GD: Skinner's Box and Portal

“At the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about 15 minutes of silence, and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.”

—	Erik Wolpaw, writer of Portal.

Games can be considered a series of test-reward situations. You are put in a situation in which the goal is reasonably well articulated and you are rewarded when you reach said goal. Sometimes you're even rewarded when you fail: a bad end may still reveal information to you, or another storyline will become open to you. This idea of a game as an environment for goal achievement resonates strongly with B.F. Skinner's theories on human free will. In some ways, a game can be an exaggerated version of Skinner's principles of reinforcement and reward and his Operant Conditioning Chambers. The name Operant Conditioning Chamber sounds like it's directly from the gameplay dialogue of Portal. "Now entering the operant conditioning chamber. Please mind out for errant electrical currents." But it's not! Skinner originally created the Operant Conditioning Chamber to show how animals will respond to outside stimuli in ways that essentially effect their own reasoning and will, using reward and aversion therapies. Rats and pigeons would be trained to pull levers by associating them with either pain or food. After a while, the animals associate certain stimuli with good or bad things, and react in an appropriate manner. To this degree, Portal is almost like a human-sized, human-oriented version of an Operant Conditioning Chamber. Let's consider how Portal starts. You start off in a fairly bland room, so of course your first instinct is to explore it. Human beings in a game, almost a rule, will try to figure out all the ways they can break it. Pick up the clipboard, jump on the bed, look around; how can this room be broken, escaped? You respond to the voice (GLaDOS) as she's the only external stimulus available, and because she has the ability to supposedly create these portals that let you escape the room. The test in the first room is easy enough: place the cube on the button and you're allowed to go on. But why do you want to go on? You get a reward by way of affirmation from GLaDOS, but that's not enough. It's the promise of more things to interact with, more ways to solve puzzles and finish tests, that makes you go forward. In Portal the Operant Conditioning Chamber doesn't reward you with food or punish you with electric shocks; instead, you are rewarded with more knowledge about the strange facility and the shadowy figure of GLaDOS with more opportunities to prove yourself, and you are punished by failure and having to repeat the puzzle. In this way you feel compelled to finish more tests, because you want to get this mental fulfillment and sated curiosity. This is probably why I marathoned Portal and finished it within an hour: because I felt compelled to do so. It wasn't by my own free will that I finished the game, however; it was the clever programming and writing of Valve that steered me in the right direction, externally manipulating my own desires to make me feel like I needed to finish the game. To that extent, Portal and most video games are excellent examples of our complete lack of free will. Skinner would be proud.