Portal is a game that explores interesting concepts including space, dimensionality, and general physics. However, I believe the most interesting facet of the game is the concept of voyeurism and vision. Throughout the game, there is a running aesthetic of voyeurism that is achieved on multiple levels; from gameplay and mechanics to the mise en scene to the metaphysical experience of the gamer. The player, who controls/is the protagonist, Chell, awakens to the voice of GLaDOS, the A.I. operating the lab. GLaDOS appears to be observing you as she speaks about the environment around you and reacts to your actions. Upon inspection, the player can observe the chamber rooms and notice red-eye cameras tracking Chell as she moves around the room. Alongside this, the chambers are riddled with frosted glass windows several feet above the ground, which seem to peer out of an office or observation booth of some kind. These aesthetics emphasize the fact that Chell/the player is under constant surveillance, yet the surveyor is unbeknownst to her/him. This concept of surveillance of a subject without knowledge of the surveyor was pioneered with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a type of institutional building where the inmates cannot tell who is watching them or whether they are being watched, thereby affecting the psychological and behavioral characteristics the inmates.
This voyeurism is also echoed in the artistic choices of the game. The complex in which Chell is being held is named “Aperture Laboratories,” a title and logo that the player encounters from the very start of the game and consistently throughout the test chambers (i.e. on cubes, GLaDOS dialogue, etc.). In optics, aperture is an opening through which light travels; most importantly, to the laymen, this commonly refers to the shutter of a camera. This compounds the emphasis of vision and voyeurism in Portal, being that the lab, in which Chell is trapped, references the notion of being watched or recorded in its own title. In company with the cameras encountered throughout the chambers, GLaDOS herself has the likeness of an eyeball attached to a larger machine base. GLaDOS is made up of multiple data cores which resemble eyeballs, and at the end of the game, the player discovers a whole storage facility full of these eyeball data cores. Along with this, the manner in which the shape of the portal and the way it functions enforces the voyeur concept. Not only is GLaDOS watching Chell like Big Brother, but by manipulating the portals, Chell can observe herself in a manner no human has ever done. The portals function as oblong pupils that dilate when shot at a surface. With the proper orientation and viewing angle, Chell can observe herself by breaking the rules of spacetime. She can see the light that bounces off her body, not by reflecting off some glass surface called a mirror and back into her eye, but as it propagates unperturbed through spacetime and enter her own eyes. Not only this, but the player can also achieve an ilinx effect, as described by Roger Caillois, by placing a portal directly above another. In this manner, Chell can jump through and fall at a continuously accelerating speed, watching herself fall for eternity: trying to catch herself like a dog chasing its tail. On top of all this, there is the ultimate metaphysical experience of the player, being quite similar to GLaDOS despite playing as Chell. This whole time, the player is observing the events occur with Chell on screen. Although he/she may control her, he/she acts as a voyeur in a peculiarly similar fashion to GLaDOS. Though we align our goals and actions with Chell, there is something to note about this juxtaposition, which I myself have trouble putting my finger on, though the sensation is quite palpable. Ultimately, I believe that although Portal is a game about puzzle solving, it is replete with aesthetics and philosophies of sight, vision, and voyeurism.