played the game from others who had also played the game it was a sort of if you know you know kind of phrase kind of like using the word sori with with some permutation of the phrase hanging out or hanging around in the same sentence to those that know they will signal that they know what is being communicated but to those who have not played dokidoki literature Club they will be none the wiser especially if the term is used Incognito enough however unlike ddlc and don't forget to hang out with seori the phrase the cake is alive became infinitely more widespread achieving complete and utter meme status of the highest degree in rather short order and meme status in that era actually meant something because there were probably at most like three good memes floating around the internet at any one time back then the cake is a lie took up one of those spots for years and years on end so as the Internet only became more and more widespread and normalized and meme culture spread its grubby little paws wider and wider the phrase spread with it to the point where nearly anybody that spent any respectable amount of time on the internet knew the Mantra by heart and unlike the ddlc example I gave earlier where it's intentionally designed by to be Incognito in a way that communicates an if you know you know sort of message while also flying over the heads of people who haven't played the game the cake is a lie is straight up just a spoiler for people starting to play the game when you start playing the game you have no reason to distrust glattus promise of cake that comes pretty early on until you get to the first ratman Den but if you go into the game with that Mantra ringing in your head a major twist is ruined and you are distrusting of gladus from the beginning the entire point of Portal's narrative is to slowly lose and dismantle your trust in gladus chamber by chamber the game encourages you to analyze the level design with a critical eye encouraging you to do away with the video game logic excuse and actually ask questions about how the world around you is designed with rationality in mind why is there toxic water that kills you instantly if you fall into it with the portal gun here why is there a firing range for turrets here why is nobody watching me even though there are plenty of observation Chambers why is the voice over the the intercom glitching out knowing the phrase the cake is a lie ahead of time ruins that narrative core of the game and because the phrase became so widespread The Narrative core of the game is something that is now lost to time this is a phenomena I like to call the portal effect wherein a game or other such piece of media enters pop culture so substantially that a major twist offered up by the work has lost all meaning and impact the fact that Portal's major twist became a meme was incredible for its marketing and was one of the many reasons the game got its well-deserved sequel but this popularity was a double-edged sword as now very few people that exist on the internet are capable of experiencing portal blind because as they play that Mantra will be in the back of their head at all times as such portal story is no longer effective and the mechanics are left to carry the game's value which luckily it can do in Spades but that's another video somebody else has already made please watch portal is perfect if you haven't already when you look at this aspect of portal it's easy to see something occur that hasn't happened many times before we all know the ending of Harry Potter and we all know the ending of any Mario game ever but what sets portal apart from these other pieces of media that have seeped their way into pop culture is that these are kinds of media which still retain most if not all of their value as pieces of media despite the fact that we all know how they end because the value of these stories is not the end the fact that Mario is going to save Peach doesn't change the core gameplay of running and jumping in the magic and atmosphere that Mario games have and the fact that Harry defeats Voldemort doesn't change the impact of the journey it took to get there these are what I like to call disengaged stories knowing the ending doesn't change the impact of the story because the value of the story is the meat in the middle portal on the other hand is along the likes of stories such as House of leaves the outer Wilds Sixth Sense and MAA Maga where the value of the story centers around a major twist or Revelation where the impact of the story relies on the audience's engagement with that twist which I like to call engag stories encountering a major twist in the story that recontextualizes everything up until then requires quite a lot of brain power from the viewer to actually reanalyze the story up until that point with said new context portal is one such story where the twist that the cake is a lie and that GLaDOS is bad forces you to recontextualize what the tests up to that point were actually for knowing the twist of an Engaged story largely ruins the experience that is so core to the type of story because it's built around light bulb moments so going into Portal with that light bulb already on takes away so much from the game this is why media such as outer wilds and six sense grip people so tightly because you can only experience these stories to their fullest effect once this is why people are so Hush Hush about the major twists in things like the six sense or outer Wilds because they see value in that kind of twist in the experience of a story forcing them to think in such a different way way but I think the reason why Portal's twist became so widespread and memd and things like the outer wild or medal Maga are still kept underlock and Key by fans is because Portal's twist is a much more subtle and psychological one as leadhead points out in her video the buildup is incredibly gradual and slow and the phrase the cake is a lie isn't even a spoken line in instead is just a texture on a wall tucked away in a level written by a Madman Portal's story is built off of many light bulb moments instead of just a single one but the term the cake is a lie acts as kind of a cheat code to immediately unlock all of those light bulb moments at the same time luckily portal is a game with Incredible gameplay as well as a story so it still works and it's still an effective game even if you go in knowing the major twist but it doesn't change the fact that this one phrase this one twist becoming so inra in Internet culture Cuts portals Effectiveness in half because the gameplay and story are meant to mirror each other in the fact that you're supposed to have many light bulb moments until you fully understand the game and its entirety for the final fight but now you only have the puzzles to figure out with the story being solved for you at the outset but something I want to point your attention towards is the wording in the latter half of the definition for the portal effect that I gave you a major twist offered by the work causing a loss of the work's meaning or impact notice how this wording is kept a little vague yeah knowing the cake is a lie ruins a major twist in Portal story but what's the say that this can't apply to something that isn't narrative and instead something like mechanical if you do a little thinking you can apply this concept of Pop Culture osmosis ruining major twists in media to other aspects of that media which can create some really interesting case studies and insights enter the platonic ideal of guilty pleasure for me Five Nights at Freddy's I find this franchise absolutely fascinating for so many reasons but the one that I want to focus on today is something that I've seen a lot of people just begin to engage with but not really fully deep dive into it something the internet really likes to do myself included is look back at Old Let's Plays of the first five nights at Freddy's game when it first came out and laugh at the silly people in whichever corner of our screen freaking out at jump scares that no longer affect us in any way anymore and people have began to realize that these jump scares aren't scary anymore and FNAF isn't scary anymore and a lot of times people will just sum it up to the fact that they've been desensitized to the franch over the however many years it's been running and all that jazz and while I think that's part of it I think the reasoning goes a little deeper reasoning that ties back to the portal effect when Five Nights at Freddy's first came out the horror game genre was at a bit of a standstill survival horror was the go-to for developers wanting to make a horror game and people were starting to get tired of it games such as Outlast slender Resident Evil alien isolation and the grandpy of them all amnesia the Dark Descent were starting to lose their charm as people begin to figure them out see Horror in my mind is built off of one thing fear of the unknown nothing can scare somebody more than their own mind so good horror media takes advantage of that that's why I actually love skinink and will defend it until the day I die it takes advantage of the unknown like nothing else I have ever experienced part of making a player fear the unknown comes from having a spooky monster lurking in the dark yes but the best way to get a player scared is to combine that fear of the monster with a system that they are unfamiliar with the reason the Dark Descent was so effective for the time was because in a genre which had lately begun to fixate on bringing the fight to the horrors and the Shadows it instead took away any and all mechanisms of which you could use to fight back and instead forced the player to rely on their flight Instinct their intuition trial and error where to hide how to outsmart the monster the system which was unfamiliar to Gamers at large at the time adds a layer of stress onto the already stressful Prospect of this terrifying monster chasing them down learning a new system in a video game is hard enough but add the stress of a horror atmosphere on top of that and you've got recipe for absolute Terror horror at its core is about abusing stress The more stress you can make a player the more susceptible to fear they will be and the more effective the leadup to in the eventual execution of a jump scare will be amnesia the Dark Descent worked so well because the removal of any fighting mechanism stressed people so much since something they had learned to rely on in video game horror was now completely absent which threw them into this new an unknown situation for the same reason this is why Amnesia the bunker works so well because giving the player a gun in a franchise that was previously centered around not having a way to fight back does the exact same thing but in Reverse add on to the fact that there is one save point on the entire map as well as incredible ammo scarcity and the fact that the gun is the only way to keep you safe and the fact that the gun is the only way to break locks a lot of the time in the game am has done the exact same thing as it did in the Dark Descent taking a player out from a gameplay Loop they were used to and comfortable with and forcing them to figure a new one out only this time swapping your only available fear response from flight back over to fight but when we're talking about Five Nights at Freddy's we're back in the early 2010s specifically 2014 so the bunker isn't quite a thing yet players are beginning to get used to this concept of a game where fighting will only get you killed and hiding is your main few response but then came Five Nights at Freddy's which asked the question wouldn't it be funny if you weren't able to do either of those what set Five Nights at Freddy's apart from every other horror game at the time was its ability to stress you out like nothing else the game starts by disempowering you completely you no longer have the option to fight or flight you don't even get one or the other you are forced to just sit there and and delay this concept alone was completely unique and threw people off their balance immediately the confusion let's players experience when first playing the game and realizing you couldn't even move immediately put them on guard but FNAF doesn't pull its punches there it adds impeccable horror sound design and Ambience as well as the core gameplay of incredibly tight Resource Management put that all together in one pot and let it simmer and you have a recipe for incredible amounts of stress Within the play which allows you to create jump scares which are immediately more effective as a result this subversion of how games in general play much less horror games in particular I think is what made Five Nights at Freddy's so scary at the time it was so scary that the game blew up in this generation's version of the Harry Potter phenomenon and then it became the multi-million dollar franchise that it is today but when you go back and play Five Night at Freddy's now it just isn't as scary anymore even for people playing FNAF for the first time like kadis in his video the scary world of viral YouTube horror games the horror just doesn't click like it did for those playing the game in 2014 so why is that well the answer lies on the fact that the game blew up and is now everywhere on the internet Markiplier's FNAF 1 video sits today at 117 million views with Millions more from other let's players at the time and with years and years of familiarity with the game it's atmosphere and its gameplay gimmicks under our belts the major twist that FNAF offered up has been osmosis into pop culture and because we have familiarity with this twist since we have this cheat code that skips us past all those light bulb moments about how the game works there is no longer anything to fear there is no longer an unknown and on top of this the fact that we figured out how the animatronics worked pretty well in order to beat 420 mode and then later on decompiled the game and now we know exactly how they work and we have a case for the portal effect affecting something in a different game that isn't story and instead gameplay the portal effect is like I said a double-edged sword on one hand by definition something that gets portal effected has to be big enough to enter pop culture at just an incredible and unfathomable scale but on the other hand it completely ruins the experience of a game or other piece of media for the larger masses that didn't get to experience it because media affected by the portal effect relies on a specific twist to work to its fullest extent large swads of the population that might experience that media aren't going to be able to because of how widespread the major twists and Concepts the work brings to the table are on one hand it's an incredible Testament to how Innovative something is but on the other it makes the entire impact of said Innovation completely Moot and in some cases causes the exact reasoning for what made said things so Innovative in the first place to be lost to history if people forget to look at the work in the context of the culture around the game during the time of its release so I guess the entire point of this video is to urge you to analyze what about your favorite piece of media makes it so effective why does the story stick with you why does a gameplay mechanic or gimmick work so well why is a certain song so emotionally evocative dig into the inner mechanisms of art figure out how it was designed and what causes it to be good because sometimes that gets lost to time and when it does it causes people to misinterpret a piece's impact on culture as that media copying the culture of the time don't let innovation in storytelling and game design be lost to time hello everybody well uh thank you for watching this video this was a my first honest to God attempt at my new like content style of like video essay and video game analysis hopefully you guys enjoyed it uh this was this is a video I've been wanting to write and make for quite a while so now that I got to do it this feels really good I have a lot of these kinds of videos in the works in the queue so if you guys want to see more of that feel free to subscribe if you want to support me even more then you can throw a couple dollars my way every month by becoming a YouTube member um you get some cool emotes in stream chat and uh get early access to videos and scripts when they're done yeah that's about all that I have for you guys um thank you guys again so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: WhaleMilk

Views: 375,878

Keywords: Portal, Five Nights at Freddy's, Amnesia, Video Essay, Whale Milk

Id: QlgP3uq3Fic

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024