Who Taught GLaDOS to Fat Shame?
I recently started playing Portal 2, because I enjoyed the mechanics, puzzle solving, and the thrill of the story in Portal. I also enjoyed learning that Chell was the main character, and I enjoyed finally understanding “the cake is a lie” joke that ran wild through the internet. The dialog from the antagonist, a robot named GLaDOS, struck me as different in Portal 2 than it was in Portal. GLaDOS had started fat shaming Chell, who looks to weigh in the ballpark of 120–140 lbs. The comments comparing Chell to a whale or hot air balloon were clearly not interpretations of the in game reality, but an attempt to make Chell feel bad about their physical appearance. I quickly found myself questioning why a robot with a far from human form would choose to insult a human’s weight over all the other potential insults I imagine a robot would find grating (consider for example: “Chell, we just discussed this, the RAM capacity of your little meat circuits is laughable.”) The simple answer is their lines were written that way.
GLaDOS’s Insults (Portal 2) — YouTube
It is the antagonist doing the fat shaming, so the action of shaming is easily interpreted as petty, mean, or cruel. I am going to assume that is how the writers meant to depict those interactions, and not entertain the idea that they might have found it humorous or witty. That said, even though you get to beat up the person doing the shaming, I imagine an hour of someone telling your first person character that the protagonist (you) are fat, might be difficult for someone who struggles with their body image. In addition, the idea that fat shaming should be able to make someone feel bad is a problematic cultural phenomenon in itself. What weight/shape is popularly considered desirable (and in turn what is considered unacceptable or laughable) has changed wildly throughout history, and is frequently determined by the ways in which people with power can augment their body or the ways in which their lifestyle affects their body. In other words, this shame is being manufactured and leveraged as a form of power.
Body shame is disproportionately leveraged at women, as a consequence of patriarchy. I was curious how many women worked on this game, and to what extent these lines might have been written or edited by women. Thankfully there were some women in the credits, but it seemed as if there were significantly more men on the team. My goal to determine how much say women had on body shaming between female coded characters was inconclusive, but it did highlight the fact that there are a lot of men in the game design field. There perspectives on the world based on the way society responds to them is always going to have a strong influence on the stories they write. It’s not bad to have that perspective, but games could be spicier (and more inclusive) with a little variety in writer background and identity.
The fact that GLaDOS fat shames Chell, prompted me to evaluate my thoughts on bodies in video games. I cannot think of a game where the main character is fat. I am certain they are out there, and that there are popular ones, but it’s not common. Even many character creators I’ve seen and used don’t allow for people with fat. There isn’t a lot of representation of people with different shape (and color) bodies in video games. It makes me think there is an assumption in game companies that a vast majority of people who play video games look a certain way and want to see people who look a certain way. “Cultural diversity in media production is not inevitable; the history of other media industries suggests that dominant voices are susceptible to political debate as well as market pressure” (Dovey & Kennedy, 2011, p. 83). If we want to see diversity in the kinds of people depicted in video games and working on video games we must create a culture and pressure that convinces game companies to include them.
Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media, by Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Open Univ. Press, 2011, pp. 83–83.