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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Right, now brace yourselves but… To properly understand the significance of the story elements in Half-Life 2, we must look at the work of Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp, who in his academic work on narrative in traditional folk tales identified a recurring series of archetypal story elements – or narratemes – which always appear in order to construct the flow of a hero’s developmental journey. Seriously, come back. We promise this bit’s good. While not all of these narratemes appear in every story ever written, every story does include a few of them in some form, and Half-Life 2 uses a great deal of them in absolute textbook sequence in order to create a journey of character progression. In Half-Life 2 though, the archetypal hero developing through this journey is the player/Gordon hybrid, who gets to directly experience the whole process themselves rather than just witnessing it.

At the beginning of the game, Gordon is cast into the chaos of a world he does not know, having existed outside of its reality since the end of the original Half-Life. Time has moved on without him, and he must learn to adapt to and triumph in this new alien world. This is Propp’s initialising narrateme of “The hero leaves home”, and blends with the player’s real world experience of being introduced to a new game world for the first time. The Combine’s fascistic domination of the citizens of Earth and their search for Gordon give us Propp’s “An interdiction is addressed to the hero” and “The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance”, immediately putting the player and Gordon on the back foot and forcing them to spend the early sections of the game running for their shared life. The intimidating dystopian society they see while escaping City 17 also gives us the key narratemes of the hero being oriented to his purpose and being dispatched, albeit under a hail of heavy gunfire. All good so far? Phew.

Throughout the course of the rest of the game, the player’s/Gordon’s sense of self and place in the world is consistently strengthened. After being victimised, they get a first taste of rebellion and personal empowerment through taking down a gunship with the newly-armed airboat, which in turn leads to the physical empowerment of the gravity gun (“Hero is tested”/“Hero aquires use of a magical agent”). They then grow stronger and more independent after being forced through the dark and solitary rite of passage that is Ravenholme, which is made more significant and personally affecting through its religious overtones of ascension. It can hardly be seen as a coincidence that this sequence ends with the player/Gordon exiting the darkness into the blinding daylight at the end of a tunnel. This also has the effect of being the metaphorical rebirth of a stronger Gordon back into the world, which makes it all the more important that his next major action is to rescue some allies in need.

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5 Comments

CaptainStupid - 6 days 12 hours 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 - 6 days 12 hours ago

Thanks for being yourself, CaptainStupid.

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GamesRadarEricBratcher - 6 days 11 hours 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 - 6 days 11 hours 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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