Thinking With Portals

About

“Thinking with Portals” is a catchphrase often used with photoshopped images depicting how the concept of “portals” can be applied in real life. It also serves as a synonym for the English idiom thinking outside the box as in finding an unconventional but ultimately successful solution to a difficult problem. Sometimes images depict just having fun with portals.

Origin

Portal is a single-player first-person puzzle-platform video game developed by Valve Corporation and released in October 2007. The game primarily comprises a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and simple objects using the “handheld portal device”, a special type of gun that can create inter-spatial portals between two flat planes. The game’s unique physics allow momentum to be retained through portals, requiring creative use of portals.

The phrase “Thinking with Portals” was first introduced in 2006 with the teaser trailer which ends with GLaDOS telling the viewer “now you’re thinking with portals.” The earliest known reference to the phrase can be attributed to the online Portal Mapping community ThinkingWithPortals.com^[1], launched on October 3rd, 2007.

It was used again few days later as the title of a “Photoshop Phriday” thread posted via Something Awful^[2] on October 19th, 2007. The article featured a compilation of photoshopped images demonstrating the potential usage of portals in real life and inspired a series of response images from the readers.

Spread

As the popularity of Portal continued to surge through 2009, visualization of portal technology in real life also became an increasingly common discussion topic among the fans. In 2010, conceptual application of portals became even more widespread with the rising popularity of Troll Science cartoons. Image examples can be found across a wide variety of blogs and community sites, such as MemeBase^[3], Reddit^[4] and Tumblr^[5], among others.

By 2011, the catchphrase became associated with forum threads discussing different ways of using the fictional teleport technology and similar brain exercises. In early 2011, Valve registered the domain name ThinkWithPortals.com^[6] for the official website of the sequel title Portal 2 as part of their advertising campaign under the slogan “Now You’re Thinking with Portals.”

“Now You’re Thinking with Portals”

Now you’re thinking with Portals is a phrase that uses the basics of portals, jumping between two seperate places, but it’s used differently. It’s most commonly used with images that don’t contain nor use portals, but are shot from an angle where it seems that portals are used.

Search Interest

As can be seen in the Google Insights, the phrase gained a rise in popularity in October 2007 and April 2010. These were also the times when the Portal games came out. Indicating that the popularity of the phrase is also very much related to the popularity of the game.