GLaDOS: an analysis

There are a few video game antagonists that always stick out to me. Ganon or Ganondorf from the Legend of Zelda series is one, more from the constant repetition of him in my life rather than anything specific about him. Pyramid Head because he’s just… weird. More recently, Capcom underestimated the internet’s love for tall dominating women with Lady Dimitrescu.

But I think there’s one antagonist that has always captured my imagination. The robotic female voice taunting every failure in a puzzle will always haunt me. GLaDOS, the monstrous machine in Portal, is an antagonist who oversees everything, and in a lot of ways is one of the greatest misunderstood video game antagonists. Today, I want to spend a bit more time on the story of GLaDOS, and how her story as victim teaches us something about what Portal is trying to tell us.

In order to really get at the heart of GLaDOS’s role of the victimised antagonist, we need to look at several factors. In a different video, I talked about how the mythic story of a game is divided on a graphic spectrum of two types of mythic narratives: the implicit and the explicit. I’ll link to that video below if you want a more detailed overview. I’m going to approach GLaDOS along these lines: looking at her story as it is written, but also as it is experienced in an actual game form. In other words, we’re going to look at the implicit GLaDOS as well as the explicit GLaDOS.

GLaDOS as antagonist is ever-present. Unlike most antagonists, she’s readily present throughout the whole game. Not in the puppeteer controlling the world around you kind of way, but in a direct way. She comments on everything you do as a player, making fun of you for failing puzzles or taunting you and your potential inability to figure out what you have to do to move forward. No matter where you are in the lab, you are always watched – and you know you are being watched, even when you – maybe – aren’t.

Portal, in its design, replicates something akin to Foucault’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is based on a prison design created by Jeremy Bentham in the mid-19th century, the idea being that prisoners are isolated and not allowed communication while always being felt they are being watched. The idea would be that guards could see into all the cells and monitor the prisoners while not being able to be seen themselves – leaving the prisoners unable to know when they were being actively watched and when they weren’t, leading to a constant sense of surveillance.

Foucault took this idea of the Panopticon and turned it into a metaphor for power systems in society. We can see the result of this power dynamic in two different ways: the effect it has on the observed, or the prisoner, in the system; and the effect it has on the observer. In the example of Portal, this can be seen in the player (playing as prisoner), and GLaDOS (playing as observer). For the player-character, the observation results in an acceptance of the situation and a form of docility. The constant surveillance becomes normalised and the resultant behaviour is not because the surveillance is present all the time but because the society under that surveillance internalises the potential of the discipline.

But let’s talk more about the result on GLaDOS, as we do care a little bit more about her today than our player-character Chell. The Panopticon metaphor is built on a particular idea of power and power dynamics. The power in the Panopticon comes from knowledge, and that knowledge comes from the observation itself. And the observation provides more power. It’s an endless cycle. As Foucault says: "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process" (Foucault 1977).

Whether or not you agree with Foucault – and to be honest, I’m unsure if I do – there is definitely something akin to this in Portal. GLaDOS is the constantly observing antagonist whose power grows from their constant presence watching your every move. Sometimes, though, we’re not sure if she’s paying attention, but we are always acting as if she is.

So now let’s look at GLaDOS physical design in the game. Like most parts of video game design and creation, GLaDOS’s design went through several different forms. One of the earlier designs was an upside-down version of Botticelli’s The Birth of the Venus. Which… I guess that’s a thing that could have happened? I think it’s important to note that in all these early versions, GLaDOS was always conceived of as female. The Birth of the Venus example shows that the designers were always wanting to think of GLaDOS as a woman, and they were clearly trying to figure out how to conceive of “female” and “robot” without just making a walking android with metal boobs.

A lot of the problem comes from the perceived mutual exclusivity of “femininity” and “power” – an antagonist cannot be seen as being inherently powerful as well as being inherently feminine. In patriarchal societies, power is tied exclusively to the male domain, leaving the nature of femininity and anything else put into the realm of “female” as power-less. Ways of depicting the feminine is entirely based on socially conceived notions of feminine beauty and how female bodies should be depicted.

GLaDOS was unable to escape the male gaze. The developers decided to design a mechanical device which was given a “delicate robotic figure” to echo her femininity. The need for GLaDOS to be composed of soft lines and delicate curves is based on contemporary conceptions of the ideal female body, and yet the amount of curves that are allowed are also highly contested socially.

I bring this up because it’s important to constantly position GLaDOS in relation to men. Despite the fact that the game itself doesn’t have a lot of men present, there is an overarching feeling of the presence of men for a variety of reasons, including the entire reason for GLaDOS’s existence. But more on that later.

Both in and out of the game, the female body, and it’s many curves, are highly sexualised, highly internalised, and highly controlled. I don’t think I need to explain the sexualisation of women here. If you need that explained, I quite frankly can’t help you. When I say highly internalised, I mean that women are constantly taught to internalise the conception of the ideal female body and be constantly searching for it, no matter how unattainable that conception may be. It’s not something that is purely put upon us from an outside force, but as members of society we also begin to put it upon ourselves. This is the process of internalisation.

The female body is highly controlled through two forces: one literally done, and the other socially done. To obtain the unattainable standards of female body, women physically control their bodies in order to force them into forms required. Fashion staples such as the corset, the bustle, and even something as simple as an A-line skirt, all work to help women control their bodies. Flesh that was out of line needed to be tied back into shape. The female body needs to be curvy, but also needs to be tight and contained: a contradiction in physical body forms that only helps to illustrate how unattainable we’re talking when I talk about female bodies.

The physical control of the body through the nature of things like corsets is often due to the social control, and the physical manifestation of it. Society has already determined which bodies are considered feminine, and anything outside of that gets left behind. This is why there’s issues of fatphobia, as well as distaste for women’s bodies which are heavily muscled – just to name two examples of bodies which don’t fit.

So basically, GLaDOS’s body needed to be curvy and tight and contained to be feminine, but these conceptions of the female body work directly against social views of power, which are often conceived of as primarily masculine. The robotic nature of GLaDOS is where the more masculine power comes in, but needed to position the character in the hanging shifting form we see as a way of conveying the femininity.

This inability to see the feminine and power as being able to be paired together, particularly on how this is reflected in the design of GLaDOS, needs to be seen in the light of the backstory to GLaDOS. GLaDOS was built by Aperture Science Laboratories CEO Cave Johnson, who had hoped to eventually upload human consciousness into a machine. His assistant, Caroline, was highly intelligent and worked well alongside him.

Caroline is described as beautiful and fully feminine, but also incredibly smart. Cave Johnson describes her as the “backbone of the facility”. In the same statement, Johnson says “Sorry, fellas. She’s married. To science.” While this statement may, at first, seem to help show Caroline as an intelligent and strong woman, it ultimately ties her to the need to be controlled in some form, and her uncontrolled status positions her as a dangerous woman.

The story of GLaDOS is that Caroline’s consciousness was put into the machine, and this was – most likely – done against her will. In one of the unused audio files, you hear Caroline being scared and saying “I don’t want this!”. Obviously, this brings up questions on what exactly was being done to her. There was a rumour for a bit that the voice actor of Cave Johnson, JK Simmons, refused to record the second half of that audio because he felt it was a rape scene. To my knowledge, Simmons never said one way or the other on the subject, but one of the writers for Portal, Erik Wolpaw, addressed the rumour in an interview with Gamespot. Wolpaw said it was “insane” that anyone would think they wrote a rape scene into Portal 2.

So let’s look into it then. The story sets up the fact that Caroline was somewhere between resistant and firmly against her consciousness being put into the robot that became GLaDOS. Despite her own wishes on the matter, Cave Johnson insisted she would be placed within GLaDOS regardless. In one voice memo, Johnson states that Caroline will be his successor, that she won’t want that but that they should force her to do it anyway. This order resulted in her consciousness being put into GLaDOS.

The unused audio of her resistance could well be this act – the forcing of her consciousness out of her body and into the machine. But this means that her body was forcibly taken from her. Her body was removed from her own control through forces outside of her and against her own wishes. It’s a direct assault on her being, her sense of self, and her relationship to her body. All of this is done without her consent. In most definitions, this is rape. Caroline’s body was so in need of being touched by men that it was fully removed from her through the touch of men.

When we look at her backstory, the art of GLaDOS’s form is given a little bit of a different view. Her form was necessary for being given a type of feminine power, which – as we remember – was somehow difficult to portray because women can’t be powerful. Her form, however, is also a quiet depiction of assault. The developers specifically mentioned the Birth of the Venus as an inspiration point, but the Game-ism blog saw how the model of GLaDOS looked like a woman hanging upside down in bondage.

Viewing GLaDOS as the bound-woman, we see how GLaDOS’s form is a demonstration of her feeling of enslavement, feeling trapped and her desire for a form of freedom. But even if we strip away this particular theory and only focus on the developer’s Venus inspiration, we still see GLaDOS as inherently trapped. The femininity tied to her form is itself a form of entrapment. What has made GLaDOS “feminine” in her form has always been her captivity. The intelligent Caroline could not find a position of power without being a robot – the developers saw the raw power of the robot as the only way an intelligent and independent woman could be considered powerful. From the beginning, GLaDOS was always going to be trapped.

GLaDOS is only able to be GLaDOS due to the loss and captivity of Caroline. Caroline is a victim of assault – whether it be sexual or another form of bodily rape – and this aspect of her is the basis of her role as antagonist.

Now, I want to return to GLaDOS and Foucault. If you remember, we talked about Foucault’s metaphor of the Panopticon as talking about the interrelationship of knowledge and – yes – power. GLaDOS’s entire role as antagonist is to observe, comment, and discuss the nature of Chell’s actions. The entire concept of the world of Portal is a scientific laboratory – GLaDOS is still learning, and through that gathering of knowledge garnering power. Her power may not be the exact same big muscles and other forms of physical power, but her ultimate intellectual power is what makes her such a ferocious and memorable antagonist. Her power is not because she’s a robot, but because she’s watching everything and utilizing this knowledge to continue the Panopticon-esque world she’s in control of.

GLaDOS as antagonist is fully realised through her position as the unsilenced woman. GLaDOS is so unsilenced, she won’t shut up. She taunts you all the time, regularly commenting and mocking every step of the way. In contrast, the player-character Chell is the silent protagonist who quietly moves through the puzzles of Portal. Chell is, of course, also a female victim. Even though GLaDOS’s rape was a silent rape – one silenced behind unreleased audio files and misunderstandings from the perspectives of the writers – GLaDOS still speaks. She voices her distaste at her position and role, and the company which stripped her of her agency. She fully embodies the role of the vocal survivor, one who fights for her position to be recognised – sometimes to a violent end. What Portal is implicitly telling us in GlaDOS is that the silenced victims are the protagonists, and the vocal victims are the monsters.