 We were promised cake, but instead we were given a fiery inferno. The premise in Portal is simple. You awaken in a mysterious lab and are tasked with solving a series of puzzles using the now famous portal gun, warping through holes in space and time at the behest of the AI Glados. She seems benign, helpful even at first, except her motivations for guiding us through are more sinister than they seem. In the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette supposedly suggested to the peasantry let them eat cake. A signal of her disconnection and cake's utility is false consolation and that rhetoric remains fully intact. However, the designers of Portal wanted to guide us past this to show us how we ought to break free of the illusory incentives dangled in front of us. We are prompted to avoid the path that Glados would have us traverse into a burning pit. The idea is clear, right? We need to break out of the system. How subversive is it to be guided towards our own emancipation though, like Ants corral towards an exit? Even the illusion of intelligence we build is just that, manufactured by the designers. Think you solve this puzzle that has your use momentum to propel through a portal using gravity? Except this moment was carefully calibrated to make it seem like a revelation. We aren't even smart enough to realize how dumb we are and so escape had to be planned for us all along. Lies are a part of design formalism. Seriously. Game designers lie as a part of their craft. In this GDC talk, game design is like a magic trick. Jennifer Shirley endorses different methods of manipulation used by games, whether it be the rubberbanding and erasing game, the polite enemies of Assassin's Creed that wait their turn to attack, or the automated platforming of Uncharted. These are all there to deliver on a specific experience. Even the maestros at Nintendo advocate this position with the designers of Zelda Breath of the Wild suggesting that designers lie to tell the truths of the game, whether it be through their art style or creating dynamics that don't make sense in reality. With games like The Stanley Parable, we see designers intend on highlighting how manipulated players are in the fiction itself, drawing attention to the uneasy relationship between designer and player. There are designers vehemently against this, chief amongst them being Jonathan Blow, who has given talks about the necessity of avoiding lies and pursuing truths. He advocates for a design program that aims to earnestly explore truths about ourselves in the universe using the fictional interface of games and to be honest to both ourselves and the players. When we use deceptive techniques, we aren't just lying to players, but lying to ourselves, and moreover, are pursuing forms of design that amplify manipulation, that dangle incentives with no real engagement. This only makes the truth even harder to see. However, it seems lies are fine so long as they are consistent and in service of the deeper goals of design. In his game The Witness, Blow deliberately cut out circular objects from the environment because that is what prompts the start of a puzzle and he omitted music and dynamic environments to ensure that there was a consistency to the rules of the world. He also altered the design to tell truths, but this was a contract with the player, a willing suspension of disbelief and not an insidious deception. The question here then is not just of lies, but of a game's systems devised in the service of deeper aesthetics of play. There is a consistent truth to the elegance of a game like Go, a phenomenological sincerity, a subjective truth in that dragon cancer and an interrogation into the process of truth seeking itself in The Witness. The clearest example I can think of to illustrate this is Hellblade, so major spoilers ahead. At the beginning of the game, it lied to you that there was permadeath to get you to feel the same sense of paranoia and dread as Senua, a woman suffering from psychosis, to understand her truth. Game designers lie to convey truth of many a kind and players are invited to play with this process of inquiry. Portal is fascinating in that it deconstructs this false dichotomy in both design and fiction by using lies to communicate truth. The potency of its symbolism is evidenced by how its iconography has transcended games themselves. Members of Occupy Wall Street use the slogan, the cake is a lie, to point out the lies that have been sold to us about the economy. The group Anonymous, known for cyber-vigilantism of many a kind, has also appropriated the language of Portal. Information is now being controlled by government agencies and corporations of monumental scale. Lies are trafficked with frightening ease. The cake is a lie is not just a fun meme, it has a revolutionary connotation born of whimsy. Again though, to what extent is Subversion itself a design of the system? In the fan movie, Portal Know Escape, we see our protagonist escape the premises of the facility, only to realize that the outside world is itself a simulation, there is no outside to escape to. This is a subversion of the quintessential matrix moment, the delusion that there is an outside of any kind, we are always trapped. In fact, the person whose work inspired the matrix, Jean Baudrillard, didn't like the matrix because it suggested that there was a meaningful way to distinguish inside and outside, as if there was some way to make sense of lies. In his book Respawn, Colin Milburn argues that video games are fundamentally subversive. Being born out of the computer revolution and created by those with programming literacy, games have an era of rebellion built into them, and moreover, are an art form that best reflect the information-laden era we live in today. He states, Video games are a speculative media, science fiction at their core, they provide a grammar, a vocabulary, a regimen for dealing with rapid technoscientific change and its ramifications. In essence, games are a cultural artifact that reveal how we are enmeshed in systems and get us to play with that reality. Many games create an aesthetic out of highlighting themselves as designed artifacts, making games somewhat inherently meta-fictional, exposing how they are governed by systems. One of the first adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure, had a plot where you had to uncover how the world around you was all designed and find a way to break free of it. Similarly, System Shock features a plot where you yourself are a hacker, embedding this technoscientific subversion in the fiction of the game. Each of these games actually incentivizes a deeper form of subversion. They encourage us to dive into their respective codes to uncover secrets and find the real endings. By creating an aesthetic out of a game's simulation, subversion can be highlighted more palpably, pushing the player towards rebellion. However, this was not necessarily the case in Portal. One devastating level forces us to euthanize the companion cube, an inanimate object that helps us solve puzzles, but does so while looking cute. Players were horrified at this and tried anything to avoid doing so, but alas, it was ordained by both GLaDOS and the game. However, this did not stop some ingenious players from circumventing this mandate. We know these as glitches, hacks, exploits, but the geometry of the world was not going to deter those who were adamant on saving our beloved cube. And guess what? They did. The beauty of this, of course, is that players are doing exactly what the game is subtly trying to communicate in its narrative, except they only do it by breaking the game itself. We don't have to accept the rules of any system. In fact, it can be an act of compassion for an inanimate object that can inspire revolution. So sometimes, it is in fact good to fail. It is good to question systems and break free of their didactic mandates. In Portal, winning the game entails we precipitate our own death, and losing means we have the wherewithal to escape. There is an inversion of moral categories. Winning in a system that is unjust is to lose. We need to break free. Brenda Romero's train attempted to highlight this more explicitly. We play a game that seems innocuous at first, assembling trains to a destination, except when players realize that the destination was a concentration camp, they immediately start to sabotage themselves and others. Hannah Arant spoke about the banality of evil, of how our blind obedience to rules can lead to the perpetuation of evil. To escape, we need to see the lies around us. In his book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that we are governed by fictions, by socially sanctioned lies. Economics are a lie. Politics are a lie. Nationalism is a lie. Religion is a lie. Even we are a lie. A more palatable way of saying this is that the world is governed by stories, about how our people are greater than other people, about the unassailable will of markets and dialectics, of how we are progressing towards a singularity. Stories through history have existed to bind us together, but also to tear us apart. We are a storytelling species that are virtuosos in the manufacturing of consent, in persuasion, rhetoric and deception, not just of others, but ourselves. By being the medium that was born out of the techno-scientific revolution, and being designed artifacts that can reveal their own deceptive machinery, games are uniquely situated to activate metacognition to get people to see through lies. This was explored more formally in Meghalus Sikart's book, The Ethics of Computer Games, where he argues that games create a space that can activate moral reflection using systems, complicity, guilt and dissonance. These claims are supported by psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman, who argue in various ways that seeing our own moral machinery, of how values blind us to reality, can help us see past lies. We may not know what the truth is, but it starts with self-awareness, metacognition, of an understanding of ourselves and the systems around us. In papers please, you are a border agent trying to feed your family in a tyrannical regime, but to do so, you need to capitulate to the whims of this state, tearing families and yourself apart. In September 12, the idea that interventionism will lead to peace in the Middle East is questioned. The choices we are forced to make within the system are perverse, perhaps revealing that the fault lies not just with us, but our governing institutions. In universal paperclips, we are enthralled by the system. We keep producing paperclips for our business, except there are no limits to our greed. Eventually, we have accidentally turned the entire universe into one. To win, we needed to fail, we needed to see the lies, we needed to break free of the rules of the game and move towards something resembling the truth. Games aestheticize both subversion and failure, they are a shock to the system. A utopia of rules, that's what David Graber argues we are in, mired in bureaucracy, institutions and governing lies that have driven us into a dependency on rules themselves. However, there is a seed for revolution, one that exists not in the conformity of games, but the freedom of play. In Portal, we are given a tool to emancipate ourselves. The portal gun is an instrument not just of spatial manipulation, but of an insurrection against games themselves. Games have fixed rules and objectives, but play is expressive, transformative, it is free. Video games are a lie, but once these lies are discerned, the truth may finally reveal itself. So the cake is a lie, but what exactly is the truth? We live in a world awash with information, but also inundated with lies, making discerning the truth a truly diabolical affair. In the end, vilifying GLaDOS is absurd, both us and her are trapped by the system, she's just following orders, incapable of breaking free of her programming. That begs the question though, how are we any different? I suppose so long as we are aware that lies do exist, there is always the hope of escape. Or maybe this too is a lie.