Half-Life 2: Games as Art

I ‘m gonna write on video games again here, and I hope eyes don’t glaze over. I had to severely edit this post because it was getting away from me, due to my enthusiasm about the topic. This is the severely edited version. A couple of posts ago, I wrote about Halo 2 and it’s impact on popular culture. I was talking about video games in general and how, like motion pictures a hundred years ago, their impact and artistic merit are being largely ignored by the cultural mainstream. Some might raise their eyebrows that I would compare video games to a financial behemoth like the movie industry, but the truth is, that fight is over. Movies lost. Video games are on track this year to outgross movies by several BILLION dollars. You read that right. The information is out there – its just not making an impression on the evening news. Yet.

Halo 2 made 125 million dollars (place pinky by lips when reading that aloud) in its first 24 hours. No movie has ever done that. Still, at it’s heart, Halo 2 is art in the sense that a ‘Star Wars’ movie is art. It’s great entertainment, and fantastic fun, but it’s not going to convince people that video games are a legitimate artform.

For that, we have Half-Life 2. Let me give a little background. The original Half Life was released in November 1998, which, of course, is 42 Gaming Years ago. It was instantly hailed as the best game ever made. PC Gamer has had six ‘Best Games of All Time” polls since it’s release, and Half Life has won every single one. Why is that? Well, to explain, we need to digress. I know, I know. We’ve already digressed from Half Life 2 to Half Life 1, but this is important. Stay with me. This will all tie together.

The digression will be on the nature of video games. Games in general, well, that’s a huge topic, but video games we can handle here. A video game is basically a 30 second hook repeated for several hours. Look at Halo 2. The 30 second hook is you face a bunch of enemies, you throw a grenade at some of them, you pick off some stragglers while ducking behind some architecture. The scenery changes, the hook does not. Wash, rinse, repeat for 20 hours. That sounds kind of lame, described like that, but it’s not. Great games have a great hook. Bad games have a bad hook. Horrible games don’t have a hook and think their game is about how pretty it looks or how ‘shocking’ they can be. The Halo 2 hook is so well done, and the scenery is so well made, that by some alchemy it becomes a great game. Half Life on the other hand, had that and more. It really made you care about its story. Stories in video game are kind of like stories in porn – an afterthought. If the hook is good, the story doesn’t matter. If the story is good and the hook is bad, then the game is lousy. But if we hit a sweet spot – if we have an intelligent, mature story, and fantastic gameplay….then we really have something. Half Life hit that sweet spot. Gamers immediately began waiting for a sequel. Because the technology of games was getting so much better, and Valve, the company that made Half Life, really seemed to get it, Half Life 2, whenever it was going to come out, was the big hope for the game – the game that would make the legitimate leap from pastime to artform. Rumors swept across the internet. It was like following a soap opera. There wasn’t going to be a Half Life 2. Half Life 2 was going to be a role-playing game, not an action game. Valve had scrapped the original game engine and worked on a completely new engine from scratch, an immense technical undertaking. (This last rumor turned out to be true.) Years went by. No actual information was released. Then, in June 2003, a press release was made. The game was done, and would be released in September 03. There was joy, there was jubilation, there was bellowing in the streets. However – then the game was stolen by hackers. I kid you not. This led to the release date being pushed back by 14 months. There was despair, there was anger, there was weeping and rending of clothing.

Well, now it’s finally here, and I have played it, and it is better than I thought it would be. This is the game that people will point to and say ‘see what this medium is capable of?’
So, what’s the big deal? It comes down to several factors – story, characterization, physics, environments, and polish. I’ll go through them one by one.

Story – the story in Half-Life 2 is phenomenal. It’s about free will, love, fascism, emancipation, slavery, and killing aliens. Don’t turn your nose up at the killing aliens part! The ‘killing aliens’ part is what makes it a game. That’s the hook. The basic storyline is that you are a scientist who awakens in an eastern european totalitarian regime, and wind up starting an uprising. Along the way you meet up with several characters, one of whom you fall in love with. This was definitely not a case of a ‘porn storyline’ By the last third of the game I was playing because I desperately wanted to know what happened. That’s phenomenal for a videogame.

Characterization – a big reason why the story works so well is because of the characters. Videogame people are usually just placeholders. I mean, you can see that they represent people, but you don’t ever buy into the fiction that they are people. Well, the characters in this game are absolutely incredible. The facial expressions alone are capable of such subtlety, you can’t believe what you’re seeing at first. You start to relate to the characters, and then, when the storyline gets more involved, you really start to care for them. The technology that valve software created to create the facial expressions alone took 2 years to create. Ah, you gotta see it to believe it.

Physics – Your character, Gordon Freeman, is a man of science. He’s a thinker, not just a killer. In this game, if you’re smart, you can think your way out of situations without killing people. Everything in this virtual environment that’s been created obeys the laws of physics. If there’s a piece of trash on the ground, you can pick it up, and toss it. Early on in the game, I came across a teeter-totter, and placed a doll on one side. It slowly sank to the ground. Then I picked up a large brick and dropped it on the other side. The doll flew into the air in a perfect parabola. As you make your way through the world, you can navigate past obstacles by building bridges and ramps out of found objects. At one point, I built a raft out of old paint cans and a wooden pallet! And it worked. When you’re in an environment where everything acts like it’s supposed to, filled with believable characters – well, the suspension of disbelief is that much easier. I think what I loved most about the physics is that it allowed me to indulge my inner McGuyver and think up unique solutions to whatever problem was in front of me.

Environments – this is the part that will impress people the most. The environments in this game are utterly believable. The totalitarian city you find yourself wondering around really looks like it should. Early in the game I found myself in a loft with sunlight streaming through the windows and I was struck that I could see the dust particles in the sunlight. That’s a level of detail that is simply astounding to me. The game does a great job of placing you in diverse environments, as well. From the opening in the city, you go on an odyssey that takes you through canals, rivers, warehouses, beaches, bridges, prisons, back to the city, and finally a huge citadel. It’s a heck of a ride.

Polish – polish is what you get when every element in the game is checked and rechecked with every other element to make sure they create a seamless whole. It makes the experience greater than the sum of its parts. This game has it in spades. It’s a phenomenal experience that creates the feeling that only great art can do. It’s easily the greatest game I’ve ever played. In the future, people will look back at this game and say ‘that’s when games became art’. In my opinion, it’s the best art of the year.