don't look back
who is gordon freeman?
Recently I've started playing Black Mesa, the Crowbar Collective's stunning recreation of the original Half-Life in the Source engine. Black Mesa is an astonishing achievement, an act of loving, careful tribute which takes an iconic game and preserves the strengths which defined it while simultaneously reworking it from the ground up. They've enhanced the obvious things, sure: the graphics are much improved, not only much clearer but also adding this real lushness which was just not available in 1998, and the physics system is more flexible and robust. But they haven't stopped there, changing elements of the mechanics and level design which didn't work so well, and almost entirely overhauling the game's final levels, set in the alien dimension of Xen.
I have to take a lot of this on faith, however. Despite having played the sequel, Half-Life 2, and its attendant episodes more times than I can count — certainly more than any other narrative game — I have never actually played the original Half-Life. It is one of my great failings.
Anyway, this makes playing Black Mesa a peculiar experience. I already know the major plot points,1 and have spent enough time playing as Gordon Freeman that going back to the beginning — to the moment that he went from overqualified lab tech to crowbar-wielding warrior — feels almost uncanny. I know this story, I have seen all these images already, and yet I've never been here before.
What this strangeness has left me thinking about is how singular Gordon, an MIT-trained scientist turned one man army, is as a protagonist. He is, to be sure, part of a long lineage of unspeaking killers, and Half-Life was obviously deeply influenced by Doom's Doomguy and in turn influenced, among others, Dishonored's Corvo Attano. Yet no one is quite as iconic or inscrutable as Gordon, because no one is more incongruous. We have no reason to imagine that he had ever so much as fired a gun before the resonance cascade, but before too long he's mowing down trained soldiers and navigating alien worlds.
Black Mesa really brings this home: while, by Half-Life 2, Gordon has achieved legendary status due to his absence in the decades since the Black Mesa incident, he starts off in the first game as just some guy. Traveling to the fateful test, he takes a tram ride in which he's informed of Black Mesa's equal opportunities policy, listens to coworkers' familiar jokes, and is briefed as if he doesn't already know exactly what's about to happen. After the incident, people tend to treat him as either a regular co-worker — albeit one demonstrating some surprising new abilities — or a black box, some inexplicable mystery. No one sees him as any kind of messiah. Yet he's there, saving the day, achieving things he has no right to achieve.
Part of what this highlights is Gordon's bizarre talent at killing people, but it also throws the game's essential structure and mechanics into a peculiar light. Black Mesa spends essentially no time on providing Gordon with a motivation. Even to the limited extent to which he's given overarching objectives — which, for the first half of the game, mostly amounts to being told that he should go to the Lambda Complex, because the scientists there can probably fix things — there's very little sense that he has any reason to want to achieve them, other than the abstract sense that someone had probably better sort this whole mess out, and it might as well be him. What we're left with, instead, is the fact that the only way is forwards: levels are designed around a single path, with the only real exceptions to this being the side rooms containing valuable health and ammo or in which he can solve puzzles to open the way forward. Insofar as he has any choice over where he goes, it's often only that he gets to decide which order to solve these puzzles in, or whether to risk that passage to get a bit more ammo.
Throughout Black Mesa, that is, Gordon might go up and down or right and left; he might take circuitous routes round obstacles, and will occasionally retrace his steps to where he might have missed something — but really he only ever moves forward. In a sense, this is all the motivation he really needs, but more precisely it's all the motivation you really need. You, the player, move forward because that's how you get to whatever's next: that's where the game is. Yet you're supposed to be inhabiting Gordon's subjectivity; you are, after all, looking through his eyes. When characters in the game talk to you, they're addressing him. And Gordon never reacts.
I think this tension — between the player's investment in the game and the total lack of affective response from Gordon — is best illustrated by the game's relationship with what and who he leaves behind. Gordon walks away from some horrors, starting right from when he's one of the only people to escape the lab at the beginning of the game. (As far as he knows, he's the only one.) The most brutal example of this (though there are so many others) is when he meets a guard who helps him through a door — and, in the process, becomes one of the characters he spends the most time with in the entire game — and says 'that could have been a lot worse' before the door suddenly shuts in front of him, an enemy teleports behind him, and Gordon is left listening to him getting savagely killed. It's so sudden and horrifying that I genuinely laughed. Gordon gives no response. There's nothing to do but keep moving forward, so he just walks away.
It's tempting to say that what Gordon offers, in this sense, is a blank slate: any emotions he might show could undercut or even contradict the player's own reaction, so you're left to imagine yourself in Gordon's shoes. Certainly the affective experience of Black Mesa is shaped by this dynamic, and it's interesting to compare its treatment of horror sequences to other games in the series.
In Half-Life: Alyx, for example, playing as Alyx Vance and hearing her reactions fundamentally changes the experience of horror. She will often start conversations with Russell, on the other end of her radio, explicitly in order to distract herself from how terrified she is, and while this helps lighten the mood, it also reminds you that you should be scared. That she sometimes feels out of her depth and emphasises the emotional stakes of the narrative for her specifically makes everything seem that bit more stressful than it does in Black Mesa, although this is, obviously, also informed by Alyx being a VR game. But when you're frightened or frantic, it's eased somewhat by knowing that you're sharing that with someone else — that strength of common feeling.2
In Black Mesa, on the other hand, Gordon's opacity leaves you feeling that much more on your own — which helps make the player feel more powerful, but also leaves you that much more vulnerable. When something jumps at you, you don't really have Gordon to feel that fear with you — but you're never quite as close to it as you are in Alyx.
So it's certainly true that Gordon's lack of reaction is used by the developers to shape the specific experience of playing Black Mesa in ways which are informed by the specific confines of the medium. Yet this dynamic can only operate to the extent that you're able to collapse the distance between your perspective and Gordon's, and this is never fully possible. You're always aware that you're in someone else's head; you just have no idea of what he's thinking. To be a blank slate, you have to be able to leave a mark, but his limits remain fundamentally impermeable.
I think this contradiction is, partly at least, the point. The Half-Life series has always been interested in the limits of immersion and how you manage the essential unreality of games: developers Valve have repeatedly said that they use the series to experiment with specific technical problems, and that the lack of any Half-Life 3 was at least partly because there was nothing they thought it could help them solve. These games don't function just as works of art, whole and entire in themselves, but as, essentially, prototypes. Narratively, the series has always relied on the deus ex machina of the G-Man, who takes Gordon to safety at the end of the first game and inserts him as 'the right man in the wrong place' at the start of the second. He's at least partly just a surrogate for Valve themselves, doing the work of getting Gordon where he needs to be for the game to happen — just as the reason Gordon keeps moving forward is because that's where the game is.
The difficulty of actually encountering Gordon as a character in his own right is, that is, perhaps a reflection of a tension which is innate to games of this kind — just laid unusually bare. To function, the game depends on you simultaneously projecting yourself onto Gordon, believing that his first person truly includes you, while also buying into the reality of him as a character having perhaps the worst day in human history. These are contradictory requirements, but by making it clear that neither can be fully achieved, the game lets you get on with the business of moving forward.
If you don't, here's the headline points: the player character, Gordon Freeman, is the one to carry out an experiment which goes wrong and triggers a disastrous 'resonance cascade', causing hostile aliens to invade the Black Mesa Research Facility; he battles his way through innumerable aliens, as well as the US military, who have decided to kill everyone in the Facility to cover up the accident; he eventually makes it to Xen, where he kills the Nihilanth, a quasi-deity responsible for the invasion, before being put into a kind of stasis by the mysterious G-Man, ready for future assignments.
This speaks to the apparent contradiction between the fact that Alyx being VR lessens the mediation between your subjective experience and the world of the game, and therefore between your subjectivity and Alyx's perspective, while also making its protagonist less of a blank canvas on which the player can simply project their own responses. I think the point, though, is the intersubjective space which Alyx opens up, allowing you to feel like you're genuinely sharing something with this character.