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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?
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.
Valve could have made Gordon speak in 1997 with the original Half-Life if they had wanted to. I like to think they chose to keep Gordon's character largely vague to improve immersion... you ARE Gordon Freeman. If they had better defined Gordon's character and given him a voice, he's just another character who you happen to control.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion about Alyx. The only weird parts I see about it are that Gordon used to work with Eli, and Eli has aged 10 years but Gordon hasn't since GMan did some trickery to seemingly move him 10 years into the future without aging. Maybe she has a crush on him, I dunno, but it's not quite like you're implying. Have you tried HL2 Episodes 1 and 2? One of the things Valve said they didn't like about HL2 was that you didn't get to fight alongside an NPC partner much. In Episodes 1 and 2 you do this a lot (and mostly with Alyx) so they had the opportunity to flesh out her character more. You should at least give the episodes a try. I enjoyed them. And if you don't like the idea of spending so much time with Alyx, it's not for the whole of each episode, and they are short games.
The mechanic where the player is always in control and there are never out-of-body cutscenes or cutscenes which remove player control (unless it's plausible, IE the teleporter cutscene in HL2) was an important one to Valve. If you would rather have a cutscene where the game takes control away, you are welcome to remove your hands from your keyboard and mouse... but really, some exposition is needed in the world of Half-Life.
There aren't many out of the way plot details hidden in HL2, and I'm again surprised that you think they would be essential. All of the essential plot details are conveyed via cutscene / expository dialog. When I was playing through HL2 for the first time I don't recall ever feeling confused or not knowing why I was supposed to do something. Any out of the way bits (such as newspaper clippings) are merely extras designed to reward players who take the time to look for such things.
I suppose recording of plot dialog might have been helpful (Valve, there's still time to put a new feature in the HEV Suit!) but the plot isn't THAT complex. You have three factions... resistance, combine, and xen aliens. They all try to kill each other. You have to make sure the resistance comes out on top. See that tall spire? That's where you're going eventually. Other than this, HL2 is largely linear. You just push forward until you find your objective.
I actually am surprised with all your nitpicking at Half-Life 2 you don't seem to point out one of the more unbelievable aspects in both it and the prequel... how the hell is a PhD guy better with such a wide array of weapons than the US Army? Here is a case where there's a tradeoff of plausibility for fun. Half-Life would have been a short game if you couldn't use weapons well.
I always figured Gordon Freeman a bit differently.
He doesn't talk, and he never does anything particularly scientific. He's mute out of confusion. He's been dropped into this world, completely out of nowhere, and while there are people claiming to know him, people claiming to have been friends with him for decades, he, like us, has absolutely no memory of any of it.
He doesn't know who he is. He doesn't know what he's doing here. All he knows is that he's trying to survive, and things try to kill him, and . . . well, he could just walk away, right? But he never had a chance to get out during the events of Half-Life 1, and in some ways this entire mess is his fault, and, well, these people are relying on him.
So he soldiers on. But he still doesn't know any of the people, events, or places that this is happening in. So if he opens his mouth one time, people might realize he's not actually the person they think he is. So he keeps his mouth shut, and somehow things seem to work out, everyone always knows where he has to go next, and nobody suspects a thing.
Except, of course, for the G-Man, who knows everything that's happened, and knows where Gordon came from, and knows what Gordon is sent to do.
Is that all really subtle enough that people are missing it? It seems pretty clear from the beginning and ending of most of the games that, whatever Gordon is, he's certainly not just some random dude with a PhD. The sheer existence of the G-Man proves that. I'm honestly rather impressed that Valve's kept it up this long without spilling the beans. I honestly think that Gordon is just as in-the-dark about the world of Half-Life as we are.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
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.)