First post I drop into this space and it’s effectively to say that I won’t be posting any more for a while. Admittedly with a somewhat longer and hopefully reasonably more interesting post-script tacked on to the end, but anyway. So I’m heading to South Africa in four days and with very little disposable time on the cards for future me, I’m investing some of what I’ve got in stock at the moment doing what I do best: going through the back catalog of older games I’ve been advised to play and made a mental note to do so at some point. To that end, I’ve only just recently gotten around to buying and playing through Valve’s puzzle-platformer-FPS which-is-not-an-FPS Portal (it’s brilliant, incidentally, even if everyone told me so long before I actually played the game for myself) And even as I’m trying to organise my initial impressions into something approaching a critical response while all the while thinking “Golly gosh, that was actually a pretty awesome game”, I’ve been sitting here wondering to myself why I’m left with a niggling sensation of familiarity the same time as I’m admiring the innovation and success of a risky concept, and I’ve only just now realised. Portal is set in a dystopic future. Its prominent themes are isolation and loneliness in an unknown, potentially hostile environment. And it revolves around a robot main character who displays at times a set of very distinctly human personality traits.
It’s not dissimilar in this regard to two other excellent entries in their respective media categories that I’ve played/watched reasonably recently and thoroughly enjoyed. The first of these is Pixar’s critically acclaimed 2008 feature-length animated film Wall-E. The second is a lesser-known indie Flash-powered point-and-click adventure game called Machinarium, (http://machinarium.net/demo/) created by Czech-based development studio Amanita Design. The latter takes place in a sprawling mechanoid city of rusty-spires and winding pipes - Minas Tirith with extra tetanus shots - itself situated in the middle of a vast radioactive wasteland. The plot revolves around a quirkily charismatic Joe Average bot trying to loosen the iron grip of the evil Black Cap robots that have taken over the city and save his girlfriend in the process. Needless to say, it’s excellent as well – a real throwback to the classic Lucasarts and Sierra adventure games of the 1990s, with the added dash of a bit of Tim Burton visual flair thrown into the mix.
So I’m sitting here wondering to myself. What makes robotsville so compelling as a thematic subject? Is there something entrancing in the idea of a robot-populated dystopian future that makes endowing them with distinctly human personalities so thought-provoking? I mean, there’s clearly a novelty in the idea that something man-made can possess a soul, the above three fine examples of popular culture attest to that. But what is it about robots in particular?
The concept of the humanoid “robot” is certainly nothing new. It stretches way back to the biblical era and in Hebrew lore, the golem. In the Talmud, the ability to create a golem was bestowed only upon those who were very holy and close to God, and in doing so were bequeathed some of his wisdom and power, which included the ability to create life. But a being created in this manner would always be the lessermost of the God-Man-Robot tripartite. This points to a key precept that tends to underscore a lot of pop-cultural representations of robots. This is the notion of subservience; the idea that robots were created as servants to do the bidding of man. This being the case, there is some kind of novelty in seeing them elevated. Seeing them take on human personalities – it’s an uproarious travesty, a laughable absurdity when you think about it. The servant becoming the master.
This is where, I would posit, the imagery and symbolism of the post-apocalyptic landscape becomes significant. After their creator ceases to exist, and is seen to be conspicuously absent, these objects – these creations of man – take on an increased status as the dominant inhabitants of the environment. At a glance, there doesn’t look to be a whole lot in common across the three separate settings comprised in Machinarium, Portal and Wall-E: Bustling steampunk metropolis vs. the narrow confines of a series of abandoned underground test chambers vs. sprawling post-apocalyptic plains dwarfed by towering garbage colossi. But each of these places is in some way perfect for its robotic denizens to flourish as distinct personalities in their own right. They are all connected by, and grounded in the idea of emptiness; a landscape devoid of humanoid forms.
But in many cases the production designers actually go a step further, adding in little symbolic touches to remind you how insignificant human civilisation really is here, and in the wider scheme of things - especially when your main characters are robots who will live forever, or at least until they break down. Wall-E is overtly conscious of this. Everywhere you look, there are towering skyscrapers of junk, of domestic objects that provide subtle reminders of the now-all-but-extinct everyday lives of the human race. In Portal, we know that the Aperture Science laboratories are long deserted, their inhabitants long killed off or gone mad, by the deranged graffiti left scrawled on the walls, the rust covering every surface outside the test chambers. Putting robot characters in a visual surrounds that is conspicuously and self-consciously devoid of human life promotes them to true sentience; it gives them a new status as humanoid personalities, not just the steel-and-microchip servants of mankind.
But getting back to the heart of the matter, what about the actual personalities of the characters? What makes robots so interesting? When you help the umbrella-wielding old-lady robot in Machinarium find her runaway armadillo-bot pet, why is that any more dramatically compelling than a comparable situation involving human characters? Put simply I would argue this is because there is a certain novelty in recognising and identifying with emotion which is not expressed through traditional visual cues. When Wall-E’s windshield wipers start going like a metronome at the first sight of EVE soaring through the skies, we know this means admiration; love. When we reach the final room of Portal and finally see GlaDOS in all her terrifying bizarreness, that eclectic assortment of orbs and cables and spinning tubes towering above you, she has four display panels arrayed around her sides cycling rapidly, streams-of-consciousness style, through images of cake, knives, warning signs, tools, lightbulbs. This seems to suggest the fragmented insanity of her thoughts.
I would also add, as briefly touched upon above, that there’s a definite romance to the idea of characters who will live forever. The credits sequence of Wall-E features a visual pastiche on the different periods of human civilisation, progressing from cave murals drawn on walls through ancient Mediterranean mosaics through 19th century French impressionist paintings, suggesting the rebuilding of human society after the planet has been repopulated. Through it all we see Wall-E and EVE, still together. Human relationships inevitably end, because they must – but this seems to suggest that eternal love is somehow possible, if only for the absence of man and his limitations. It’s a mind-boggling and somewhat disturbing thought, one that turns your head upside down. Oh, and it’s movie with a kid-friendly audience in mind, too. That tends to affect the possibility of any kind of messy break up being displayed on screen... Who knows, maybe after the credits roll comes the twenty years of Wall-E stagnating in a job he hates with three little bot-kids, a mortgage and the mid-life crisis, with EVE leaving him because he’s lost the spark and passion for life he had when he all had to occupy his time of a Saturday was constructing thousand-foot-high skyscrapers out of soft drink cans. Even the song that GlaDOS sings over Portal’s credits sequence, “Still Alive”, which, incidentally, is hilariously funny and takes out first place for the best novelty song I’ve heard in some time – points directly to the fact that she is a machine and will therefore always be somehow superior to you: able to do and survive things you can’t. Despite the fact that in the previous sequence you just redirected her own rockets at her using the portal gun, blew off all her various appendages and threw them one by one into an industrial incinerator. You can do things, story-wise, with robots that just can’t be achieved with human characters, because they’re made out of metal and will keep on chugging until at least until judgement day decides to roll around and possibly even after (case-in point: the Terminator series).
But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, as discussed above, we’re certainly navigating some very empty and lonely spaces over the course of these stories. But they are only made such because it is necessary to create a vacuum into which a simultaneously fantastical and familiar visual environment can be spliced. In all of the aforementioned pop cultural examples, the visual architecture and attendant inventions have a practical sense to them. Devices aren’t just an arbitrary collection of levers and buttons. There is a logic and an eerie familiarity to items and devices that allows the audience to identify emotionally with these worlds. Take for example the combo-locked safe in the prison cell that hides the popgun in Machinarium. Or the fact that all the robots in that game drink cans of oil. Then there’s the scene in Wall-E where Eve and Wall-E bond over the latter’s personal collection of junky bits and pieces like rubix cubes, lightbulbs and a cigarette lighter. In Portal the confiscation fields that bookmark the end of each test chamber and vaporise any unauthorised material resemble airport scanners. Little references to similar contraptions in our own society that mix the uncanny with just enough of the familiar to create a sense of the novel. Machinarium actually reminded me a little of the steampunk Australian short film, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, that was released several years ago. There’s the same apparent preference for desaturated colour palettes and a focus upon a landscape dominated by the iconography of industrialism, not to mention the sense of vertigo enabled by the prospect of a massive vertical city to explore. And like Machinarium, Morello shares that same uncanny sense of déjà vu mediated through its visual architecture.
In Portal and in Wall-E this takes a slightly different slant because as already stated, at least in some part, we’re still on Earth; we’re still in a world that was at least at some stage recognisably our own and inhabited by a society we know. But Machinarium never specifies where or when it takes place. It’s a completely new and imaginary world that invites exploration, with subtle references to our own visual culture but never so far as to suggest it was ever anywhere we’ve been before. It hasn’t been grafted on to what we already know and understand. So it has to try even harder to get the audience to identify with it. In that sense it’s at once more and less familiar, because you have a robot civilisation which lives in a vertical super-city of tiered apartment blocks in a manner reminiscent of Renaissance-era Florence. Busker-bots roam the lower echelons hawking their tunes, corrupt Black Cap metro police thug-bots exploit their authority and enjoy the privileges and decadence that come with power while unjustly incarcerated, oppressed robots populate the prisons beneath the sewers. Wheelchair-bound elderly robots ruminate by the fountain in the town square while the bar is rife with shifty patrons waiting to cheat you out of your money with a game of checkers using nuts and bolts. The civic institutions, class structure, way of life and social patterns in Machinarium are all recognisably human. In this way, robot society becomes almost a direct surrogate for human society. But there’s something ever-so-slightly different about it which means we continue to laugh, to be surprised and to wonder at what we’ll find around the next corner when exploring Machinarium’s catwalks, tunnels and cul-de-sacs. This is a world we’ve seen before, though maybe not in quite the same form or guise.
Bit of a distinction to be made at this point: Wall-E and Machinarium both embrace the gritty, rust-covered steampunk aesthetic. And yet at the same time it’s striking to note the visual similarities between Eve from Wall-E, and GlaDOS from Portal – I’m thinking mainly of GlaDOS’s security cameras that swivel to follow the player wherever she goes, or the turret guns that whisper “I don’t hate you” even as they fall to their deaths through a player-created hole in the floor (or is that the ceiling?). In both Portal and Wall-E, clean white reflective surfaces and sleek curves on the turrets and cameras suggest sterility and conformity – the empirical test conditions of the modern scientific lab environment. LED lights blinking eerily from within resemble eyes. Eve’s are vaguely humanoid – almond shaped and bright blue, suggesting calm and warmth – but all GlaDOS’s minions have red eyes with the opaque, sinister stare of a CCTV camera. They reveal nothing of what lies within, other than a radiating a cold, focused malevolence. Because in a pop-cultural era where some robot characters are so close to being human, the real threat and counterpoint is the true mind of the computer, its logical extreme: the soulless being without any moral code beyond that which can be expressed in numbers. Focused, precise, inhuman. The tension inherent to this dichotomy makes GlaDOS the enigma she is. There seems to be no order to her bizarre ramblings – these at least seem very human behaviours at the outset - but then she may just be manipulating the player with the calculated, reverse-psychology precision of a computer all the time. Is there a method to her madness? Is her mind human or machine? What drives her to act: a personality, or a mathematical equation? Whether she is one or the other, however, is never fully resolved. At least until Portal 2 comes out next year. Maybe.
What links all of these examples – Portal, Wall-E and Machinarium – together is that they all involve robot characters who are struggling to overcome their limitations as the steel-and-plastic creations of man and become quasi-human personalities in their own right. At heart, this is why robot stories are novel, occasionally poignant and always timeless. They play on an almost primordial source of continuing fascination to man’s psyche: namely, the idea that something which is not alive can become alive. GlaDOS in Portal directly parodies this at one point by attempting to convince you that the Weighted Companion Cube – nothing more than a metal block with a heart drawn on it - is a sentient being and you should treat it as your friend, and you almost believe her, because although from that point on you continually expect the cube to speak and vindicate her words, it never does. It’s part of the ultra-dark humour and pervadingly twisted atmosphere of that game that makes it so brilliantly original and wickedly funny. Here I’ve compared it to several other excellent examples of the genre that I’ve encountered recently, though I’m sure there are at least several billion other tangents you could go off on if you felt thusly inclined to compare it to other similarly themed games/films/coffee mugs.
May be some time before I check in again with another couple of pages of pithy ramblings, although seeing as at this very moment my regular rate of article output is approximately 0 from 8395 (just about equal with my readership base), I don’t imagine there’ll be too many issues there. Anyway. Don’t go leaving the country or anything. Hang on, wait a second...
