Digital Cream

Posted by Matthew on October 31st, 2007

My son Dylan urged me to play Portal, a new game contained in Valve’s “Orange Box“ product. I already had good reasons to check it out– an amazing design riff; a Cinderella story of birth as a student project at DigiPen; and I heard bizarre rumors that it exhibited a real sense of humor. However, watching Dylan fall through an infinite chain of portals while flipping the gravitational axis made me fearfully recall a childhood viewing of The Man With The Golden Gun which put me off the hall of mirrors for years. Dylan assured me that it was not nearly as confusing as it looked, but as he gleefully recounted to his friend Harry yesterday, I once got lost in a single room in BioShock. (I crept around a bloody lab table, came upon the door through which I entered the room, exited through it thinking it was a new door, and then wandered in confusion wondering why everything looked vaguely familiar.) In any case, I screwed up my courage and gave Portal a go. I was delighted in all the ways that the game’s many fans have already extolled, but I want to especially point a prophetic finger at a feature of the game which I predict will soon be commonplace, and the game world made all the better for it: Portal has optional commentary by the game creators, much like a DVD commentary track. This is very cool and I am bursting to tell you why.

In case you have not stumbled across the option for game commentary, here is how it works. You turn it on and then can play the game as before, with a few changes. One is that you take no damage, which is a nice bonus but in the hell of the Portal world it still makes the game less than a breeze. The main change is the appearance of suspended info bubbles in the world. When you use a bubble, the same way you use ordinary game objects, an audio blurb plays. The blurb contains the kind of stuff you might hear in a DVD commentary. My favorites are those that speak to me as a game designer, for example laying out the logic of how they bring the player through the learning curve with a particular puzzle or level design. These are probably interesting to everyone, but I gobble it up even if it’s not particularly surprising information. There are also bits of commentary which point out details I had missed the first time, such as the heel-springs on the main character.

The blurbs are voiced by various members of the development team, including those who are not particularly effective speakers. However, that’s not the point; the authenticity is enchanting. Also, this brings me to the main reason I extoll the idea of an in-game commentary besides value to the player: this is a fantastic way to reward and motivate a development team. If I am given a soapbox in which I can tell the game’s most rabid fans how this bit I made is clever, I am psyched. It’s every bit as motivating and celebrated as a fat bonus check. My generation X is driven by a sense of purpose and peer appreciation just as much as money and title, so like good game credits times a thousand, a spot of game commentary serves as a great reward to the team’s key people.

I predict that in-game commentary as seen in the brilliant Portal will become more and more common, and that’s a great thing. It will further legitimize games as an art form, expose fans and would-be developers to the craft, add even more value to a great game, and give game creators an effective and motivating voice.

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