I’m Doing Science (Charming and Open)

A lot of video games feature cool technology or magic that would be really useful to us in our practical, day to day lives. Unfortunately our real life tech overlords are more interested in creating the torment nexus than in actually doing anything that makes life more enjoyable, so it seems unlikely that we will ever get to enjoy the benefits of such fantastical inventions. Luckily we still have our *imaginations* and we can fantasize about what it would be like if people invented something useful instead of a planet-killing engine dedicated to preserving JPEGs. This is precisely the premise of today’s Charming and Open question. It is perhaps the most straightforward and simply question I have received to date, but despite that it is one full of potential: what would I do if I had a portal gun?

This question comes courtesy of friend of the blog Alex Sigsworth. I first met Alex as part of a different community event and have since interacted with him across a number of blog posts and Twitch conversations. While I learned early of his love of the Driver series, as time went on I found that Alex’s true passion is the world of cinema, and much of his body of work online focuses on films. You can check out his writing on WordPress or Medium, and if you ever have the pleasure of seeing him in Twitch chat be sure to say hello. Alex is a smart guy who’s always got an interesting creative project going on, so I appreciate him taking the time to participate in this event!

Okay So What Exactly is a Portal Gun?

Listen, I get that Valve’s catalogue is very well known to gamers of a certain era, but I really missed that entire train. I never touched any of the Half Life games nor the Portal games. And while conceptually I understand what the Portal Gun is supposed to be able to accomplish from its presence in pop culture, I assume there are some types of limitations or mechanics that I need to be aware of when deciding how to use it for myself in real life. So prior to writing this article I did a quick search to learn about the specifics of how the Portal Gun works.

The essential function of the Portal Gun is to create two portals that connect directly to one another, allowing a person or object to cross a significant amount of real physical space in an instant. It also allows for the transferal of momentum to create astonishing stunts and to navigate challenging puzzles. For science! A lot of the limitations of the Portal Gun seem to be tied to the type of material you can use it on; specifically, it is most effective when used on moon rock or objects synthesized from it. You may be surprised to learn, adventurers, that I don’t have a particularly impressive amount of moon rock in my life. I think this rule is one I am going to have to elide if I wish to participate in this question in good faith.

Most of the other rules I should be able to stick to. You can only have one blue portal and one orange portal, and the portals have to be formed on surfaces large enough to accommodate them. There’s a little gravity attachment on the gun that lets you lift small objects without touching them and kind of move them around, but they can’t really be launched; best case scenario you can sort of fling them through a portal or try to create momentum by dropping them. Trying to overlay two portals on top of each other just places them side by side, and trying to form a portal on a surface that is incompatible simply results in a shower of useless sparks. With all those rules in place, let’s figure out how in the world I would utilize a portal gun in real life!

#1: Travel

The most immediately obvious function of portals at first blush seems to be teleporting between two distant locations. Instantly transporting to another part of the world is an appealing concept! The problem is that the portal gun’s specific mechanics somewhat limit its flexibility when it comes to travel. You have to physically be at the place where you want to put the portal, which means you have to actually travel there first. This makes circumventing long range travel one would typically do with a car or a plane really complicated, because you have to make the full trip once by normal means before being able to just portal from place to place. Plus if you then want access to a vehicle in the place you made the portal to, you have to rent it or something. And if you accidentally replace your home portal while you’re gone, you’re really up a creek. This means that the Portal Gun is most useful for eliding repeated short-range travel. By keeping your portals local, you can move them around without too much trouble or inconvenience, which opens up the opportunity to use the gun for multiple functions. One function that jumps to my mind right away is work travel.

I functionally have three offices. I can work from home once a week, I have an office downtown in the city where I live, and then I have a cubical at the central office for the organization I work for. During a typical week I have one or two trips to central office, one day at home, and then the remaining days in my downtown office. Travel to central office takes the longest but it also is paid travel, so it would actually be impractical to get rid of the need to make that trip with portals. But getting rid of the need to travel downtown every day that I’m not at central office – now that’s useful. I could sleep in later without the thirty minute commute downtown, could actually come home for lunch every day since it would be a matter of walking a few feet; I’d functionally be making every day a work from home day!

Less selfishly, I could see myself instead using the Portal Gun not for my personal travel but instead for my partner’s. We only have one vehicle and I need it for work, so during the day my spouse is stuck at home without a lot of opportunity for getting around. Using the Portal Gun could give them some mobility by creating portals to a friend’s house or their mother’s or something like that so that my partner could go places while I’m away with the car. This particular application I think is the most promising, as instead of just simplifying something we can already do, it adds a completely new option on the board.

#2: Chores

Technology is supposed to make the shitty part of our lives easier so we can put more time and attention on the things we really want to do. So the next task I would want to put the Portal Gun to would be completing some chores around the house. Primarily I want ways to make these chores faster and more efficient, but I’ll also be thinking about opportunities to make them less physically demanding. The main chores I typically have to deal with are cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and cooking, so those are the areas where I’ll be looking for opportunities for improvement with the power of portals.

Cleaning and laundry would definitely have obvious benefits from the Portal Gun. Making a portal on the ceiling of one room and then placing the other portal over a toy box or laundry basket would allow you to quickly and easily transfer toys or clothes between rooms while also organizing them. No more walking back and forth with just whatever you can fit in your arms – you can quickly just toss things one at a time while having confidence that they are landing where they are supposed to be on the other side of the portal. The gravity mechanism would potentially be useful here too, grabbing objects that are just out of reach when cleaning out under the bed or behind the couch or something. It’d also let you move things around without the physical pressure on your body, which as a thirty-something with back pain I would deeply appreciate.

The applications for cooking and grocery shopping feel somewhat less obvious. Having a portal at the grocery store would mean never using the portal anywhere else, and is a huge security risk because strangers could just walk into your house. But what you could do is make a portal on the ground outside of your car and one in your kitchen so that you can just dump your groceries into the house instead of having to manually carry them up the stairs. The gravity attachment could also be useful for moving certain groceries around, putting them on tall shelves and the like. We keep our potato chips pretty high up and my spouse normally has to ask me to get them down, but the Portal Gun would eliminate the need for that.

#3: Political Revolu- Wait I Can’t Write About That

#3: Moving

I’ve mainly talked about integrating the Portal Gun into things I do on a regular basis, but I think it would definitely have some useful applications for one-off events as well. One particular thing that most folks can expect to do a few times throughout their life that I absolutely dread is moving to a new place. Moving is complicated and expensive, plus the process of actually packing and transferring all your stuff is like cleaning on steroids. I’ve had two major moves during my adult life and I hated both of them despite the fact that they represented hopeful new chapters in my life. With the Portal Gun, perhaps I could focus on the exciting new prospects and not on all of the painful practicalities.

Imagine having a portal that directly linked your old house and your new one. Now no matter how far you are moving away, there’s no need for a moving van or anything. You can just carry your furniture directly from your old living room into the new one. This also limits the amount of actual packing you have to do because you don’t have to organize things for long-distance shipping with packing material. If you’ve started moving early enough that you don’t have to do everything in a single sitting, even better; a couple times throughout the day you just take a few things over to the new place, slowly transferring everything over until you finally reach the point where all your stuff is in your new home.

Those are the main applications that came to mind when I imagine having a Portal Gun. I try to focus on the practicalities and imagine how it would be applicable in my day to day rather than doing anything too adventurous or off the wall. Heaven forbid life be exciting, amiright? Thanks again to Alex for the question and be sure to check out his site to keep an eye out for his response to the question I posed to him!