WHEEEE!
Lately, my life has been a little ridiculous. I recently finished Portal 2 (if you couldn’t tell by my title), and I had a conversation with a friend about how, as players, we project our latent feelings onto the character, Chell, who we play as. Throughout both of the Portal games, we are drawn into the role of a “test subject” who, as my friend (in RL and on Youtube) puts into song about LoZ’s Link, is a mute protagonist (see video below).
However, Chell is a mute protagonist beyond Link and other characters who never actually speak, since other characters have expectations. For Chell, all we know is that she is a character who tests and takes crap from GlaDOS. The fact that she does so without so much as a “stop it GlaDOS or I am going to kill you again!” is kind of cool, because it leaves so much to the imagination. You don’t get to see her reaction or what she is thinking, so it lets you do what you want with the character.
What the friend I had dinner with was telling me is that I have been projecting my feelings onto Chell as I played the game. (This part gets a bit spoiler-ish so read at your own risk, otherwise skip the rest of the paragraph.) From the way that we see Chell as a lonely character living the life of the typical everyman, to the way we seem to miss Wheatly for the period where he disappears, and the feeling we first get when GlaDOS incinerates our companion cube, the game never tells us anything – all of these feelings are derived from us, as the players of the game.
In a major way, this odd fact helped me realize the kind of person that I tend to be sometimes, and regardless of what our specific experiences, they seem to tell me one of two things; Chell is a mute everyman, doing these tests without expressing that she gives a fuck, and that we are (either secretly or openly) the kind of person we project onto Chell as we play.
Anyway, I guess that’s the end of that long rant. Hopefully I’ll be posting more frequently. For now though, enjoy a GIF and a video.
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