“The Only Thing You’ve Managed to Break So Far Is My Heart”: An Analysis of Portal ’s Monstrous Mother GLaDOS

Mother’s Role in Video Games

Representations of mothers in mainstream video games are largely absent or secondary, while their varying appearances often promote harmful gendered stereotypes in relation to familial roles. In her web series that critiques female tropes in video games, Sarkeesian (2013) draws attention to the regularity in which game narratives murder the mother of the male hero’s daughter before tasking players to rescue their kidnapped child. An alternative representation of motherhood is presented in the science fiction and postapocalyptic game Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017). At the center of the narrative is the Nora tribe who function upon and worship matriarchal values. This matriarchal tribe, adorning feathers, animal furs, and face paint, represent all that is natural and primitive, that is, in opposition to the mechanical beasts that roam the game world. It has therefore been criticized for promoting an intrinsic association between nature and motherhood that exists in tension with technology (Batti, 2017), an antithesis that the computer GLaDOS also embodies via her corruption and chaos.

Another troublesome representation of mothers can be found in the comedy game Hidden My Game by Mom (hap Inc., 2016). The game is about a boy searching throughout his house for his game console that has been hidden by his angry mother. A stage called “Gamer” in Game & Wario (Nintendo, 2013) likewise depicts a boy playing video games in bed when he is supposed to be asleep. Players must pause and hide the video game played by the character before his mother discovers him in the act, and if the player achieves a certain amount of points, they are rewarded “Gamer” status. These games demonstrate a persisting cultural conflict between mothers and gamers. The young male protagonists in Hidden My Game by Mom and Game & Wario support a continuing correlation between video games and boyish rebellion that can be traced back to the earlier hacker culture of the medium’s origins (de Peuter & Dyer-Witherford, 2009). These games may additionally be understood in relation to an article by Shaw (2015) that draws correlations between solitary play and masturbation for they reiterate the separate space of video games as one that resides away from parental intervention.

At the time of Portal’s release, there was also a significant market surge in casual gaming, that is, family-friendly, mimetic interface games like those on the Nintendo Wii or low-budget mobile applications that were predominately marketed to adult women (Juul, 2010). One study in 2006, for example, revealed that 65% of casual gamers fell between 35 and 60 years of age and that 71% were women (Dobson, 2006). This association is recognized across different gaming platforms: A website containing over 1,000 browser minigames called “Mom’s Puzzle Games” (http://momspuzzlegames.com) displays a tagline stating “‘Mom’s Puzzle Games’ is an arcade site for all gaming mothers around the world. Come in and see some nice casual games, a lot of puzzles, match3, hidden object, bubble shooters and other fun arcade games.” Meanwhile, Vanderhoef (2013) identifies the criticisms of such game styles in the advertising campaign for survival horror game Dead Space 2 (Visceral Games, 2011) that distinguished itself from casual gaming by boasting “Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2.”

A number of casual games targeted for adult women promoted an ideology that dictated women’s play as efficient and productive. In a study of Nintendo advertisements in women’s lifestyle magazines, Chess (2011) found that women’s play was marketed as a form of self-improvement. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (Nintendo, 2005), for example, was advertised alongside the slogan “Do Something with Your Nothing” and was not marketed as a video game but rather as a process belonging within a youth-retaining beauty routine (Chess, 2011). Advertisements for Nintendo’s Wii Fit (2008) likewise reinforced gendered stereotypes by appealing to women’s body image and their relationship with their family (Chess, 2011). This form of targeted advertising promotes a societal ideology dictating that mothers revolve their choices and actions around productivity and their family—a far cry from advertisements targeted for men who frequently endorse their commitment to gaming before other responsibilites. ¹

This concept of the nurturing and efficient mother is also intrinsically linked to the practice of coding computerized female assistants. Science fiction narratives have often experimented with the parental role of the AI computer, designed to protect and nurture. This is most plainly demonstrated in Scott’s (1979) Alien, where the cargo ship’s AI mainframe is explicitly named MU-TH-UR. Aside from the historical labeling of female mathematical laborers as “computers” (Chun, 2004), this tendency may also be traced back to the female pronouns assigned for all structures that house dependent workers, as seen in the female names christened for sea vessels (Schwartzman, 1999). Stereotypical gender roles are promoted in this representational practice of gendering computers. As Schwartzman (1999, pp. 76–77) identifies, women and intelligent machines in popular fiction share a number of qualities from “extending humanity” to being the “passive vessel of male desire” or the “the active cause of evil.”

Resembling the opening sequence of Alien is Portal’s own opening, where the player’s vision is blurred as their avatar is awoken by GLaDOS. As the setting becomes more discernable, so too does the evidence that something is not right. The mother-computer in both of these texts ultimately betrays its children, as the player’s role as a disposable test subject in Portal resembles MU-TH-UR’s preprogrammed directive: “CREW EXPENDABLE.” Schwartzman (1999, p. 76) further notes that machines designed to provide maternal protection act “not malevolently” but “dispassionately” when performing automated tasks for the purpose of efficiency. The commodified mother thus evokes suspicion. GLaDOS even comically mocks the failure of robots to simulate intimacy when she says, “Unbelievable! You—subject name here—must be the pride of—subject hometown here—!” The maternal computer as represented in these popular science fiction texts therefore reinforces the feminine role of nurturer and productive supporter—albeit often unsuccessfully.

A significant theme is revealed across this small sample of mothers in varying video game genres in which they are consistently positioned in opposition to gaming and broader technological cultures. While casual games invited adult women to gaming, these examples outlined reinforce the ideology that gaming culture is a club for rebellious boys. The entrance of mothers to this space was therefore considerably unwelcome for those male gamers seeking to maintain their gamer identity as one that informed their masculinity (see Kubik, 2012; Vanderhoef, 2013). Dismissive and subservient representations of mothers therefore work to preserve enduring gender role ideologies while additionally reinforcing gaming culture as an exclusively masculine space. Following this line of reason, troubling gendered implications can hence be drawn from Portal’s monstrous mother GLaDOS.

Abject Mothers

Monstrous women that are active rather than passive have largely been examined within screen studies through a psychoanalytical lens (Creed, 1993). Psychoanalytic textual analysis can be further developed when brought into contact with games like Portal, where its integration with video game theory like Jenkins’s (2004) work on narrative architecture provides insight into broader cultural anxieties. This psychoanalytic approach, however, is limiting when examining machine subjects like GLaDOS, as it tends to centralize on corporeal, sexual difference, primarily in regard to maternal reproductive functions and situated in relation to the cinematic horror genre and its grotesque imagery. It is still worth identifying these tropes within Portal; as despite being a comedy text, GLaDOS embodies a number of Creed’s (1993) observations.

In her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Creed (1993) applies Kristeva’s (1982) model of the abject—which “disturbs identity, system, and order” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 8)—to a number of female figures of horror, concluding that, contrary to Freud, woman is feared not because she is castrated but because she castrates. Creed (1993) argues that male and female monstrous subjects in cinema are constructed differently, wherein the site of monstrosity for feminine-coded monsters is informed foremost by their gender. Grotesque exaggerations of the female body therefore emphasize its abject status, that is, the use of imagery intended to disturb or disgust (as well as fascinate) including bodily fluids, decaying skin, and sharp teeth, symbolic of the “vagina dentata” and fear of castration. These representational conventions signify abjection because they threaten to corrupt symbolic order. As this order celebrates patriarchal law and cleanliness, it accordingly avoids acknowledgment of the body’s debt to nature: “It must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 102).

Abjection theory has begun to occupy recent video game representational studies that identify the grotesque, sexual exaggerations of feminine-coded monsters (see Bonenfant & Trépanier-Jobin, 2017; Spittle, 2011; Stang, 2018). Resident Evil: Revelations’ (Capcom, 2012) erotic agent-turned-zombie Rachael Foley, for example, has been psychoanalytically theorized as symbolizing both the phallic and castrating woman, where her head becomes a phallus that bears a gaping void or “vagina dentata” at its tip (Bonenfant & Trépanier-Jobin, 2017, pp. 43–44). Stang (2018), meanwhile, traces various representations of Western mythical creatures, like banshees and sirens in the God of War (Santa Monica Studio, 2005–2018) ² and The Witcher (CD Projekt RED, 2007–2015) franchises. She identifies their sexualized bodies as markers of their horror while their gaping, fanged mouths incite fear of castration.

Unlike these monstrous women’s hypersexual curves or castrating fangs, GLaDOS is not marked by a conventional corporeal form. Her body is rather located throughout the entirety of the Aperture Science facility itself; therefore, her dialogue plays a significant role in expressing this form of abjection related to sexuality and sexual difference. When the player destroys her “morality core,” dropped from her central mainframe in the concluding confrontation, GLaDOS adopts a deeper and seductive voice. This shift in tone indicates the vice of sexual expression and thus reiterates Creed’s (1993) contention that women’s sexuality is represented as something that must be contained. ³ The expulsion of the morality core, a metal orb that ungracefully rolls across the floor, also signifies the abject’s role in highlighting the fragility of the law (Kristeva, 1982). GLaDOS reinforces this when she instructs the player, “Just put it in the corner and I’ll deal with it later.”

GLaDOS’ voice as her predominant presence should not be understood as a limitation, particularly when Stang’s (2018) examination of the feminine monster’s shriek is brought into consideration. She argues that the voices of these female monsters become weaponized when their shrieks are used to paralyze their adversaries (Stang, 2018, p. 25). GLaDOS uses her voice to simultaneously guide, mislead, taunt, and threaten players, who are obliged to listen to her words as they are in a situation with little alternative guidance—other than that of following the game space. The weaponized voice is thus threatening because it indicates feminine empowerment through vocal expression. As Stang (2018) explains, “these monsters fall into a long popular culture tradition of framing the empowered female body as monstrous and threatening—a discourse which contributes to the marginalization of women within patriarchal society” (p. 20).

GLaDOS’ voice is also a marker of her maternal coding. The figure of the mother is central to Kristeva’s (1982) theory of abjection as the mother’s reproductive functions represent a height of abject bodily expulsion. GLaDOS’ maternal abjection, however, lies outside of corporeal gore, where instead her dialogue is rather reflective of an emotionally abusive mother. While seemingly preprogrammed, her supervisory role and guiding language come to first resemble an authoritative matriarchal presence. Slowly revealed as the game progresses, however, is that her dialogue is characteristic of emotional abuse. Throughout the earlier test chamber levels, GLaDOS maintains a controlled and instructive manner, but she also reveals subtle traces of humor and sarcasm to the effect of betraying her performance of mechanical passivity. She comically advises, for example, “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!” This dramatically alters when her plan to murder the player/character fails, where both the level obstacles and her words become more sinister as she evolves to represent a truly monstrous and abusive mother: “The only thing you’ve managed to break so far is my heart”; “I’ve given you every opportunity to succeed”; “You’re not a good person […]; Good people don’t end up here”; “[You’re] unlikeable, liked by no one. A bitter unlikeable loner”; “Where did your life go so wrong?”

The abusive mother is an abject figure because it represents immorality and corruption, described by Kristeva (1982) as “a hatred that smiles” (p. 4). The figuration is also not exclusive to Portal, existing in far less symbolic guises in other video games such as The Park (Funcom, 2015) and The Binding of Isaac (Himsl & McMillen, 2011). These examples feature biological maternal bodies and disturbing horror themes and are hence highly suitable for further discussion of abusive mothers and maternal abjection. Batti’s (2018) recent article does this with another relevant text, Among the Sleep (Krillbite Studio, 2014), providing a psychoanalytical reading of the game’s themes of maternal monstrosity through the mother’s alcoholism and physical abuse. Within a psychoanalytical interrogation of a machine subject like GLaDOS, abjection as an exclusive framework is admittedly limiting. Due to this, I return to Creed’s (1993) faces of the monstrous-feminine, specifically the face of the archaic mother that precedes the paternal symbolic and its subsequent abjections.

Portal’s Archaic Mother

Kristeva’s theory of abjection primarily situates the maternal form in opposition to the paternal symbolic. Without human biology and even a strict corporeal form, GLaDOS cannot express her debt to nature in the way that Kristeva (1982, p. 102) presents the abject expulsions of the maternal body. GLaDOS is then rather best understood as an embodiment of Creed’s (1993) “archaic mother”:

A negative figure, one associated with the dread of the generative mother seen only as the abyss, the all-incorporating black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed. The central characteristic of the archaic mother is her total dedication to the generative, procreative principal. She is the mother who conceives all by herself, the original parent, the godhead of all fertility, and the origin of procreation. She is outside morality and the law. (p. 27) ⁴

The archaic mother is a primordial presence that precedes the phallic symbolic order. The generative archaic mother does not require a father to conceive so her womb hence occupies “its own point of reference” (Creed, 1993, p. 27). The original womb symbolizes both life and extinction and thus imposes an all-encompassing threat to reabsorb its children, fulfilling the individual’s abject desire (but also fear) of returning to the primal state of “non-differentiation” (Creed, 1993, p. 28). The archaic mother is derived from a number of mythological sources that uphold a singular feminine figure as the original bearer of life. As Creed (1993, p. 27) points out, however, patriarchal representational practices have reconfigured her to be a negative characterization, an emphasis echoed by Batti (2018) when she asserts:

The representation of monstrous mothers in horror does not provide insight into female identity but rather sheds light on the manner in which such identity is patriarchally inscribed through the perpetuation of domestic ideologies. (p. 400)

That is, the threatening nature of the archaic mother is a patriarchal perspective that highlights ambivalence to maternal agency.

It is the archaic mother’s striving for reincorporation that reinforces Creed’s (1993) contention that women are feared not because they are castrated but rather because they threaten to castrate. The mother-as-abyss is a terrifying figure because her attempt to reclaim the life she has birthed is perceived to be an act of castration. Like so many main stream video games, Portal challenges its players with the stake of their character’s death. As with the horror genre then, death (and hence reabsorption) ensues a constant presence. Players are therefore ultimately tasked with the simultaneous goals of escaping the laboratory (the symbolic site of the monstrous mother), avoiding death (her reabsorption), and destroying GLaDOS (and thus restoring symbolic order). Players, however, learn the futility of expelling the archaic mother in GLaDOS’ closing credits song, “Still Alive,” where she celebrates her immortality and taunts, “When you’re dead I will be still alive” (brought somewhat to reality in the game’s 2012 sequel).

The archaic mother provides critical interest to the study of video game representation as Creed locates the abyss conceptually within the thematic imagery of a screen text. Expressive of this indirect form of representation is Portal’s navigable environment, which is the site of GLaDOS’ all-pervasive body. More so than other storytelling mediums, video games rely on their spatial design to convey mood and narrative progression (Jenkins, 2004). Jenkins (2004) emphasizes the mise-en-scène of video games as producing immersive environmental narratives, calling for theorists to engage in these spatial stories when analyzing a game text. As Wendler (2014, p. 353) has noted of Portal, subtle environmental designs, such as the empty offices and tracking cameras, construct a “sense of wrongness” that intensifies as GLaDOS’ hospitality declines. Following the event in which the player narrowly evades her betrayal at the test’s conclusion, the path to the concluding battle then takes players into dark and claustrophobic passages (her metaphorical organs) that significantly contrast from the brightly lit and open designs of the test chambers. It is this path to the final arena that resonates with what Creed (1993, p. 53) describes as “intra-uterine settings…dark, narrow, winding passages” that lead to the “symbolic place of birth.” These areas behind the scenes of the facility take the player into overturned offices, ventilation shafts, and engine rooms that are further rendered unholy by their dim red lighting

Portal’s final challenge represents a convention of video games wherein concluding or larger battles take place in an arena-like, circular environment, a spatial setting that Creed (1993, p. 53) relates to the womb. This dangerous arena in which the player is directly confronted and attacked by GLaDOS’ central mainframe is hence symbolic of the reabsorbing mother, functioning as the site of GLaDOS’ final attempts to devour and reincorporate the player. Players are further confronted with the presence of the archaic mother's reproductive functions through her brood of turret bots. These are small robots with motion sensor lasers that fire upon the player if contact is made (although deadly, their infantile and apologetic lines of dialogue decree them comically amicable). At these points of the game, GLaDOS is still a seemingly nonthreatening voice, although the act of directing the player to a room of turret bots is one of the first clear signifiers of her sinister intentions. The bots (her weaponized offspring, conceived without a father) therefore represent the horrific nature of women’s reproductive abilities. As the player later traverses behind the scenes of the laboratory, they come across a powered-down conveyer belt of insentient turret bots. Previously encountered as lively, comical, and dangerous, this site is unsettling and mournful and so also reinforces the cultural suspicion of the commodified mechanical mother.

Portal’s spatial construction of GLaDOS as a monstrous mother evokes Freud’s (1919) notion of the “uncanny.” The reproductive imagery is uncanny due its simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity, subsequently arousing unease and terror. As Freud (1919) explains, “This uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (p. 241). As the uncanny, or unheimlich, is the opposition of “homely” (hemliche), it has undergone a common translation to “haunted house” (Freud, 1919, p. 241). The overturned offices and messages on the walls operate as environmental narrative devices that generate a puzzle of haunted memories. GLaDOS is likewise reflective of the spirits of a haunted house through her unseen but all-encompassing presence, while further embodying the “unhomely” as an emotionally abusive mother.

I apply psychoanalytic theory here less as a means of exploring the individual psyche than as a tool to investigate how specific fears may be rhetorically projected within video games. Of video game representation, Spittle (2011, p. 318) advises, “We must pay particular attention to what we cast out, reject, repress, and destroy in the fictive universe of video game play if we are not to forget that repression has a very particular politics.” In the context of Portal’s release, games were becoming more accessible to a broader demographic, specifically adult women, and those alternative styles of games were achieving significant monetary success. As Spittle (2011, p.318) continues to explain, representations of the abject and uncanny rather speak to a “historically specific fragmented self, frequently burdened […] against a backdrop of rapid and risky change.” In addition to broader patriarchal psychosocial anxieties, GLaDOS as a monstrous maternal figure may be understood as representative of the fears these changes posed to the traditionally masculine-coded gamer.

It should not go unacknowledged, however, that Portal is ultimately a game about a prominent maternal personality. While the few games that feature mothers sideline, stereotype, dismiss, or mock them, GLaDOS is a powerful figure who is undeniably central to the game and, more importantly, Portal’s humor constructs her to be likable and memorable. Additionally, the game’s protagonist is a woman, freed from the male gaze through her first-person perspective (see deWinter & Kocurek, 2015). Discussing the impossibility of imagining Portal without GLaDOS, an article regarding her conception quotes one of Portal’s game designers Robin Walker: “Even today, it’s always fascinating to us that players seem to start Portal talking about the gameplay, but after they’re done, all they talk about is GLaDOS” (Rosenberg, 2017). Despite the harmful gender ideologies that Portal’s maternal antagonist promotes, GLaDOS is simultaneously a representational achievement for mothers in video games.

Conclusion

The mother figure has been a concentrated subject within cinematic discourse, yet unfortunately still endures a noteworthy absence as a central focus for video game textual analysis. Portal is one of a minority of video game texts that feature a monstrous maternal personality. Greater attention afforded to these games can be revealing of the medium’s cultural treatment of the mother gamer because to repeat Spittle’s (2011) words, “What we cast out, reject, repress, and destroy in the fictive universe of video game play […] has a very particular politics” (p. 318). Feminist analyses of such texts also have the power to highlight the ways in which these representations reinforce (or challenge) gender roles in broader social contexts.

The representation of GLaDOS as an abject and archaic mother contributes to a representational trend that positions empowered women as a threat to be subdued. GLaDOS’ voice is the predominant signifier of her presence that she weaponizes to manipulate and taunt the player. The empowered female voice is then a marker of her monstrosity while her dialogue also characterizes her as an emotionally abusive mother. The game space further functions as the site of her monstrosity, as the uncanny navigable environment is symbolic of her all-pervasive maternal body that attempts to reabsorb, and hence castrate, the player. As Creed (1993) contends, the monstrous woman is a product of patriarchal signifying practices that presents female authority as threatening. Feminine-coded monsters in horror, fantasy, and science fiction media are distinguished from those coded masculine because their terror is informed by their gender (Creed, 1993, p. 3). Feminist psychoanalytic theory helps us to identify how these patriarchal representational practices promote harmful gender ideologies. When applied to video games, a culture from which female and marginalized identities still feel widely excluded (Consalvo, 2012; Shaw, 2014), these psychoanalytic theories operate to explain how representation plays a role in reinforcing patriarchal normativity, in this case by presenting challenges to male authority as subversive and in need of containment.

This analysis of Portal contributes to a small but growing archive of feminist video game analysis, as called for by Shaw (2017) where she notes a lack of diversity within the history of game studies. This article has presented how Portal’s antagonist GLaDOS is reflective of an abject, abusive, and archaic mother, a figuration in video games that is not exclusive to this single case study and therefore aims to encourage further research into the medium’s various formations of maternal monstrosity.