They will either remember learning about Aperture Science, in all its bureaucratic glory, from exploring its website, or they will not. Players of the original 2007 game and its 2011 sequel will either know that the game’s setting, Aperture Science Laboratories, began as a shower curtain manufacturer and branched into government-funded teleportation research, or they will not.
Portal’s many paratexts likewise make a difference to how players may understand significant details about the game’s setting and backstory. Portal’s ubiquitous in-joke, like all in-jokes, also divides those who understand it from those who do not. “The cake is a lie” originated as graffiti on the walls of Aperture Science’s test chambers and has gone forth and multiplied in the world of video game fandom as memes, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and more recently as facemasks. In its original context, this cryptic phrase functions as a warning to the player-character left by a previous occupant of the Aperture Science testing facility, where the monomaniacal computer GLaDOS runs captive humans and androids through an enigmatic program of usability testing-with the false promise of cake at the end. Portal’s ubiquitous in-joke “the cake is a lie” has become its most famous paratext. In this article, I take up the classic video game Portal (2007) to consider how paratextuality and the associated concepts of ephemerality and materiality may reveal new dimensions of video games as objects of interpretation and play.
These questions also have a history in the study of other media forms, including print and manuscript books, visual art, and recorded music ( Greetham, 2010). What differences can paratexts make to our understanding of video games? If a given paratext might be important for the interpretation or historical context of a game, how would we know it existed? And if that paratext were ephemeral, as so many seem to be, how can video game scholars account for that complex dimension of video games’ materiality? These questions all point to the challenges of studying born-digital materials such as video games, both as historical artifacts and as texts within larger transmedia properties.
0 kommentar(er)
