LOS ANGELES – Grown-ups need toys too, says Kim Swift.
In a tiny cubicle hidden within the recesses of the Square Enix E3 booth, I sat on a big red couch with Swift, best known as the lead designer of the acclaimed 2007 puzzle videogame Portal. She listened quietly as I talked about the similarities between that acclaimed puzzle game and her next one, Quantum Conundrum, which was released on Thursday.
"A lot of people, including me, thought that Portal was a game that really moved the art form forward," I said. "Is that something you'd agree with, and are you trying to do that again with your new game?”
The question came out more as fanboy gushing than a proper inquiry. But Swift wasn't exactly flattered.
"No. I didn't try to do it the first time,” she said, shaking her head. “I work on toys.”
She paused for a moment, then added sternly, ”Don't take that away from me. I like that I make toys."
Weeks after the Electronic Entertainment Expo had shut its doors, I was still thinking about what Swift had said. The creator of one of the most celebrated games of the last decade thinks games should aspire to be toys? Gaming culture is filled with geeks and indie types who desperately want to be taken more seriously, for games to be recognized as an artistic medium and not just playthings. And here sat Swift in staunch opposition.
Portal meant a lot to me. I didn’t know anything about the game going into it, other than the fact that I'd heard there was a really awesome song that played alongside the end credits. I didn’t even understand how the portal mechanic worked until about 10 minutes into my playthrough.
I remember the first time I looked through a portal and saw a girl in an orange jumpsuit standing in front of me. I tried to chase her down, but she ran away from me at the same speed that I ran after her. I’m embarrassed to admit that only after a full minute of this did I realize that I was looking at my own player character through a window of my own creation.
Portal forced me to use its own mechanics to see myself and learn who I was playing. It’s a captivating work of art, and hearing that the person most credited for its creation saw it as a "toy" intrigued me. Unable to get the conversation off of my mind, I arranged a follow-up phone interview with Swift in the hopes of digging a little deeper.
All games are toys, she said on the phone, not because they are fun but because they allow adults to use their imaginations.
“They allow us to be a kid again,” Swift said. “What's great about games in particular is that it's a socially acceptable way for adults to imagine.”
Take for example a fantasy that has you as a big, burly weapons expert. You run through buildings gunning down bad guys, saving the day and becoming a hero. “If you start telling all your coworkers that you just imagined that, they’d think you were certifiable,” Swift says with a laugh.
But turn that fantasy into a videogame and the same scenario becomes socially acceptable. Immersing yourself in that fantasy is no longer weird or immature. The social stigma is gone. With her games, Swift wants to encourage grown-ups to use their imaginations and play with toys.
Listening to Swift's passionate defense of games-as-toys, I rethought my own experience with Portal. When it was over, did I find myself thinking about my experience chasing myself? The characters? That song?
Yes, but after that was all over I’d lay in bed at night imagining what I could get done in the real world if I only had a portal gun. The most logical usage, I thought, would be to find a massive structure from which to see as much of the earth as possible, and use that as a launching point. I could portal my way up to the top and then shoot portals to any place I could see. Or, hey, I could rob banks. Who’s going to catch me when I could shoot a portal underneath my pursuer’s feet and teleport them to a South American jungle?
I wasn't dreaming about Portal as a work of art, I was dreaming of it as a toy.
“Games can be art, and they can be significant and all the glorified things that we want them to be,” Swift said. “But if you ask a kid if their toys are important, they'll say yes, and please don't take them away.”
