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Chell Game: Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity in PORTAL and PORTAL 2 2015

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Chell Game: Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity in PORTAL and PORTAL 2 2015 Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Jennifer deWinter; Carly A. Kocurek Chell Game: Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity in PORTAL and PORTAL 2 2015 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14996 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Sammelbandbeitrag / collection article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: deWinter, Jennifer; Kocurek, Carly A.: Chell Game: Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity in PORTAL and PORTAL 2. In: Thomas Hensel, Britta Neitzel, Rolf F. Nohr (Hg.): »The cake is a lie!« Polyperspektivische Betrachtungen des Computerspiels am Beispiel von PORTAL. Münster: LIT 2015, S. 31– 48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14996. Erstmalig hier erschienen / Initial publication here: http://nuetzliche-bilder.de/bilder/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Hensel_Neitzel_Nohr_Portal_Onlienausgabe.pdf Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Weitergabe unter Attribution - Non Commercial - Share Alike 3.0/ License. For more gleichen Bedingungen 3.0/ Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere information see: Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz finden Sie hier: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ ­­­Jennifer deWinter / Carly A. Kocurek Chell Game: Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity in ›Portal‹ and ›Portal 2‹ Chell stands in a corner facing a portal, then takes aim at the adjacent wall with the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Between the two portals, one ringed in blue, one ringed in orange, Chell is revealed, reflected in both. And, so, we, the player, see Chell. She is a young woman with a ponytail, wearing an orange jumpsuit pulled down to her waist and an Aperture Science-branded white tank top. She moves tensely, ready to strike. We are Chell, and Chell is us, the player, inserted into the world of Portal 2 with this young woman as our avatar. We know Chell. Chell is the only avatar and one of a light handful of characters in the Portal franchise. A character who never speaks and who is effectively without voice has become beloved among fans. Players cosplay as Chell, buy Chell action fig- ures, and make videos celebrating and dissecting her and her story – the scene described in this first paragraph is from one such video, titled Portal 2 Trying hard to see Chell’s face.¯1 When developers at Valve Corporation experimented with removing Chell from Portal 2, playtesters uniformly demanded that Chell remain; they wanted GLaDOS, the AI Chell had effectively killed, to recognize them when it woke up, and the only way players might be recognized would be as Chell.¯2 And so, Chell stayed. But, who is Chell? And, what about Chell makes her so appealing, and so im- portant, to players? In-game, she is shown only in reflection, and she never speaks, instead running, shooting, and solving puzzles under an unbroken veil of her own silence. Officially, we know little about Chell. We know that she is a woman; we can discern, in the flashes we catch of her in reflection, that she is young. We know that she has been a test subject at Aperture Science. But, beyond this, Chell is enigmatic. Theories abound. One fan video suggests that Chell’s silence is because »All her teeth have been emancipated by the Eman- cipation Grill! If she did talk it would sound ridiculous, which would only hu- miliate her infront [sic] of GLaDOS«.¯3 Another fan video covering assorted theories about Chell’s identity and origins surveys ideas including the quick- ly dismissed idea that Chell is a robot, the idea that Chell may be the daughter or sister of Gordon Freeman, that Chell might be a clone, or that she might be Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity 31 the daughter of Cave Johnson and Caroline.¯4 However, who Chell is in the con- text of Portal may ultimately not be as important as who Chell is in the eyes of her fans. In a piece highlighting the lack of representation of women of color, and spe- cifically black women, in games, the journalist and cultural critic LaToya Peter- son alludes to Chell – »But to play as a black woman, to inhabit and play as someone is similar to my real life identity? I’ve had five opportunities in twenty-two years. And that’s if I count characters that are biracial, characters that appear in reflections, and one tan colored viera«.¯5 When Kotaku.com covered Chell’s Portal 2 redesign, which included lighter hair and a new outfit, commenters were quick to identify Chell as a woman of color. Commenter truthtellah asks, »Wait… wasn’t Chell a Latina? What hap- pened? She seems more Caucasian in this redesign, though maybe that’s just lighting«. In the ensuing conversation, commenters forward that Chell is Asian and that she is »Half Brazilian, half Japanese to be precise« with the last being a reference to the voice actor, Alesia Glidewell, on whom Chell was modeled.¯6 As the comments on the Kotaku.com piece suggest, Chell’s racial and ethnic identity is as ambiguous as the rest of her identity. However, that players are so willing to latch onto Chell as an instance of representation – not only of a woman in a game, but specifically of a woman of color in a game – speaks to the shocking lack of gender and racial diversity presented in games. In a medi- um where a long-time gamer like Peterson can point to only a handful of char- acters that look at all like her, players are starved for representation; the idea that players so marginalized in video gaming’s visuals would latch on to any character who might, maybe, a little bit resemble them is unsurprising. It is also indicative of the importance and necessity of diversity in representation. In this chapter, we argue that Chell has become a flashpoint in player demand for more diverse representation in avatars and video game protagonists. The ambiguity of who exactly she represents has enabled a particularly broad ap- peal while also highlighting who exactly feels most left out of mainstream gaming. However, we argue, this flashpoint is problematic as well: Chell is a si- lent character, a largely absent character, which is permissible because Chell is a female character. Thus, if there is a lesson to be learned from Chell, it is a more complicated and nuanced understanding about representation, avatars, and games: Gamers crave diversity; they embrace it and iterate on it when it’s presented. Yet the ideological ambivalence still permeates the character. To make the obvious play on words: Chell is an avatar shell for desired identifi- cation. 32 Jennifer deWinter / Carly A. Kocurek »The Aperture Science Self-Esteem Fund for Girls«:¯7 Women, Avatars, and Identification Video games offer remarkably few female characters, and even fewer of those characters actually do anything. In Williams et al.’s virtual census of gender, race, and age in games, the authors found that men are over-represented in games (85.23% male; 14.77% female), and that these numbers, as depressing as they are, get worse when measuring the gender breakdowns of primary char- acters (89.55% male; 10.45% female). We do not intend to suggest that this is unique to video games. Film, too, has a well-documented history of gender dis- parity. For example, Smith et al.’s 2013 study Gender Inequality in 500 Popular Films found that 2012 films had only 28.4% female speaking characters (out of 4,475 speaking characters) and that the ratio of male to female characters in a scene was 2.51 men to every 1 woman. In Gender Roles & Occupations, Smith et al. analyze movies and television from 2006-2011 to determine what types of jobs the characters hold, finding that women in family films and television have significantly fewer career positions in authority (0%-38.5%). These numbers matter because representation matters. Media representa- tion has psychological effects concerning people’s perceptions of their bod- ies (Grabe / Ward / Hyde 2008), of their career choices (Phillips / Imhoff 1997), of their political influence (Adcock 2010), and of their communities (Crenshaw 1991). For perceptions of women, representation has real consequences in so- cial roles and possibilities. The commonly held belief, for example, that wom- en talk more, and, in fact, talk ›too much‹, is supported by widely-circulated statistics that are, as linguist Mark Liberman points out, basically bogus.¯8 And, studies covering group discussions ranging from classrooms to workplac- es have found that men, not women, dominate conversations. Despite this em- pirical evidence that, at least in group settings, men talk more, the belief that women talk more persists (Swann 1985). This represents a devaluing of wom- en’s speaking, of women’s ideas, that is aided and abetted by limited media representations. As we consume media, we absorb mediated representations. That women talk so little on screen helps normalize social interactions in which women do not or should not speak. But, this problem goes beyond speech. That women are shown so widely to be auxiliary players in the action of life on- screen has profound implications for the positioning of women in the action of real life; for women of color, who are more underrepresented on screen than white women, this situation is particularly acute. Within these mediated representations enters Chell. Chell often appears on lists of powerful or important female characters in games, joining the ranks Representation, Identification, and Racial Ambiguity 33 with Lara Croft of Tomb Raider and Samus Aran of Metroid (c.f. Dargenio’s 10 Most Iconic Female Video Game Characters;¯9 Yacco’s The Best Fe- male Video Game Characters for Gay Players;¯10 and Dursten’s Top 20 Heroes of the Genera- tion¯11).
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