Gordon Freeman: Strongest personality in gaming

How Valve created the most complex and best-realised character in videogames without a line of dialogue.

Words: David Houghton, GamesRadar UK

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In their early days, videogames were a crude and unsubtle medium, Technological restraints reducing character motivations to blunt and simplistic variations of “Save the princess” or “Kill the villain and save the world” when sending us bleeping away to shoot up the monotone bricks of evil. As technology has developed, designers have been eager to make games a more sophisticated experience, and many have understandably, but perhaps misguidedly, attempted to ape the conventions of cinema to make their videogames more realistic or involving. Thus, cut-scenes and protagonist dialogue have become the standard model with which to tell a story.

The problem with this technique though is that it disregards the fact that movies and videogames are two very different media. Watching a movie is a passive occupation, relying purely on the third-person witnessing of a narrative in order to pull the viewer through the experience while they just sit around and scoff sugary things, whereas a game thrives on the player’s sense of ‘existence’ within its world and their interactions with and manipulations of it. The thinking that both are just audio-visual media is often the paper that tries to hide the cracks between the two, but in practice, both experiences are very different and need to be treated differently. It’s a common complaint that certain gaming conventions such as cut scenes (particularly ones with crap acting), loading screens and overly elaborate HUDs take the player “out of the game”, and when extrapolated, that problem of the interruption to the in-game experience extends far and wide.

Valve have taken vast measures to eradicate as many distracting factors as possible from Half-Life 2, and most fundamentally this thinking can be seen at the level of protagonist construction. Gamers create a presence in a game world purely through their own personal effect upon it. Anything forced upon that presence which is not of the gamer’s own making reminds them that they are playing a game created by someone else by someone else’s design. If a player is told that their character has a certain attitude or reacts to a situation in a certain way which is not their own, immediately there is a degree of divorcing from that character, and through that character, their link to the game world.

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4 Comments

CaptainStupid - 20 hours 28 minutes ago

In this article, David Houghton writes, "In their early days, videogames [sic -- "video games" should be spelled as two words] were a crude and unsubtle medium..." Besides the lousy, unprofessional grammar ("video games" are plural, while "medium" is singular, and redundant), this sentence brings up the obvious question, "As opposed to now?" "Crude and unsubtle" is a good description of 95 percent of games on store shelves today.

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GamesRadarTylerWilde - 20 hours 13 minutes ago

Thanks for being yourself, CaptainStupid.

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GamesRadarEricBratcher - 19 hours 51 minutes ago

- Modified by Moderator

We write "videogames" as one word in accordance with both our own unique style guide (compiled by several writers and journalists, as well as one linguist) and The International Game Journalists Association's Videogame Style Guide, published in 2007. But you're free to spell it however you like - our studies have shown that most human brains accept both spellings.

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GamesRadarMikelReparaz - 19 hours 37 minutes ago

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"Video games were crude and unsubtle media?" I don't know, Captain - I think I have to side with David here.

I think you'll find that minor grammar rules like this are actually quite malleable, as - for example - the Associated Press and Chicago style manuals seem to differ on just about everything.

To put it another way, I think Chaucer said it best when he wrote, "Hadden for love the bataille hem betwene, That in that selve grove, sote and grene, Ther as he hadde his amorous desires, His complaint, and for love his hote fires," and was hailed for centuries afterward as a true master of the English language.

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