Portal is not only digital media, it is an interactive version of new media. Digital media is often defined as any sort of media that is digitized. As a video game it is most certainly digital. What makes this video game media? Portal is a visual based game, it uses video, along with audio to display what is happening. The audio is not just random; there is a script for all the audio presented by GLaDOS. The audio can be found here. The definition of digital media is met on multiple levels, as it has multiple forms of media in the digital form. New Media is very similar Digital Media, however New Media is more precise on how it is defined. Manovich states that New Media should consist of 5 things: Numerical Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability, and Transcoding.(Manovich)
To be able to say that Portal is an interactive version of new media, one has to define it as new media first. "In short, media becomes programmable.", as Manovich said, Numerical representation can be reprented as a function and/or algorithmic manipulation. Portal was created through programming, through many different algorithms, and algorithms for those algorithms. Video games are not just magically available (which would be awesome), they are programmed, the images are not just flat images that are pixels, they are complex data structures that have functions to know where everything is to be able to work. Modularity, or the "fractal structure of new media", in Portal is very obvious, the levels are built very similarly using the same building blocks to define each test chamber. Modularity Example Below
Automation is represented in a few ways in Portal, the AI, the working of physics in the game, and the video game as a whole. The video game works without having to manually tell it to work. Once the game is started, it will not stop until told to do so. The AI works without having to be told as well, shown below is a warning for the Droids(in the background), an AI that trys to kill you.
The most obvious example of Portal being new media is the variability. There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to complete a test chamber. No individual or hard set solution is the correct one. Portals can be placed in any concrete spot with enough space, as pictured below I can place a portal anywhere the blue and orange semicircles light up.
The last criteria to be met is Transcoding. Portal to the people playing the video game is a visible gaming environment, however to a programmer it is algorithms, functions, variables, and databases. All of this that the programmer used is converted into something that both parties can recognize. Transcoding is the transition or conversion until something different, another format.
Now to the part that defines Portal as an interactive version of new media. McLuhan stated, "All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical." (McLuhan) Logically, since there are many different solutions to each problem in Portal it takes the mental faculty, this would make the gameplay (the interactive part) media. Again quoting McLuhan, "Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view." In Portal, it is essential to try different things, if one thing fails try another. If one thing keeps resulting in failure, chances are that it will continue to end in failure. Many times it is not a straight forward solution, pictured below are warnings about the obstacles of the environment, some that were present in previous levels, and some that may not have been.
"Believe only half of what they see, and nothing what they hear." another quote from McLuhan, is extremely prevalent in Portal. At one point in the game GLaDOS states, "The Enrichment Center regrets to inform you that this next test is impossible." The test was in fact possible. Multiple times throughout the game GLaDOS offers cake as a reward for completing the tests. "Cake and grief counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test." But, as the game goes on images such as below begin to appear. Learning to "listen" with sight and not the ears, allowing for a distinction between the two allows for more interaction with the environment.
The last point I want to bring up to prove that Portal is an interactive version of new media is a quote from Baudrillard. "Simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", and between real and imaginary." (Baudrillard) This "test" that is happening to you (Chell), is it really a simulation? GLaDOS is actively trying to kill you. It is no longer a simulation, something controlled, it is real, interactive. As GLaDOS noted, "Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an 'unsatisfactory' mark on your official testing record followed by death. Good luck!" There will be a simulated 'unsatisfactory' mark, but a very real death. It is interactive to the fullest means.
From being release until today of 2012, Portal has been interacting with people through its gameplay. Ad defined above, Portal is digitial media. It is a video game that delivers on many rhetorical levels. Through arguments from Manovich, McLuhan, and Baudrillard, Portal has shown that it is an interactive version of new media. Portal is digital media, it is new media, and it is interactive.
References:
Websites:
Portal [http://www.valvesoftware.com/games/portal.html]
Valve [http://www.valvesoftware.com/]
Valve Developer [https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Portal]
The Orange Box [http://www.whatistheorangebox.com/index.html]
GLaDOS Audio [http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/GLaDOS_voice_lines#Portal]
Manovich[www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf]
Baudrillard [http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations/]
Books:
McLuhan, M. (2005). The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects. Ginkgo Press: Berkeley, CA.
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