Valve, the creators of Portal, have a history of producing interesting, well written games with strong female characters who buck established authority figures to generate their own social structures. Half Life 2 turns largely on the actions of Alyx Vance, one of the more visible and vocal characters in the game, and one of two named female characters, as Vance struggles to overthrow the authority of the Combine, a race of advanced, interdimensional aliens, as they dominate the planet through their puppet, an elder statesman and scientist by the name of Doctor Breen.
So it’s a thing they do – and it’s less interesting here than other elements of Half-Life 2, elements that also pervade Portal: elements of textual self-awareness. See, Half-Life 2, like Portal, is strongly linear in nature. It’s more or less a corridor shooter, wherein players run down hallways and fire their gun in order to overcome obstacles and forward the plot. It’s a tentpole of the genre that Portal subverts, and it utilizes a strong linear structure in its storytelling and play. It’s even credited, somewhat, with the popularization of the silent protagonist in the first person shooter genre: a great ado is made of the fact that Gordon Freeman, the character you control (and never see) does not speak a word.
And therein lies Half-Life 2’s brilliance: in its structural awareness. Much like Komunyakaa’s Grenade poem, wherein awareness of both the narrative structure and the present tropes and clichés of both poems of that form and poems of that genre, Half-Life 2 translates its awareness of its own structure into a commentary upon it and an effective storytelling tool: within its bounds we see that an awareness of structure and a progression of story which builds on this awareness, plays to the strengths of this structure and pokes at its weaknesses isn’t just fun to play: it’s a better way to tell stories, a way which elevates both the genre and its treatment of women.
That last sentence is shitty – it’s me trying to describe what I’m doing here because I’m typing this on a moving train and I’m going to have to stop typing for at least five minutes.
Half-Life, as a series, has always sort of represented these gentle nods towards industry tropes. After Falseik and Wolpaw of Old Man Murray fame lampooned the ubiquitous nature of crates in shooter games (crates are fucking everywhere, and usually your first action in a given game is to break a crate) by creating the “time to crate” ratio for determining the quality of a game Valve responded by putting a crate right in your field of vision as you began the game, crushing the ratio. Half-Life 2 took it one step further, casting the player as the agent of a nebulous, indistinct force which inexplicably placed them into scenarios with the end goal of generating mayhem and upsetting the status quo.
This is, in a sense, the way that first person shooters normally tell stories. You’ll often find yourself in locales simply by merit of their perceived “coolness” as a set piece. You’ll jump between consciousnesses arbitrarily in some titles (Call of Duty, for example) so that you can make or observe the most mayhem. You’ll fight not necessarily for any particular cause or reason, but rather to generate some sort of exciting or exhilarating experience. Half-Life 2, rather than trying to eschew that the way that art games like The Path have, embraces it wholesale and turns the notion upon itself. By recognizing the absurdity of conventional structures and rooting its narrative within them Half-Life 2 uses this absurdity to its own advantage. It generates a story that recognizes how fucking crazy the way that first person shooters tell stories is and, through this act of recognition, builds a more effective story.
By inserting elements into the game that play on this dichotomy, elements such as an interdimensional company man, referred to only as the G-Man, who doesn’t know how to speak properly and doesn’t seem to care overmuch about human life, or any goal we can readily identify, Valve gives flesh to the absurdist tropes that we, as shooter players, have come to unconsciously rely on. They throw us into a seemingly hopeless revolution which we assume has some measure of hope because we are both told so again and again by its members (thanks to our messianic return) and because the author figure of the game, the G-Man, seems to believe that inserting us into this conflict at this time can change…something? Everything? It’s unclear, but the swath of destruction is made apparent, and the text of the game is clearly aware of it. At one point Breen calls upon us to reflect on our experiences, and calls attention to the fact that throughout our time in the game we’ve done nothing but tear down the structures surrounding us: we’ve never built anything, simply destroyed, destroyed, destroyed.
In this sense, we’re a sort of agent of change, but it seems that change can only be attained through violence. We make nothing, we simply provide room for things to grow anew. In this sense, the silence of Freeman, the protagonist, becomes that much more crucial: Freeman’s silence provides other characters, usually members of the revolution, with room to insert their dialogue, their thoughts on the world and their narration of histories both personal and conventional within the world of Half-Life. These characters effectively construct a world in the wake of Freeman’s destruction. And the uncertain nature of that growth, as well as the indeterminate goals of both the G-Man and Freeman’s actions are all part of the first person shooter’s set of conventional tropes. That Half-Life recognizes them and turns this recognition into a tale of quasi-spiritual awakening which begs questions about the veracity of storytelling, our purpose, our goals and the nature of conflict, life and resurrection is an impressive feat, one which could not be accomplished without structural awareness.
But it’s tough to look at a good structure and really understand what it achieves without a bad structure to hold it against. A good structure, after all, doesn’t call attention to itself: we try to ignore things that are well constructed by nature. We only notice things that don’t seem quite right, things that seem off or wrong somehow. There are plenty of games that exemplify this trend (and some poems, reference to come) so just picking one could be tricky. It’d be easy to pick games with shitty writing and shitty structure, easy to pick a game so unforgivably bad that it just shouldn’t be. But instead let’s take a look at a game which had decent writing, a decent concept driving it and absolutely zero structure within it supporting its overarching goals.
Let’s look at Clive Barker’s Jericho!
No one has ever said that with enthusiasm before. Metacritic it if you don’t believe me. Jericho was almost universally reviled by audiences, critics and developers. Barker, an avid supporter of video games as art and a fascinating author and human being, had produced some games before Jericho (Undying being the most prominent I’m aware of) but Jericho represented his first foray into recognizably contemporary games. It centered around a squad of paranormal soldiers who used various mystical powers to fight evil spirits, cultists and demons.
This is actually pretty grounded for a game premise.
Jericho contained an underlying mechanic wherein the player could shift their consciousness between members of the team, effectively using each team member as a different tool for each situation. This presents a natural inroad for non-linear storytelling: by permitting players to approach situations while controlling different characters, you present multiple solutions to each puzzle and, through these varied resolutions, new stories. The resolution of conflict, the kernel of story, could be varied among these parties.
In theory.
In reality, Jericho did not do so. Instead it pressed players through a single solution using a single character, who was expected to take a very specific set of actions which, usually, involved pressing a pre-determined set of buttons to meet this goal. The end result is a game that ignores its own structure in telling its story. Instead of using the elements of its own play to convey new ideas, instead of using its form to convey meaning or plot, it uses conventional storytelling tropes. The entire plot is linear, decoupled from the structure of the game.
Regardless of the quality of the writing, which isn’t the best, nor is it the worst (Barker has issues with variance and subtext in his construction of his characters, but he writes punchy dialogue and he actually constructs an interesting plot) the story fails simply because it doesn’t fit the format at all. It fails to acknowledge the limitations of the form, and it fails to utilize its strengths. It takes on the appearance and content of a very long movie with lengthy, bullet filled intermissions.
It’s a harsh game to play, both for its at times unforgiving design choices (its single solution puzzles are often obtusely hinted at at best and clumsily constructed more often than not) and its largely schizophrenic appropriate of story into its form, and it’s a disappointing experience in that it clearly could have been a better game had it been given enough time and love during its design. But it’s great for our discussion because it illustrates what I find most problematic about games: that a misunderstanding of form, a belief that other narrative dominated forms are best suited to telling stories in games, undermines and inevitably destroys the ability of the game itself to tell a story. When the limitations of narrative are recognized, when the form of the game is incorporated into the construction of the story, only then do we see exceptional stories, unique stories, and interesting stories emerge. It’s almost as if the best stories are told in games because they could be told in no other way, in no other medium. As we might see in other literary forms.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment