In the first Portal, we have GlaDOS, teasing us, taunting us, playing with us – changing the rules, controlling access to the cake (the cake thing – my own mother used to do that frequently). In a similar vein, we’ve got two of the best games made in the last 10 years, Portal and Portal 2, as prime examples of the controlling AI mother figure. What System Shock does is takes Mother’s defiance of Ripley, in those final minutes of the self-destruction countdown, and makes Shodan go crazy. That one little act of defiance by Mother in Alien – the refusal to shut down the countdown after Ripley has fixed the cooling system – is the very conception of Shodan.
#HAL 9000 VS GLADOS MOVIE#
If she was in a 1970s horror film, she’d be shouting at Sissy Spacek about her dirty pillows.” Or indeed, she’d be in a 1979 horror movie by Ridley Scott. As Kieron says, “She’s the insane mother. Good, weren’t they? And the part about her as a hysterical mother figure? Exactly what we’re talking about. Kieron Gillen arrived here first, with his excellent article on Shodan from System Shock as ‘God.‘ It’s worth a read even if you’ve never played System Shock. With one little twist, the ‘children’ of the computer become test subjects, and we are in the realms of two classic game series: System Shock and Portal. Mother is part of the cover-up – The Company is out to use the crew for experimental purposes.ĭoes that sound familiar? It should. Captain Dallas types: “What’s the story Mother?” As author Lynda Zwinger points out, “The story Mother tells turns out to be a sentimental fiction designed to enable an entirely different agenda.” Mother tells a bedtime story, but none of it is true. The significance of calling the computer ‘Mother’ is symbolic of her power over the crew – she ‘gives birth’ to them from stasis pods, she runs the lifeline systems on the ship and she controls what they know about their environment. The propagation of the omnipotent, omniscient mother computer archetype began in earnest with Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Alien. However, science fiction quickly noted the HAL cliché and subverted it accordingly – instead of having the voice be a he, now it was a she. On the other hand, the female default needed to be changed in Germany “after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman.” Regardless of the exception, the same analyst has a theory about why male voices are no longer used in products: “A lot of tech companies stayed away from the male voice because of HAL.” This is a great example of how fiction can shape our reality. “When automakers were first installing automated voice prompts in cars (‘your door is ajar’) decades ago, their consumer research found that people overwhelmingly preferred female voices to male ones,” a Silicon Valley analyst says in the article, explaining why most GPS navigation systems have a default female voice. In a 2011 CNN article, Brandon Griggs noticed that our computer voices are now, on the whole, female. Yet, because 2001 was such a significant landmark in our cultural history, HAL’s distinctly male voice has had a huge impact on both real-world products and the genre of science fiction.
In Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the ship’s computer, HAL 9000, has a calm and somewhat nasal male voice, even after HAL 9000 becomes paranoid, manipulative and ultimately tries to kill his object of affection, the astronaut Dave. The nightmare of the omnipotent AI began in science fiction and has, for the most part, stayed there. I’m talking about the soothing computer voice – the Artificial Intelligence we all trust. She’s meant to be caring, protective and helpful but she often turns out a bitch from hell. Videogames use this idea of the controlling mother figure to play with us, to scare us. (Mother, that is a joke – look, I’ll go to the gym soon, okay? No, I won’t brush my hair.)
Imagine, if you will, that she is everywhere at once, controlling your every move, making sure you ate a certain thing, went certain places, picked up certain things, kept telling you that you’re getting fat…it’s not hard to imagine, is it? Well, not if you have my mother. Imagine if your mother became your worst enemy.