If at first you don’t succeed, you fail.

I’m a couple of months behind on the phenomenon that is Portal, a short video game produced by Valve Studios. Portal is a first-person puzzle game with an ingenious twist: you have a “gun” that can shoot an entrance and exit portal pretty much anywhere, so you can cross a chasm by shooting portals next to you and on the wall across from you, allowing you to “cross” the chasm by avoiding it all together. The game is surprisingly hard to explain, actually. I’ll just embed a video:

The game is amazingly well done, and it makes me think about the video game and cognition research that is all the rage right now. Multitudes of studies (most famously Green & Bavelier, 2003) have shown that video game experts can process more information and have a larger functional field of view. This is just a side effect of these action video games, though - they weren’t designed to enhance cognition. A game like Portal, however, stretches the mind and requires an entirely new way to solve problems. Portal requires the player to completely re-conceptualize their concept of 3D space. Not many other tasks do that.This game provides a fascinating platform for learning this entirely new concept in a first-person environment. There are times (when learning how to maneuver a submarine, for example) when this type of spatial nonconformity is necessary to successfully complete a task. It would be interesting to examine what new cognitive skills develop as one becomes an expert with a game like this. The field of video game and cognition research is still fairly new, but I anticipate seeing it expand in many new directions, including leveraging innovative new games such as this to examine how we can train our minds and expand the way we think.