Growing up as a marginalised Iranian immigrant kid who couldn’t fit in within the social structures of Greek meatspace — physical reality —, I found refuge within cyberspace and the internet. Cyberspace and the internet were my safe place, a timeless shelter, a library and access point to a multiversal discourse. I learned things that were not taught in school, hung out online with people from other parts of the globe, and cultivated my creative thinking while playing video games.

Watching cyberspace’s popularity transform into something more essential to everyday life got me thinking that digital presence is taking the shape of a substantial exoskeleton for social and professional existence. Concerts, lectures, discussions, and games are casually streamed on Twitch, Discord, and Instagram, virtual and web exhibitions thrive, remote working is a thing, posting on forums might find a solution to a problem, psychotherapy sessions or meetings take place on Zoom, you can pretty much learn anything with tutorials provided on YouTube, and you can enjoy your home cinema via streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney+. Cyberspace has become a place of gathering, a tool for expression, and an archive of documented reality on an established and popular level.

Common electronic devices like smartphones, TVs, tablets, and computers function as portals that lead to these multiversal and unending digital explorations and narratives. This essay explores the nature, use, and symbolism of portals via one of the most common grounds of all – video games – and examines the recurring interest in escaping through fantasy and sci-fi themed narratives.

The games and stories I choose to explore are timeless, popular examples that I grew up playing, and that are nowadays being nostalgically revisited in search of »higher social connectedness, vitality, and optimism for one’s current situation« as Nicholas David Bowman and Tim Wulf write in the paper, »Nostalgia in video games.« In »Nostalgia, media, and technologies of the future« Katharina Niemeyer and Olga Siebert add that »nostalgia can be anticipated and felt as a potential future experience in the form of mental travel.«

I will specifically focus on the visual and sonic elements that amplify a portal’s nature in terms of experience, based on their functionality, and identify similar audiovisual experiential elements within cyberspace and in interactive terms. Emile Frankel writes in Hearing the Cloud about the importance of sound regarding the narration of a fantasy / sci-fi story: »In philosophies of horror and philosophies of salvation, the future is often presented as a space which can be changed by simply speaking about it. That is, by making a sound about it. Science-fiction on the page and on the screen is accompanied by the dangerous and exciting thought that this imaginative vision could become reality.«

Please Mind the Gap between a Portal and its Metonymy

Throughout fantasy and sci-fi contexts, the most common portrayals of portals are either a physical manifestation, for example a freestanding gate with magical aspects, or that of the intangible mass, appearing in the form of ellipse, circle, formless tear, or sphere that rips through space-time. The physical types often feature figurative sculptures of either mythical beings or humanoid figures, inscriptions, and runes. Immaterial portals appear two-dimensional and either have an eerie glow, or consist of vapour or particles/granules that define their outline.

Sonically, physical portals often feature sounds and compositions with mediaeval and archaic aesthetics. Melodies are mostly created using analogue instruments, while sounds are mellow, slow, dark, gentle, magical, and chanting, and tend to borrow elements from their environment such as the sound of the wind. In contrast, immaterial portals tend to be more attached to futuristic aesthetics, but not exclusively, as we’ll see in the references explored below. There are occasions where a game with a mediaeval setup will feature futuristic portals, or vice versa. Some games even combine both aesthetics. Futuristic portals tend to sound sharp, abrupt, and noisy, with electronic sounds that quickly shift back and forth as a manner to underline the fact that they are bending space-time and reality.

Portals have different functionalities, for example connecting one point of space-time to another; leading to different realities via new dimensions, parallel universes, or timelines; or acting as veils that connect the world of the living with the world of the dead. Overall portals are connected to spatial and durational transition, indicating a place and time and enabling teleportation. They mark both a closure and beginning that might entail curiosity or fear for the unknown. Portals metaphorically extend beyond their architectural forms or visual formats. An object that doesn’t look like a common portal and requires a different action than that of simply walking through it could be considered a portal as well.

Portals have frequently been associated with escapism, however, within the context of games, rather than escaping, one begins a new adventurous quest. By stepping through a portal, one embarks on an exploration of unfamiliar terrain through which personal growth can be achieved. Portals can thus challenge norms and bring fresh perspectives. As Alenda Y. Chang writes in Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games: »[...] the old assumption that games are escapist fantasies defined mainly by their narrative fictions no longer holds as solidly as it once did. Whether it involves watching a computer or video game in a crowd or at home, using a phone or other mobile device to play games, taking part in an alternate-reality game, or indulging in some costumed creative anachronism, it is clear that the world in which we walk, gesture, observe, and act is more than ever constitutive of the game experience.«

Break on through to the Haunted Side

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, within the British Ministry of Magic’s Department of Mysteries, an enigmatic structure like a portal is located at the centre of the Death Chamber – a vast, empty, murky, echoing, and crusty room. The portal functions as a manifestation of the barrier between the living and the dead. When Harry and Luna approach it they claim to hear voices, while Hermione exclaims that it is just an empty archway; the veil within the arch can only be seen and heard by those who have witnessed death. It echoes with fuzzy, eerie muttering rustles and unrecognisable words and phrases that are carried away by the air in a wispy gesture, with celestial reverbs warping the sounds in favour of the void.

Speaking of the metaphorical dimension of portals – indicating transition – when a player dies in World of Warcraft (WoW), they enter an in-between-worlds place where they are a ghost, roaming neither the land of the dead nor the living. The player has to »corpse run,« talk to a spirit healer, or have another player resurrect them. The experience comes with a black and white world where you cannot interact with the living layer. Above in the sky is a whirling tornado, giving the impression that it is sucking souls into the afterlife. It comes with a global resounding soundscape consisting of choral voices chanting bewitching, spooky, and spine-chilling melodies, and restless poignant strings accompanied by infinite reverbs that create whimsical veils of quasi-drones in the far distance.

This in-between state is reminiscent of the Nazgûl (Ringwraiths) in the Middle-Earth franchise, who are neither living nor dead. The story goes that they were once nine great Kings of Men who became corrupted by the rings handed to them by Sauron. There is a particular moment in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbit protagonist Frodo Baggins is being hunted down by the Nazgûl and wears the all-powerful One Ring just for a moment. He enters an in-between world where the true forms of the Nazgûl are revealed: white, skeletal, aged, and ghastly. We hear sinister, murmuring, and wistful sounds that are similar to those of the in-between world of WoW. The vague whispers emitted through the noisy wind feel as if they are going to drag you within their shrouds of mists, to be stuck in perpetual afflictions.

A similar world appears in the Silent Hill survival horror game series. The Fog World in the town of Silent Hill, Maine is a deserted town haunted by roaming spirits and grotesque monsters, where the laws of physics are defied; the town manifests the visitor’s unconscious into a tangible reality blurred by dense fog. Entering the town itself is like stepping into a portal, but the town is altered based on the visitor’s unconscious mind, becoming an ever-changing destination. A magazine within the game explains that people who died suddenly might not realise they are dead and thus continue to haunt the town. This transitional world is occupied with maleficent ambient pads, cracking noises, howling winds, uncanny reverbs, and whirling sub drones along with creepy, randomly triggered environmental sounds such as ambiguous voices and footsteps. Listen to the soundtrack here.

As we can see, portals that function as a barrier between the lands of the living and the dead are represented by sounds that include whispers, lost or choral voices, and dramatic subtle drones choked in sublime reverbs that make you feel dizzy, uneasy, and forsaken. Such portals are visualised in very unsaturated colours, foggy and blurry – how the world of the dead sounds and looks like, one might say.

A pale parallel side exists within cyberspace as well. Cyberspace is filled with ghosts, graveyards, and archeological sites: deserted video games, dead websites, inactive social media accounts, bulks of unread emails and broken links, to name a few. Studies such as this one have shown that our connection to cyberspace has become so stable and connected with dopamine-seeking effects, that when a glitch occurs, an »ERROR 404« appears on a computer screen, or our phone dies, we might experience a small dose of death as well. Glitch interrupts. As Legacy Russell writes in Glitch Feminism: »A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function. Within technoculture, a glitch is part of machinic anxiety, an indicator of something having gone wrong. This built-in technological anxiety of something gone wrong spills over naturally when we encounter glitches in AFK scenarios: a car engine calling it quits; getting stuck in an elevator; a city-wide blackout.«

Don’t Gaze too Long into the Abyss Unless You Desire to Gaze Forever

A portal functions as a demarcation and access point between two worlds or planes of existence. In video games, the worlds tend to differ immensely, and the contrast between them is highlighted by the very divergent audiovisual elements of each respective location. One such example is the Dark Portal in WoW, which is the gateway between the worlds of Azeroth and Outland. On Azeroth, the portal is found in the Blasted Lands while its other side is on Hellfire Peninsula on Outland. Each of the portal’s gateways feature two hooded figures with glowing green eyes holding a sword which points towards the ground. A serpent is engraved on the lintel of Azeroth’s gateway, and a dragon’s head is found on the one in Outland. The music and ambiance change significantly when a player passes through the Dark Portal and ends up on Hellfire Peninsula. The soundscape composed for this region sounds much more artificial, exotic, and alien, with various evil voices and demonic machines overwhelmingly covering the soundscape of the entire region, unwelcoming you in a tremendous manner. In contrast, the soundscape in Blasted Lands is benevolent, down-to-earth, warm, and terrestrial, and is composed of wind instruments, various percussion, and orchestral drones. The role of portals as a principal element in the gaming of WoW is further highlighted by the way that Mages, Warlocks, and Death Knights all have the ability to create portals. These portals all feature a wretched soul sucking sound.

Similar portals to that of the Dark Portal exist in Minecraft, such as the Nether Portal, a manufactured structure that functions as a gateway between the Overworld and The Nether, and the End Portal, a naturally-occurring structure that is used to travel into the End. The Overworld is the dimension in which players spawn and where the gameplay mostly takes place; a green landscape filled with natural materials, vegetation, animals, and monsters. The Nether in contrast is a dangerous hellish dimension featuring lava, fire, a ceiling of bedrock, fungal vegetation, hostile creatures, dust, and hazardous mists, and is the game’s underworld. The End is an obscure, space-like dimension with a barren environment consisting of separate islands in the void and is considered the opposite of the Nether. While the Overworld features natural sounds such as water, bubbling, animals, and rustling vegetation, with jocular soundtracks that feature xylophones, minimal melodies, and subtle pads in the background, the Nether and the End feel much more malevolent. Both the Nether and the End include low-pitched, bone-shaking twitchy drones and pads with various landslide-like sounds, windy filtered-out shimmers, falling and clashing boulders, and grim undefined noises that oscillate to and fro.

In the game, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, various gates called Oblivion gates spawn throughout the world and lead to the demonic realm of Oblivion. The gates are oval-shaped, made of brown boulders with sharp edges that look like demonic claws, and emit a magical fire. The gameplay is based on the player's efforts to stop a fanatical cult known as the Mythic Dawn from opening these gates. When a player approaches such a gate, the world around them drastically turns from natural and peaceful to a black and orange hell-like scenery as demons spawn from the gate. What is interesting is that the area where such a gate has spawned emits a rumbling, howling noise that can be heard from afar. Both sonic and visual aspects transform into something horrifying. The game initially features slow bittersweet ambient orchestrated strings accompanied with environmental sounds like birds, wind, and fluttering vegetation. When a gate is found, a burst of lightning strikes, and when the world shifts to its hellish version the music turns edgy with a focus on lower pitches that shift abruptly to higher notes and slow tritonal passages. During combat, the sound of lightning provides a backdrop to demonic voices. This hellish music persists when the player enters the gates and finds themself in Oblivion, but a touch of suspense is added by the strings playing tighter and faster from time to time.

These examples demonstrate portals that separate peaceful habitable planes from darker ones, and underline their differences through representative sounds and visual elements. The portals themselves visually offer information on their destination either through their architectural elements or magical auras.

Similar to how a player steps through a portal and finds themself confronted with darker paths, entering certain areas of cyberspace can situate us in an intense, complicated, and fluid location. Cyberspace’s darker sides seem to have stepped into the light more boldly as time passes. Conspiracy theories have caught the attention of ever more online users, alt-right and incel ideologies have found resorts on platforms such as 4chan and Reddit, climate crisis deniers and anti-vaxxers have come out of hiding, fearlessly posting and manifesting their opinions online. As numerous studies have shown, the dark web’s tentacles are climbing, more and more, towards the outer layers of the web.

Conflicting narratives find new life in cyberspace through effects of manufactured amplification and echo-chambers, which has increased polarisation to the extent that cyberspace has become both a host for and instrumental to post-truth. As Joshua Citarella writes in »Raw eggs, pink pills, and embodied identity: Online communities create their own proof in a vacuum of truth:« »Online, all conflicting viewpoints are represented simultaneously. At the touch of a finger, every wingnut can call up information to support any claim, no matter how absurd. Everything can be disputed and nothing is clear. For example, I tweet a study that claims, ›Eggs are good for you.‹ Someone replies with a counterstudy that reads, ›Actually, eggs are bad for you.‹ To which I reply with a counterstudy to their counterstudy, showing, ›New data proves eggs are really very good for you!‹ And so on and so forth ad infinitum. Now multiply this typical exchange for every topic across all of social media. Online discourse has become a sinkhole of infinitely granular debates, without any coherent summary to cut through.«

Multiple Portability Disorder

Thus far the examples cited have described portals that grant access to specific dimensions. This functionality has been taken to a maximal extent in game series such as Super Mario Bros, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon, where players spend most of their time in central hubs that house multiple portals which grant access to other worlds / levels of the games.

In Super Mario 64, the player mostly spends their time in Peach’s castle and each level is accessed through paintings in different rooms of the castle. The player has to jump into the paintings and as soon as they do, a magical, lightsome star-like sound effect is activated; a sound akin to stars travelling rapidly through space-time or a wizard making something disappear.

In the Crash Bandicoot series, the player similarly spends most of their time in Warp Rooms; different themed rooms in which various portals exist and lead to the game’s levels. Crash Bandicoot portals follow futuristic aesthetics; they feature electrical spikes, glowing tunnels that are akin to wormholes, and laser beams, all which are framed with elements from their destination worlds. Respectively, similar sounds are triggered when using these portals; high-pitched laserish and electrical spike sounds that create an illusionary doppler kind of effect, with fade in and fade outs giving impressions of space-time being vigorously stretched.

Akin to that, in the Spyro the Dragon series, the player spends most of their time in various Homeworlds; hub worlds that contain several portals to other worlds. The portals appear as arches with gold letters indicating the name of the realm they provide access to while the sky of their destined realm is visible through them. They are either free-standing or found on a wall. When the player gets near a portal they begin to hear its aura, blended with the natural sounds of the hub world. The portals’ ethereal-sounding auras give the impression of millions of fairies singing together from the depths of a quantum-sized realm that culminates in a magical reverb looped into a drone that keeps the portal running.

A less-known example that uses central portal hubs would be the role-playing game, Planescape: Torment, where the player spends a great portion of their time in Sigil; a city located atop a spire at the centre of the multiverse which features a series of portals connecting the various planes.

Teleportation between two points of space-time is probably the most common use of portals in gaming. A pivotal example is the Portal series, which explores the pursuit of freedom from computational processes by using portal guns to create portals on surfaces to access and complete algorithmic puzzles. The reward of completing these puzzles is freedom, however as this possibility is granted by the very system of control the player wishes to escape, over time the game reveals a bleak message of entrapment, synchronising the player and protagonist into eventual self-destruction. Chell, Portal’s protagonist, shoots blue and orange portals, while the protagonists in Portal 2, the androids ATLAS and P-body, each use a variant of those colours. Upon entering a portal, a glueish, stuttered oscillator sound is triggered, followed by echoes and a fast fade out. Portal belongs to the Half-Life universe where teleportation is also the focal theme of the series.

Throughout The Legend of Zelda series, teleportation is made possible via Warp Portals. Warp Portals feature geometric patterns in either green, or red combined with pitch-black, and appear and disappear with very distinctive futuristic sounds. The appearance of or entering a portal is accompanied by a low-pitched, grainy electronic sound that rapidly gets higher in pitch in circular ways, as if a tornado is sucking up every last molecule around it. These sounds are heard in reverse when a portal disappears, or when stepping out of a portal. A further collection of portal sounds from Zelda can be heard here.

Portals can also give access to altered timelines. The Final Fantasy XIII-2 gameplay is based on time travelling through Time Gates. Looking like artificial trees, the gates are golden or blue spherical masses framed around a metallic sculpture featuring flower and leaf ornaments. Upon stepping into a time gate, a magical sound is triggered that very much resembles the sounds from the Spyro portals, a fairy-like magical reverb drone, except increases in speed and pitch until you reach your destination.

Time travel through Time Gates is a key element of the gameplay of the Chrono series as well, specifically in Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Travelling within such a gate is visualised in the game as a psychedelic geometric pattern that includes bouncing neon lines and an ever-expanding vibrating tunnel. The sound has many layers, one of which is a looped ghastly noise that swings in the background, with a jittery constant sawtooth drone above it and a very bright dancing sine wave reminiscent of a U.F.O. that falls and rises.

The above examples show how the transitory aspect of portals is highlighted by sounds that are triggered upon a portal’s appearance, or upon entering or getting close to a portal — though one striking example of soundless portals exists, in the game Kingdom of Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. The interactivity between action and audiovisual triggers in video games has been analysed by Karen Collins in Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. Collins outlines: »[...] interactive sound is event driven, and the sound is controlled by an action or occurrence that is initiated by the game or by the player. A player-generated event is an event that the player initiates (for instance, by clicking a mouse or by pressing a controller button). Interactive sound in games is primarily the sonification of player-generated events where the player initiates an event and there is a system-controlled (game-generated) sonic response.«

Much like computer start-up sounds, app notifications, or interactive digital interface sounds, the sonic stimuli of video games transcend cyberspace, transported to the meatspace via screens and speakers. According to Kristine Jørgensen in »Sound in Participatory Culture«: »While games’ visual aspects cannot be interacted with directly save through game controllers, the game sound is not delimited to the virtual space but penetrates the physical space, and makes game sound inseparable from other sound produced in actual space.«

A.F.T.U.A.T. (Away from this Universe and Timeline)

Currently, we are faced with many wars and frozen conflicts, climate and biodiversity crises, environmental pollution, pandemics, an identity politics overload, and spectres of technocracies that are entangled within the strings of corrupted politics amidst rapid developments in artificial intelligence. In this setting, it’s not surprising to find ourselves face-to-face with pessimism and cyber-nihilism. We set out on a path to believe that we are living in a multiverse, and pursue alternative timelines where such things are not happening, because frankly it sounds as if we are being pranked. We take refuge in cyberspace and post memes about how terrible reality is, especially when the media is bombarding us with catastrophising headlines that make us feel as if it’s the end of times.

As Shumon Bashar writes in »The Dawn of Endcore,« there has been a recent increase in interest in multiversal discourse in pop culture, such as the new phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once: »If optimism is impossible in our storyline, the one we seem to be living in, then why can’t we travel to a multiverse where there’s no Endcore? Where climate grief never happened? Where there’s no microplastics in the Antarctic snow? Multiverses have invaded popular culture today because they offer an escape from Endcore.«