Much like Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life series, Valve chose to make Portal 2‘s protagonist, Chell, silent for a reason. It’s not for a canonical reason — or if it is, Valve isn’t saying why yet — but instead because it better serves the game’s comedy for her to never utter a word.
“We always assumed she could talk and simply just chooses not to, what with these robots all being dicks,” said writer Erik Wolpaw at the New York University Game Center yesterday, according to Kotaku. “She’s not giving them the satisfaction of saying anything.”
“There’s also this thing, with comedy — this is sort of reductive — there are sort of two different patterns,” Wolpaw continued. “There’s the straight man in a world gone mad. And the other one is: You’re a crazy person in a sort of straight world. Portal is definitely the world gone mad with a straight man. And the straight man is you… Because you have to write in the margins in the game, time is kind of at a premium. The fact that there’s already this established thing where you can have a silent protagonist, that saves us a lot of time.”
