All this debate about if games are art or whether they should be seen as poetry smacks to me of incredible pretentiousness. A game needs to be judged as a game, not as an interactive art piece or a short story or a blueberry pie, and a s a game Portal is a success.

At any rate, y’all sure do seem to worship “thought” and the provocation thereof. Why is this? Some commenter above makes a goofy effort to extrapolate Nick’s original argument into a hypothetical world wherein every game tries to be serious art and to break your heart. To me that doesn’t sound so bad… it might be more interesting than what we have now, anyway. What bothers me is the thought of the hypothetical world in which y’all seem to get your wish and people come to consider the highest calling of humanity to be Important, Thought-Provoking Criticism, and instead of games OR art we have nothing but words words words from men who sit in chairs while the world passes them by.

Recently I’ve been suspecting that today’s gamers, who become so angry and defensive when games are criticized or analyzed in a negative way, actually think of games as mere entertainment, not as art works, themselves. People just don’t like what they love being discussed in degrading way. I think the responses on this blog is a testament to my suspicion; most here consider games’ priority lies with entertaining players, and thus, boring and trite Passage can never be a better game.

And one of the comment likens Passage with painting, and Portal with short story. I think it’s wrong comparison. I think of Passage a small but focused and thought-provoking painting (maybe Mona Lisa?), and Portal a big and fun (probably Roccoco, at best) but with accompanying music playing next to it to heighten the viewing experience.

Thank you for such a great discussion. I’m off to your follow-up post. And any word on next Facade-like interactive drama?

Passage is beautiful. Portal is more fun, but is beautiful in a different way. I believe Passage excels because of its blandness. I’m not sure whether or not you can consider Passage a game – it seems to me more like art disguised as a game. Portal has artistic elements, but is certainly a game.

Incidentally, when I first played Narbacular Drop–not even the awesomely polished Portal, but instead the goofy little chunk of coal it was chipped out of!–I felt utterly intoxicated with possibility. Nobody had ever given me such a wonderful tool as that portal gun before, with which to explore a model of my world and some of the things I care about in it (i.e., its geometry and mechanics)! Sure, after a few minutes the feeling faded… but Passage is only a few minutes long. Where were you during that part of Portal? Were you busy thinking Deep Thoughts about Love and Death? Come on guy, there’s more to the universe than that.

but at least it isn’t hippy bullshit masquerading as a game

holding up a non game as an example of what games can be is not actually a very helpful thing to do

“The game mechanics and the simulated environment do not make a definite statement about life (”money is meaningless” or “life is better alone”) or about moral choices (”you killed the puppy, you are a bad person”)”

Not true. The music – especially the music – the ambiance, the inevitable tombstone, they all usher you to a certain conclusion. And what is the definite conclusion? Nobody says it better than the developer himself,

“Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone.” – Jason Rohrer

Personally, I think that passage is an interesting little game that touches on some issues that most games don’t (mortality etc), but it is not the first to deal with such issues. Planescape: Torment, for example, was largely focused on the idea of (im)mortaility and the memories one collects through their lifetime, however long.

Johan Huizinga was full of shit. You can’t say Passage isn’t a game just because it deals with real life issues… EVERY game deals with real-life issues, once you look at them long enough. No, what makes Passage not a game is the fact that there’s no objective. Players can decide on their own objective, sure, but that’s something THEY bring to the table, to turn their experience INTO a game.

That said, I think you just mean ‘game’ in the general ‘interactive experience’ sense, in which case you may well have a point. Portal is a good game, but I think it’s more likely to be remembered as a prelude to HL2: Episode Three than for the game itself. Of course, Passage will barely be remembered at all, since so few people will have played it, but it does have an interesting message at least.

Like someone else said earlier on, I “got” what was happening about 10 seconds in, but it just didn’t move me in the slightest.

Portal is a puzzle game pure and simple. Can be fun or can be boring. I cant think of a single reason Passage would be considered better. Why try and compare things that are so different.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the power of games to do that kind of thing is dangerous. As the author mentions, A Mind Forever Voyaging is one of the most powerful works in gaming. When I played through it, it gave me nightmares. If it were rendered with modern, realistic graphics, I’m not sure whether I would have finished it, though if I had the ending would probably have been that much more uplifting.

I’m also tempted to agree with the author that Portal is primarily focused on commercial value, not that that’s a bad thing. The thing is, it would probably be commercial death to set up something more emotionally charged. Gamers like playing through games in a haze of mild addiction, and then try to discuss their play experience as if it were literature, for lack of other ways to discuss the game. Portal fulfills that with lots of subtle cues, but if you wanted to go for artistic impact, it fails where it would all add up to something, right at the ending. The boss sequence was, like most boss sequences, *mildly embarassing* in its obvious machinations. Once you’ve sat through the long, contrived monologue, things are deliberately left unresolved. No deep, hard-hitting revelations. That’s no way to end an “artistic triumph.” That’s being geeky and clever and highly marketable.

Oh look, I just found the existentialism (hooray, a buzz word) in Portal. If you want to go even deeper, Portal can be analagous to life. You start off (are born) in a room, no idea who you are or what you are doing. Then you are slowly coached by the parent figure GLADoS on how to get through life. She gives you a key tool to explore your world and live. Then you find the cube. It is not your parent, it is a fascinating other person who you’d rather spend time with. GLADoS, the over protective parent, gets you to dump them and never see them again. Then, when she sees that you are no longer her child, she tries to destroy you. You escape and start to learn your parent was wrong about the world and there is more to it. Eventually, you cannot escape her clutches and the only way to live your life freely is to kill her.

So now we can say Portal is a dark look at the life of children who live with over protective and controlling parents.

Portal spends hours teaching you a mechanic and then unfolds the actual game in the last level; what Portal is and does is a factor of the fact that it has a gameplay mechanic to teach you; the length of the game is almost exactly “long enough to learn the mechanic + 1 level”. As a window into game design, Portal does an amazing job.

Passage isn’t the same kind of beast. Not in any way.

I think this is where you and those disagreeing with you break apart. You simply consider a game better if it makes you think about it more. While you have other points for judgement, it seems as if this is your most important aspect of what you call a game, and if a game is lacking “visually beautiful, well-crafted interfaces” and “interesting game mechanics” but is “interesting to think about and talk about”, then you would still consider it superior.