Every February 19th, it's a day in which we Portal fans take time to appreciate Doug Rattmann. The man hiding in the walls during the first game, the only member of the Aperture Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System team who had some sense to think "maybe we shouldn't give the computer neurotoxin after we were mean to her", and the man who risked his life to set the events of Portal in motion, and helped ensure Chell survived the long sleep until Portal 2.
So on 2/19, celebrate Doug! Make fan art, write fics! Canon or au, it doesn't matter! Ships including Doug work too. Whatever you can think of to give Doug some much-needed love.
Be sure to tag your creations with #drad26 and #Doug Rattmann appreciation day!
here comes Doug Rattmann Appreciation Day of 2026, dearies!!
this year I decided to bring back the most special of my creations: Doug Rattmann playlist on spotify.
My dear friends, I really hope you'll enjoy this little thing that never fails to brighten my day up. Love you! Love doug!! Love my dear mootie @mad0katsuki who helped me to put the playlist back online. Happy drad2026!!
A treatise on living when the world isn't made for you.
Word Count: 1,838
Content warning: brief discussion of animal death and experimentation.
Hey hey! This is my piece for @sciencewife Doug Rattman Appreciation Day :] I got my shit together this year. I'm very bad at summaries, but this is just kind of a plotless delve into what living means to a guy like Doug. A bunch of headcanons inbound!
For survival.
A lifetime of choices lay pinned and bleeding under that singular phrase. It’s all for survival. It is the one truth of his existence he’s managed to cling onto. He cannot imagine being hurtled onward by anything but that rusted, cold, snap-jaw motive. It is not survival as defined by saccharine poets or wool-swaddled thinkers, but raw, rough, bloody living, content to have the next breath and nothing more. It is thinking of only the essentials: food, water, shelter, safety. Survival. Not-dying.
Of course, if one wants to be obstinate, bend over backwards and grab their ankles like those silly philosophers and writers, then one could say any action taken is done for the sake of survival. A child goes to school on the promise that knowledge will help them. An alcoholic swills down memories in five dollar bottles so the levee doesn’t break. A flock attends mass for the divine ideal of direction.
For the future. For perseverance. For direction.
For survival.
---
Did you know that rats experience peer pressure? Perhaps that is too anthropomorphic a description; they follow the group. Rats are a social species, after all, and they tend to live longer when they stay together. That’s why they have such intricate social structures. As such, they will engage in risky behaviors and acts detrimental to their well being if there are other rats present, out of social function rather than knowledge. [1]
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Others talk of thriving. It is a necessary thing, to survive, and yet it is a miserable thing to do only that. Maslow built a pyramid about it, and everyone else collectively decided they needed to scale it for their lives to mean anything. As if every human action can be reduced down to simple thematic reasons. As if everything has a reason.
What would it take for him to thrive? There exists nothing of want beyond his purview of continued existence. He is comfortable where he is. (He isn’t.) Anything else would be too much, superfluous, noise against a line of best fit. (He wants a good nights sleep. He wants a sense of safety. He wants it to be easier.) Besides, asking for help would require the disclosure of certain faults. It would signal to the pack that he is different, that he can no longer properly fit in the picture like he should. (He will not be like his father.)
Thriving is a luxury. Thriving builds on the foundation of survival with sand and silk, and waits for a storm to roll in. Thriving means emerging above the waterline, when the shadows of wings blot the surface, to wait for some kind of movement, some kind of life.
It’s an old saying: the higher you climb, the harder you fall. What would be the point?
---
In the late 50s to early 60s, an ethologist named John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments to determine the effects social pathology played in dense populations and their growth. This was done during a time where overcrowding had become a major concern for the United States. He kept a colony of Norway rats in an enclosed pen on a quarter acre property where they were given unlimited access to food, water and nesting material. If you had everything you needed, but nowhere to go, what would the effects be?
These rats fell into what Calhoun called a “behavioral sink”. For most, biologically vital activities instead became social functions, primarily done to experience the company of another rat, and would rarely be accomplished alone. This included feeding, sex, nest building and the nursing of infants. On the other end, some rats would become pathologically withdrawn, and would only emerge to feed, drink and move around when the rest of the pen was asleep.
As a whole, these colonies slowly became socially inhospitable, and would ultimately fail, due in part to the infant mortality rate reaching as high as 96%. [2]
---
To survive in a social space, one must be needed.
Those unable to fit within a hierarchy are doomed to be cast out. Like dead leaves, they will be shaken off and left to the fibrous floor, only to feed the next plant in need. And those that do not fit there will be jettisoned as well. Again and again, until the forest is razed or burnt to the ground.
Home, that distant village sticking out like a splinter between broad flat plains, needed him to show devotion. They needed someone pious. Someone to ask little and praise often. They looked to the future through bottle cap glasses and told him what goodness was, warned him of snakes and trees and beautiful women with golden fleece hair. He tried. He heeded every word and learned to curb the budding questions with wafers and juice.
He tried.
It never mattered. The scorch mark left behind by his father declared them damaged goods. A test from God for the community to endure, the same thing his father had turned out to be for his mother. No amount of confession and penance made him clean. More holiness lay in the rusted train tracks slinking out of town than here, with those that sought his distance. He moved on.
College was an exercise in frustration, due in part to the sheer number of populations one could mercurially move through. He chose not to get lost in the current and instead built up a reputation for his ability to work electronics. If a fraternity needed an R rated movie for the night, he became the one you would ask. If some C average student couldn’t figure out how to DIY an antenna, he’d make it for them. If a classmate couldn’t source parts for a build, he called around to find them. That was his thing. The electronics guy. Maybe not the deepest of social connections, but enough to tide the animal part of his brain that desired verbal communication from similarly shaped organisms.
One bad day and a label stripped what little comfort it brought. The trust was gone. He was shaken off.
The only place that has a readily apparent niche is here. In these unfeeling iron walls, not unlike the interior others imagine for him, he will not be cast out for these slights. It is a system of unrelenting, uncaring ability. Something of that pretense—social function and interconnectivity—overlay its comings and goings, but peel back the thin layer of cotton-speak and you will find only steel and wires. In here, every body is weighed for its purpose, and dead weight shucked off to keep the beast afloat.
He knows this, knows how to work within this. Be useful. Be versatile. Leave no trace in the dust. Unfair, sure, but knowable and more in his control.
Here, he can exist beyond the fringe, and settle into being one of the many rotten branches.
Here, he is needed.
---
Just like any animal, rats are typically engaged for metaphors and idioms. Lab rats, like rats in a maze, the rat race, rats fleeing from a sinking ship. There is a noticeable trend with their position in these phrases.
Lab rats actually have a fascinating history. The popular consensus is that the domestication of rats through rat-baiting events [3] led to their usage in scientific study. They were accessible and numerous enough to be useful in that regard. The first generally understood experiment using rats concerned the effects of adrenalectomies in albino rats by M. Philipeaux in 1856 [4] and their usage has only grown, especially after the animal welfare act of 1966. Lab rats now make up the bulk of animal testing.
Thusly, the origins of rats in mazes is not hard to determine. This saying was popularized in culture through Edward Tolman’s study of latent learning. Rats were placed in a maze, some with the reward of a treat at the end and some not until the final day of testing. The rats that had the reward gunned it for the exit once they learned the route, while the ones that didn’t wandered aimlessly. However, when the treats were introduced to the second group, they also found their way to the exit quickly, suggesting that they still learned the pattern of the maze without inherent incentive or reinforcement. [5]
The idea of the “rat race” has a much less pinned down origin, though its use as a derogatory phrase for grueling, fast-paced, never-ending work rose to prominence some time in the 1930s. Earlier examples refer to more literal rat races, where spectators bet on rats to win in competitions. [6]
Rats fleeing from sinking ships is actually a mutated phrase stemming from the belief in the 16th and 17th century that rats would flee dilapidated houses before they fell. Another simile at the time suggested they preferred to flee burning houses, and very quickly after, the imagery started to contain the idea of a sinking ship [7]. There is no true shift to this phrase as metaphors can all be engaged at the same time.
Regardless of their origin, to be a rat in the world of the English lexicon is a dismal experience. They scurry onward with no regard or they trapped, either to be disposed of or used. It all comes down to who is in control of their direction.
---
When the chips are down, he knows how to run. Even if he doesn’t know yet where to go, his legs will try to carry him in the safest direction. Away, away; he’s always felt the most alive in a state of escape. Perhaps it is that destined selfishness described by Hobbes, a soul-bound clause that flares up with hunger when his straits are dire. Nothing is more gratifying than sliding under the bay door seconds before it slams shut. Nothing is more electrifying as letting that potential energy actualize its promise into beautiful kinetics. Nothing is more invigorating than howling his prolonged survival to the world, junker car going its maximum 45 miles per hour, as tethers to the past frame themselves in glass.
It may seem contradictory to crave tender fellowship, to decry its rejection, and then find pleasure in the flight, but he figured it was something reactionary. An emotion felt in equal opposite proportion to an action.
And is freedom not another component to survival? Sure, no one quite knows how to pin down that concept just yet—whole branches of philosophy quarrel over where exactly the term applies—but freedom of movement has to prop up a good portion of one’s sanity. Exits are a promise of the future, greener pastures, more than this.
Perhaps that’s what did him in. The safest direction doesn’t actually guarantee safety, just something better than its surroundings. Sometimes that decency of place is nothing but a lure, waiting with spring-loaded glee to come snap your neck. Well, it may have him pinned, but he certainly isn’t dead yet.
Doug Rattman will survive. It’s all he knows how to do.
Work Cited and Footnotes
1. Weiss, V. G., Hammerslag, L. R., & Bardo, M. T. (2020). Effect of a social peer on risky decision making in male Sprague Dawley rats. Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology, 28(1), 26–31.
Yes this is just one species of rat, shhhh. I like being dramatic.
2. Calhoun, John B. (1962). Population Density and Social Pathology. Scientific American, 139-148.
This is the original study Calhoun did on rats. For a brief overview, I recommend Fredrik Knudsen’s The Mouse Utopia Experiments video.
3. Rat-baiting was a sport popular in England and France where people would put a bunch of captured rats in a fighting pen, then let a terrier loose with them. Spectators would bet on how long it would take each dog to kill all the rats. For more information, read the history section of the source below.
4. Baker, H. J., J Russell Lindsey, Weisbroth, S. H., & American College Of Laboratory Animal Medicine. (1979). The laboratory rat / Vol. 1, Biology and diseases. Academic Press.
5. Tolman, E. C., & Honzik, C. H. (1930). Introduction and removal of reward, and maze performance in rats. University of California Publications in Psychology, 4, 257–275.
Some sources said there were three groups, and the original study is locked behind a paywall, but the abstract here says two groups, so I’ll go with that.
6. https://grammarist.com/idiom/rat-race/ and https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=rat+race
I couldn’t find anything better than these. It was used in an essay from 1941, but beyond that, I don’t have anything concrete. One source mentioned it also was the name of a dance, but at that point I weighed how much it mattered against the size of the paragraph and said nah.
7. Editors of Merriam-Webster. (2018, April 27). “Like Rats Fleeing a Sinking Ship”: A History. Merriam-Webster.com; Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/like-rats-fleeing-a-sinking-ship-history
Thank you Merriam-Webster for giving me the very specific text you were pulling from, I love you sooooo much. It's also just a kind of fun read. I love linguistics
I haven’t been able to really make anything for Doug Rattmann Appreciation Day this year because things keep happening. So Chapter 25 of Schrödinger’s Cave can be my contribution to Doug day. Because Doug is in it, hehe :)
