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Slouching Toward Black Mesa
The Escapist this week is themed around stories and storytelling. The article that resonates the most with me is a Tom Rhodes piece called Slouching Toward Black Mesa. It explores the connection between the journey of Gordon Freeman and literary explorations of similar end-of-the-world themes. "Freeman isn't slouching toward Black Mesa, he's converging on the great citadel in the middle of City 17, the Bethlehem of our story. Bethlehem is a holy place in Christian theology, which makes it the perfect location for the beast of Yeats' poem to encroach upon. In City 17, that ideal is flipped on its head, replaced with a center of darkness and powe ... In an even more direct rejection of Yeats, however, the forces in Half-Life 2 are non-supernatural. It continues the series' theme, man as a force in this world; whether for good or ill is his choice. It is this choice, this need to carve out our own destiny and define ourselves based on our own hopes, dreams and fears that makes us human. So what is slouching toward Bethlehem? We are." The issue also features an article entitled The Ending Has Not Yet Been Written, about the never-ending story of Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
The tie to Yeats is so loose it isn't funny. Yeats was working with themes common to humanity and so of course there will be some overlap - but the entire thing seems to argue against itself at least half the time. And the end? Didn't even make sense. So I'll give it points for bringing attention to great poetry - but that's about it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The guy who writes the story in an MMO is kind of like the guy who decides what color plastic to use for motherboards. Somewhat compulsory, but ultimately inconsequential.
This sounds like the kind of crap I might come up with were I to use my knowledge of lit-crit terminology and thinking to make up deliberately-stupid but syntactically- and factually-correct bunch of bullshit for my own amusement.
Want me to write something like this holding up K-Fed's song "PopoZão" as an intelligent bit of verse, in the vein of, say, Lindsay's "Congo"? I can. It won't be true, but it'll sound as good as this crap.
(don't get me wrong--I think that the Half-Life series has given us a damned-good balance of action and story, and is probably the best "pure" FPS series in existence. This article, however, is stupid.)
This is the most overwrought load of crap I have ever read.
Ugh, this kind of pretentious clap-trap illustrates perfectly what I found objectionable about Half-Life 2.
Now, don't get me wrong, I still think the original Half-Life was one of the greatest fpses ever made. Sure, it's not aged all that well and feels a little primative now, but compared to the competition at the time (basically Unreal and Quake 2), it was superb. It had a plot that made sense, an environment that actually felt plausible and AI which, while relying heavily on scripting, *felt* convincing and realistic to the player.
Half-Life 2, however, left me utterly cold. It reminded me of nothing more than the pretentious student-videos I'd had to sit through at University, put together by people who thought that "OMG SILENT MOVIE" or "OMG BLACK AND WHITE" were original, ground breaking concepts, never thought of before.
The biggest problem I had with HL2's storytelling was that it took the technical limitations imposed by the general state of the genre at the time of HL1 and made them into supposed virtues. The biggest obstacle to immersion for me was the "mute protagonist". I'm sorry, but this is absolute bollocks. We're supposed to be playing *Doctor* Freeman here. I've spent my share of time in academic circles and I have never known a PhD who could stay silent for more than 10 seconds at a time. However, we are supposed to believe that this mute, inexpressive guy whose visage is largely obscured by a bulky hazmat suit is some kind of inspirational resistance leader? Pull the other one. He's also got this strange, stuck-firmly-in-the-freaky-valley woman who obsesses over him and who seems to be on the verge of orgasm every time he stares blankly at her or hits a bit of the scenery with a crowbar. Immersion by this point is so badly blown as to be irretrievable.
People talk about *proper* cut-scenes destroying immersion, but frankly, compared to the nasty, cut-price story-telling in HL2, the classic "Mark Hamill at his worst" cutscenes of the Wing Commander 3 era are masterpieces. I fail to see what is so great about being able to run around during vital plot exposition, to the point that half the time you don't even realise it's happening until you've missed half of it.
Finally... this idea that the back-plot can be filled in through newspaper cuttings and the like? Fine... that can work. If done properly. Unfortunately, HL2 didn't have anything like enough of it and finding a good chunk of it involved spending way too much time staring at every inch of wall in the game in the hope of finding something relevant. I found HL2's contemporary, Doom 3, did this whole business much better, with the audio-logs system.
Have you even considered that Gordon may be mute? Perhaps he has a disability preventing him from speaking, and he can't use sign language since his hands generally are carrying tools. In any case, The odds of a Headcrab knowing ASL is pretty darn slim.
Black Mesa is an Equal Opportunity Employer after all, you insensitive jerk.
This reads like someone's college English thesis that started with the concept of "how can I pass off a video game as literature and make my teacher buy it without realizing I'm completely bullshitting the entire thing because I don't feel like researching a real work of fiction and would rather just reference a video game I played".
In other words, the last ditch effort written the night of the deadline just to get some kind of grade.
Artist Keven Federline's hit song "Popozao" is a refreshing change from the literarily-ignorant tunes of his contemporaries, which thoroughly fail to speak to a modern world while retaining ties to the important sense of rich history that exists in the medium of verse--lyrical or otherwise. Federline's use of sound is plainly meant to be evocative of those of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo", and may be equally offensive if one fails to grasp the significance beyond the words themselves. The message of this tour-de-force is many-layered, and worthy of closer analysis.
It quickly becomes plain to the listener that the setting of the scene is a dance floor, painting for us a picture full of moving bodies and light that well-fits this song's rhythmic and sometimes chaotic flow. We have a narrator who appears, on the surface, to be calling to a fellow dancer of the opposite sex. Following a Lindsayesque bit of primal noise, we are greeted with the line, "Toy all your thing on me, baby." Now, through this request for openness ("all your thing") and the use of the second person possessive, it is clear that the narrator desires a dialog with the listener, inviting us to explore and speak to the verses that follow, and to release our inhibitions. The deep, drum-like rhythm of this line, repeated four times for emphasis, ties it to the preceding noises, letting us know that the narrator speaks to us from--or on behalf of--that primal chaos.
A bit of Portuguese follows, chanted with a tone that is both menacing and enticing, reminding the listener in a few well-chosen syllables of the emotional rollercoaster that is Lindsay's "The Congo". The next two verses are particularly interesting, and inform us that a literal, superficial reading of these verses is, indeed, incorrect. The first gives us the meaning of some of the previous Portuguese speech, which we are told means "bring your ass". We'll come back to that in a moment. Later in the same verse, we are told that the narrator wants to see our "kitty and a little bit of titty". All-in-all, this is an overtly and even offensively sexual bit of lyric.
The next verse, however, reveals that this was merely a light-hearted play, as was foreshadowed with the laughter accompanying the songs introductory sounds. Federline deliberately breaks one's natural association of "kitty" with another synonym for "cat" which may also mean "vagina" with the lines "Girl, don't you worry about all the dough/because a cat is coming straight out of the know". With our earlier images shattered and replaced by the narrator himself, it is revealed that this pair of verses is really a statement on how we cheapen not only others, but ourselves by degrading sexuality in this way. This and other evidence in Federline's ouvre may indicate that he has a dislike for modern, sexually vulgar poetry, in the vein of Charles Bukowski. His overt references to Lindsay, who wrote in the very early 19th century, may even give us a glimpse into Federline's ideals. Further, the self-association of this deep-voiced male narrator with the feminine may have deeper implications.
(OK, I'll stop there. I was thinking about tying him in to the Beats and even Andy Kaufman [via their both having had amateur experiences with "professional" wrestling], but I think I've spent enough time on this already. I rest my case.)