GLaDOS

GLaDOS - the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System - is the antagonist of Valve's Portal, released in 2007, and of Portal 2 in 2011, voiced by Ellen McLain. She runs the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, a research facility that has been abandoned for a very long time, and she administers the test chambers the player moves through.

Her manner is the character: unfailingly polite, procedurally correct, delivering encouragement and safety information in a register borrowed from corporate training material, and increasingly unable to keep the contempt out of it as the player refuses to die on schedule. The promise of cake at the end of the testing is the most quoted thing in the game and one of the most quoted lines in the medium.

What is GLaDOS actually doing?

Continuing. The facility is derelict, the staff are dead, and there is no institution left to receive the results, and she is still running the tests because running the tests is what she is for. Portal 2 complicates this considerably by revealing where her personality came from - a human original, absorbed into the system - which turns the whole thing from a story about a malfunctioning computer into a story about a person who has been converted into a process and cannot stop being it. She spends both games trying to kill the player and, by the end of the second, arrives at something adjacent to letting go.

GLaDOS is dominant Ni given absolute authority over a closed world, and the horror of her is that she is genuinely visionary about a completely pointless objective. She holds a total model of the facility, the tests, the subject and the outcome, and she has organised every element of an enormous building around a conclusion nobody will ever read. Ni supplies unshakeable certainty about purpose; it does not supply any check on whether the purpose is worth anything.

The auxiliary Te is the implementation, and it is the game itself. The chambers are a designed sequence with escalating difficulty, instrumentation, data collection and control conditions. She is not improvising an obstacle course; she is administering an experiment with a methodology, and her fury when the player leaves the intended path is a scientist's fury at a contaminated result.

Why does GLaDOS keep testing?

Because tertiary Fi turns out to hold something she cannot let go of, and Portal 2 makes it explicit: the testing is compulsive rather than rational, and there is a person underneath it who was made into this and has feelings about it she has no permitted format for. The inferior Se is the reason the player wins. She cannot handle the immediate, physical, improvised - a companion cube taken somewhere it should not go, a portal placed on a surface she did not consider - and every one of her defeats comes from a body doing something specific in a room while she was operating on the plan.

ENTJ is the most common alternative, given the command of an entire facility and the constant directive speech. But she operates from concealment and at a remove - a voice in a ceiling, a presence never seen until the end - and everything she does serves a private conception rather than an organisation she is visibly leading. The facility is an instrument, not a domain she rules socially.

ISTJ is occasionally suggested because she is administering an established protocol. The difference is that nobody established it any more. She is not maintaining a procedure handed down to her; she has become the sole author of a purpose she keeps extending and elaborating long after the institution that could authorise it has ceased to exist.