A New Portal to Frienship: Portal 2′s Cooperative Campaign

Sometimes it’s hard to know who your real friends are.  Several friendship tests have been administered across several mediums—most notably on Facebook—but the results are inconclusive and dubious at best, and the tests themselves are more or less completely bogus.  In this world of superficial friendships and vast social networks, how are we to sift through the chaff and discover the diamonds in the rough? The developers at Valve, the firm responsible for such gaming phenomena as Half-Life  and The Orange Box, may have a solution: Portal 2.

Everyone was impressed and generally mind-blown when they played through the original Portal, which was actually not a full game in its own right, but merely an add-on to The Orange Box.  Gamer and critical response to Portal was so overwhelmingly positive, in fact, that Valve dutifully produced a sequel which eclipses its predecessor in difficulty, length, and originality.  

The solo campaign was challenging and entertaining, but for me the real treasure of Portal 2 is the newly added cooperative campaign, which follows the delightfully quirky robot characters Atlas and P-Body as they do GLaDOS’ (the HAL-9000-esque manipulative, villainous artificial intelligence of the first installment) dirty work: unlocking security systems and locating cryogenically frozen human test-subjects.  As you play through the game’s genuinely innovative puzzles, you can’t help but develop a soft spot for the silly bots, especially as GLaDOS pits them against each other, incessantly and disloyally insulting Atlas and favoring P-Body, only to praise Atlas and ridicule P-Body in the next breath.

What’s best about Portal 2, though, is that it doubles as a litmus test for friendships.  The puzzles are hard, and require a kind of collaboration and synergy never-before-seen in videogames.  They will test your friendship, your patience, and your mutual creativity.  You may find yourself discovering things about yourself and your co-player you never knew: You’re actually jealous of your friend’s ability to think outside the box; your friend breaks down like a four-year-old when the limelight is taken away from him; you have OCD tendencies and issues with personal space.  Ok, maybe not that last part.

And the game doesn’t just emphasize your obnoxious and unpleasant characteristics either.  Playing alongside a buddy, you’ll find that the two of you are able to do together what you couldn’t do alone, both literally and figuratively.  The game’s puzzles require teamwork to such an extent that without a second player, they would be impossible to solve.  Encouraging and congratulating each other as you solve the puzzles reminds you why friendship is so important, and why you’re friends with the person you’re playing with to begin with.

I won’t give away the ending of Portal 2′s cooperative campaign, but I will say that it is an ending as poetic and poignant as you could expect a story about two robots to be—maybe even a little more so.  My advice: go grab a friend (did I mention that you can also complete the cooperative campaign with an online buddy?) and run this creative gauntlet with her.  You’ll either end up better friends than you thought possible, or have a lifelong nemesis you’ll battle for the rest of your life—either way, you won’t regret it.

This guest post is contributed by Lauren Bailey, who regularly writes for online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: blauren99 @gmail.com.