Sometimes a girl is just a girl

If you enjoy the things that go beep the way we do here at LBGD (which sounds like a group that should be having a pride parade), you've more than likely tried Portal and fallen deeply, deeply in love with it. Portal is, as near as I can tell, a perfect game. Its concept is simple, its controls, elegant, and it's exactly as long as it needs to be. The fact that its creators are a couple of girls right out of school is at once both surprising and obvious. We expect such moments of brilliance to come from seasoned professionals, but they rarely do. Once you're in the system, that kind of wild creativity seems to get ground out until it's as fine as fairy dust.

The last panel on the last day of the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco was the Portal Post Mortem, where Kim Swift (one of the original designers) and Erik Wolpaw (the guy who wrote all of that hilarious dialog for GLaDOS) would tell us, the audience, just how Portal became Portal.

The room was as full as a room can be without people actually being stacked on top of each other. I'm glad I don't know the mathematical equations necessary to calculate how rapidly a crowd that size was using up all the available oxygen, because I might have fled in sheer terror otherwise. Everyone, everyone wanted to hear what Kim and Erik had to say. Or at least they thought they did.

After Erik and Kim gave a fascinating glimpse into the creation process (here's a hint: playtest the crap out of everything, as soon as you possibly can), they answered a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from the audience. If you've been following the Portal saga at all, you know that people have been analyzing and reanalyzing it, desperately trying to find deeper meaning in its 19 levels. They make much of the fact that both Chell and GLaDOS are female characters (clearly, it's a lesbian game!) and even find significance in the colors of the portals themselves.

It was almost heartbreaking to see them step up to the mic, certain that they'd have their theories confirmed, only to have either Swift or Wolpaw tell them, in so many words, to get a life.

"I couldn't help but notice that the portals in Narbacular Drop (Portal in its original form) were red and that they changed to orange in the final version, and I was wondering about the significance of that?"

"We tried a lot of colors and liked orange best."

"Settle a bet for me. Is Chell a cyborg?" That's a big one, the Chell is a cyborg theory. To be fair, she does have those weird things on her legs, so this one isn't totally out of left field. But as it turns out...

"No, she's not. We just put those weird things on her legs."

And so it went. Theory after theory being shot down by cold, hard, practicality. And the biggest ones of all, the ones about GLaDOS being female so that she's some kind of mother figure, or that everyone in the game is a girl because the game is some kind of pro-lesbian statement? Guess again.

GLaDOS is female because the Portal team knew that whoever they cast would be taking some very specific direction ("No, say it exactly like this") and knew an actress they thought would be amenable to that. And Chell is female because Valve's Gabe Newell suggested it.

"We had a guy originally, and then Gabe walked by one day and said, 'Why don't you make it a girl?' and we said, *shrug* 'Ok.'"

That's it. No subtext. No deeper meaning. Just a great game made by an insanely talented group of people. Apologies to those in the gaming community who feel that games must Mean Something in order for them to have value, but sometimes a girl is just a girl.