Portal 2 is a game which is mostly about solving puzzles with your mind and your Portal gun in Aperture Science"s various lab rooms. But the game has now become a target of a local TV news crew who apparently had a slow news day recently. Charlotte, North Carolina based WBTV ran a story about a father of an adopted 10 year old who was upset about how Portal 2, at least in his mind, made fun of adopted kids.
The newscast, which can be seen below (and might be considered to be a spoiler for those of you who haven"t played Portal 2 yet) does show the robot character Wheatley making fun of the player character Chell and how she is adopted. The father, Neil Stapel, is clearly not happy with this, saying that it was offensive to him as the father of an adopted Chinese girl. Of course, the whole game is all about Chell trying solve the puzzles and ultimately defeat Wheatley and GLaDOS. So the fact that she is out to prove that being adopted is not a detriment is apparently lost on Mr. Stapel. Oh, and the fact that Chell is called fat by Wheatley is totally ignored by him and the news crew.
The news report makes much of the fact that the game is "educational" which is stretching things a lot in our view. Yes, you have to solve puzzles, but this isn"t exactly a game where you learn something that might help you in the real world (unless there are Portal guns out there we don"t know about). The news crew also know nothing about the game industry as they first contacted Sony, not the game"s maker Valve, for comment and then act as if Sony is "passing the buck" over to Valve. Mainstream journalists are once again shown to not have a clue on how to cover games.