I must say Portal 2 left me incredibly cold. I constantly felt like the game was telling me what to do, what to think, what to see. At some point all manner of incredible things happen and I was just standing there, thinking: "Would you like me to do anything while you're busy showing off?"
Jeroen, I'm surprised to hear you voice this particular criticism of Portal 2 given your recent update to Dinner Date which removes the need for the player to interact at all (as a sidenote I thought your press release couching this update in purely positive terms like "adding"/"recognizing"/"expanding" was very funny+clever). I'm curious what the distinction is for you between the way Valve has handled this tension between interaction & non-interaction vs. what you're doing (& are interested in continuing into your next project from the sound of it).
This similarity surprised me incredibly, while playing it, because I heard myself say the things I have heard people denounce Dinner Date for; so I also feel a bit strange to critique Valve (of all companies) with it. My problem, mostly, is that where Dinner Date evidently says 'you cannot do anything to change Julian' (and
completely so after the update), Portal 2 suggests I will do impressive things, and then does not allow me to do anything I feel is impressive. I feel that when Dinner Date (or, for that matter, Dear Esther) announces itself to the player it sets a certain magic circle which sets you up for emotions brought about by the game without suggesting that you will be 'the hero'. Portal 2
does, I feel, not explicitly, but implicitly, by its theme, attitude and effects. It suggests 'epic' things are happening around
me, but all I am doing is placing portals at designated areas; which is jarring to me; it places me as a character 'at the centre' of the narrative action but does not allow me to do anything when it comes to it. That is proper and good to me when the game does not suggest it is a puzzle game, or an action-adventure game; when it does, I cannot but wish that I solve puzzles or I have adventures. In some sense, Portal 2 was very polished and removed 'rough' parts where I felt it needed them: puzzles and action sequences. All of this would have diegetically been soothed for me by making the story
about the other characters, rather than emphasizing
me, a narratively insignificant character. It left no room for me to have my adventures and I felt it was tiring to go through epic scene after epic scene when my own actions had to be curbed just to make this possible.
Quite some time ago I felt that it was more important to have a 'hug Alyx' button than to have more dialogue in the Half Life series. To me it is not about the number of actions, rather the nature. Your main action as Freeman is shooting; your main action as Chell is placing portals. For both, this activity is removed every time something narratively interesting happens. I felt in past games (Portal 1, Half Life 2), Valve was interested in ambient storytelling, giving me agency in discovering the story. However, the games increasingly place emphasis on the spoken narrative as what I ought to care about; but that is something the game often does not give without taking away what I do as a player. My defence for Dinner Date would be that I never take away this freedom; like Dear Esther never takes away freedom to tell its narrative but stays at fixed 'level' of interaction.
This is the reason for the positive terms, even if it was consciously a bit tongue-in-cheek: I do honestly think the game should assume you are not interested in doing interactions when you do nothing, rather than 'taking over' when it considers you incapable of participating - the later being the 'rooted to the spot' cutscene. The idea for the next project remains that the game sees not doing anything as a valid way of playing the game and anything you do beyond this as you 'venturing' to do more. I do not intend to have a strict 'you do this' relation with the player which for the sake of story I then take away again, rather I want to have a safe harbour that means that 'doing nothing' equals 'doing well enough'; and offering ways to expand on this only by adding, not by subtracting.
