Half-Life 2: Episode One
developed by Valve (Bellevue, WA)
first published June 1, 2006 by Valve, for Windows, $19.95
[original site, current site]
~1.6 GB
Played to completion in 5 hours, 1/9/15–1/10/15
Video of a complete 2.5-hour playthrough. Once again, disregard the subtitles.
The official trailer.
Also purchased 11/28/10 in “The Orange Box” for $7.50 (divided by five games = $1.50).
What is a “puzzle”? Game designers and reviewers and players are always talking about the “puzzles” in action-adventure games, but usually that’s the wrong word. For something to be a puzzle, I feel like it needs to have a certain degree of abstract intricacy. The kinds of obstacles that occur in these Half-Life games just don’t have enough variables for “puzzle” to feel right. I’m almost embarrassed when a game tells me I’m solving puzzles, when what I’m actually doing is hunting around to find the only thing available for me to do, and then doing it. “There don’t seem to be any exits from this room… Are there any switches to flip? Any breakable doors or gratings? Any way to jump from platform to platform and work my way to a higher level? Anything I can push or pull into a more useful position?”
Those “now what?” moments are very effective dramatically (though perhaps “drama” isn’t quite the name for the aspect of gameplay I mean, which is why I keep using the awkward word “dramaturgy” instead). They — those moments — give variation and tension to the player’s flow. The action drops from noisy combative certainty to quiet observational uncertainty, and then back again, which feels like one of the basic dramatic rhythms of real life. But that’s all those moments are; they never actually require switching all the way over to an analytical puzzle-solving frame of mind. The commentary makes it sound like playtesting kept leading the developers away from any such genuinely tricky problems. Players want and need very explicit guidance at every point or they stop “having fun.”
The developers kept talking about “fun,” as observed in testers moment by moment. How do they determine this? How do they define it? Do playtesters grin and guffaw and shout “awesome!” when they’re having fun? If the developers were watching me, with my deadpan expression, dutifully gunning down enemy after enemy in their game, would they know whether I was having fun? Because I certainly don’t know! Does what I’m doing when I play this game count as “fun?” What is “fun?” Is it the same thing as “flow?” As “gratification?” If someone came up to me in the middle of watching a movie at the theater and whispered, “How much fun are you having right now, during this particular scene?” I would have no idea what to say.
It sure seems like the point of these games is the primal satisfaction that certain people get from shooting bad guys and watching them flop over. The game has certainly made all the audio/visual/tactile elements of that experience as tasty and catchy as possible: everything about using guns to shoot bad guys goes whoosh, blam, thud, clack, with perfect correctness. To the degree that I can appreciate it, I do, but my satisfaction only goes so far, and it’s always mixed. I don’t particularly want to be shooting anybody. I think of shooting bad guys as just the price I pay to see the rest of the artistry on show here. I always thought that put me slightly on the outside of the target audience.
To my surprise, though, the commentary paints a picture of a process completely open to learning from players what the point of the game is… and maybe it’s the stuff I like after all. The developers say stuff like “People seem to like watching the NPCs interact with each other,” “People seem to like the big pet robot,” “People seem to feel fatigued after a lot of continuous combat.” A good majority of the commentary is about how playtesting guided the team to emphasize various things that aren’t shooting bad guys.
The thing that makes a Hollywood blockbuster seem cynical is its condescending singlemindedness: “A sells, B doesn’t, so do A, period.” These Half-Life games give just the opposite feeling: the developers know how to do all kinds of things very well, but they don’t know what their goal product is other than quality and audience satisfaction. Like I said last time, the amount of attention lavished on the story and characters is so incredibly disproportionate to its gameplay function that it creates a kind of stimulating confusion about the nature of the game as a whole: what manner of thing is this? Now that I’ve heard the developers talking about it, I get the sense that they don’t know what manner of thing it is, either. They just know it’s something that they have tested and tested and can feel confident that people will like, because people seem to like it. It’s an everything bagel. It’s got a little of this and a little of that, but not too much of any one thing, because they found that when they put in too much, people stopped having fun.
This kind of process of uncoordinated ambition can result in a unique and stimulating and uncategorizable product, and I think that’s what’s happened here. But such journeys toward the unknown can also be pretty risky, at least as far as deadlines are concerned. Maybe this might have something to do with why Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is mysteriously about 7 years late at this point. More on this next time.
Almost all video games have some degree of everything-bagel-ness about them. They are the least formally-determined of all popular arts, comparable only to “high” contemporary museum art, it seems to me, in their freedom to work however the hell they want. But without any pretension. They are the ultimate “lively art,” in the Gilbert Seldes sense.
This particular installment is all about working in partnership with “Alyx,” Half-Life 2‘s premier NPC (“Non-Player Character”! Come on, people! I said I wasn’t going to explain this stuff!). She covers you, you cover her, she tags along, she leads the way. She jokes with you and flirts with you and gets emotional and gets embarrassed. She’s a good shot, she says things that are appropriate to the situation, she reacts to developing battles in a believable way, and she mostly knows when to step aside if she’s blocking your way. They did such a great job with all that impressive technical stuff that I can take it for granted. The real question left to me as a player is who she is as a person, or a friend, or a sidekick, or whatever’s going on here. What is going on here, Valve?
From a feminist perspective I am always more uncomfortable with “she’s a strong independent woman wink wink” than with an out-and-out vapid buxom damsel. Alyx — for all that she’s got a Y chromosome in her name and has post-apocalyptically patched her leather jacket with duct-tape — certainly does look at you and brush her hair behind her ear with sheepish delicacy a lot. And let’s not pretend that the tiny tiny glimpse of her purple underpants built into her clothing texture is just a sign of the developers’ meticulous and unbiased attention to detail. She only consists of a finite number of data points, and this happens to be one of them. So is her slightly visible midriff. Being strong and independent are just two more data points.
On the other hand there is certainly some kind of weird relationship one inevitably develops with these puppets who exist only as an assembly of a few telling details. That’s what characters in novels are too, after all. But unlike characters in novels, you can prod these game puppets and interact with them, and they will still only consist of a finite amount of information, which gives them a weird quality of being both more and less available than we’re used to. Alyx clearly has some kind of mild thing for you, “Gordon Freeman,” and there’s nothing you can possibly do that will make her cool. Or warm, for that matter. She has about 10 pixels of purple underpants on show: no less, no more. What does it mean to be in a friendship with someone who is completely unaffectable? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? This is a real question, because the whole idea of this game is for me to develop some kind of sense of rapport. I really don’t know whether it succeeded because I don’t have a strong sense of what that entails. In real life either. Computers that play at social games tend to call up rather uneasy questions about the nature of all social experience.
The designers say it’s crucial that the player “like” Alyx. Well, I can at least say for certain that I didn’t dislike her. When I would be alone in an elevator with her and see her winding up to start performing some dialogue, I would get a nervous feeling: “uh-oh, is she about to do some crushing/bonding/emoting?” And hey, that feeling’s not so different from the one I have felt around real women (and men) in the same situation. So… is that “mission accomplished” for social realism?
I get the feeling that what I was really supposed to be doing in relation to Alyx was role-playing, and that if I were more of a geek I would just know the role, I would know what trope I had been asked to inhabit.
On the one hand, the game has a sense of humor, or at least of shared bewilderment, about the silent void at its center that is the player-slash-Gordon Freeman. “Good thing you you know what you’re doing!” says Alyx as you are sent into the reactor core to stabilize it, because of course the player doesn’t, has no idea.
And yet the game also wants this to be socially engaging, to actually work somehow. What goes on for me is that I genuinely feel that sense of non-belonging, of being an impostor, for the whole first playthrough. On second playthrough, there’s no joke at all, because now I do know what I’m doing. Then again, I know far more than Gordon Freeman could: I know which machine will happen to break, which girder will happen to collapse. And I know, what he doesn’t know, that my pal Alyx will always be much, much less than a human being. Just some sound files and texture maps and behavioral algorithms.
It’s very easy for me to pity a puppet for being a puppet; always has been. So once that emotional link has been established, you’d think it would be easy for me to love it and trust it too, but that’s harder. I’m working on it with a therapist.
I have played all the preceding games on Easy but this one defaulted to Normal and I didn’t notice until I was most of the way through. All I noticed was that I felt subtly more frustrated and ashamed by my combat skills. The game just feels more vindictive, stubborn, angry, on harder difficulty levels. I have nothing to prove to anyone, least of all a game. I have no use for “normal!”
The commentary is locked until you’ve completed each level once, but playing the whole game again just to hear it turned out to be perfectly pleasant. (And incidentally confirmed my suspicion that I can proceed at almost twice the pace when it’s my second time around and I know where I’m going.) The main thing I took away from hearing the commentary was not the design thinking itself, because that stuff’s all quite apparent already (“This arena is meant to be the culmination of this sequence, calling on all the skills the player has acquired throughout this map.” Duh.) What I got from it was just the shift of attitude that comes with being able to hear all these ideas originating in plainspoken real people, rather than in my own analytical observation, which has its own skeptical lonely flavor. I enjoy being relieved of it. Yes, when you’re down there in the dark fighting zombies alone with Alyx the puppet, you’re actually in the company of all these real people.
Then again, have they failed me if I didn’t feel that company already? That’s a big question; the big social and artistic question. I dunno. I think nobody is failing anybody. I’m grateful for the time spent with this game.
Playing these games well entails developing a very quick, mercenary kind of rhythm to your actions: “what’s in here nothing grab that ammo uh-oh soldier switch to shotgun headshot headshot check back there no gotta go up here then shit okay more soldiers duck headshot headshot.” It’s not that I’m exactly horrified by seeing myself behaving this way, just dismayed that I haven’t been able to assert my own style and rhythm in its place. If you want the game to make sense, you are simply obligated to let this kind of burrowing, urgent expertise come over you, and I have.
The original title of this thing was going to be Half-Life 2: Aftermath, which is what it is — a short expansion and continuation of the big tentpole game that preceded. But then Valve had the idea of continuously releasing episodic content, and so instead gave this game the absurd title Half-Life 2: Episode One, which of course is not what it is. It should be Half-Life THE SERIES THAT COMES AFTER 2: Episode One or something. Of course, they only managed two of them so it hardly matters.
As with Opposing Force in relation to the first Half-Life, I appreciated that greater compression gives a greater sense of cleverness, even when most of the materials are old. If you’re only going to have this much story, five hours seems like a fine game length to me.
The opening sequence, picking up from the cliffhanger ending of Half-Life 2, felt like a step even further up into storytelling: “We’re really doing this for the story. Listen to this story!” I am, guys! I’m listening. After the 50-odd hours I’ve spent in your world, I’ve gotten to the point that I genuinely want to know what The Combine is going to do now that The Citadel has been destroyed. Bring it on. Tell me.
I sure have played a lot of Half-Lifery in the past couple weeks. What am I getting out of returning to this weird little limited story space over and over? It does definitely have something to offer, if not quite everything I’d want in a fantasy home base. Heading back into The Citadel in this one reminded me of the childhood feeling I’d get watching our videotape of Star Wars over and over and returning to the Death Star, always nominally infiltrating the enemy fortress but really just doing that thing we do. When the gang would hole up in that control room and argue about what to do next, and Han Solo would put his feet up on the panel, it would feel like a cozy little apartment party to which I had once more been invited. Yup, here we are again. All’s well.
This game offered at least that much. Yup, here’s all the stuff again. A couple entries ago I asked if Blue Shift was all old hat because we’re supposed to pretend that it isn’t, or because it’s developed into a ritual. This is a third way and it seems like the best option: it’s not old hat, it’s a space, a room that you can keep re-entering. You can make it your room. Welcome back to your room.
I still don’t quite know why there are zombies in my room, but Habit is doing its work and even their edges are softening. It’s just zombies, after all, and I have the shotgun, which goes clack just the way it should. Yup, here we are again.
Now we’re up to 2006 and Valve’s credits are listing 100 employees. The commentary features about 40 different people, which is probably closer to the actual number of contributors to this game. I believe I am correct in saying that exactly one of those 40 people was female. Turns out she’s whip-smart and independent and athletic and dresses really funky and is sarcastic and has a crush on you and her midriff is showing.
Only one left before we’re on to other things!