I'll confess here that I haven't really played all that much of the Half-Life games. I got through a decent chunk of 2, but to be perfectly honest, something about the art direction and the speed of the action actually made me feel nauseated - which is odd, because I can't think of any other game that has given me motion sickness (I don't even get it when reading in a car.)
It's a shame, because I know it's a fantastically popular game, and one of the biggest fan speculation stories in the gaming world is when Half-Life 3 is going to come out, if ever. It's also a shame because Half-Life is one of the few FPS games that focuses on the single-player campaign these days, when so many are all about online multiplayer (I'm also a big fan of the Bioshock games.)
But perhaps the biggest shame in my inability to play them is that Half-Life has one of the most intriguing characters in video games - the G-man.
For those of you not familiar, the G-man is a character who pops up very sparingly in the Half-Life series, but he tends to have his biggest moments in major climactic scenes. At the end of the first game, he takes the player character, Gordon Freeman, away, stashing him on something that looks like one of the trams at the Black Mesa facility, but is traveling through some sort of starscape. The second game has him sending you on your way almost two decades later, in which the "tram" you were on kind of bleeds reality into a train taking you to "City 17," where you discover that in the years you've been missing, Earth has been conquered by an inter-dimensional empire known as the Combine.
After you spend the game blasting away the Combine forces, the G-man appears again, freezing time to pluck you up right before a massive explosion would kill you.
The G-Man look human - he wears a suit and carries a briefcase, and has an old-school crew cut hair style. But there's something... off about him. His face is asymmetrical (which is of course fairly common in the real world but less so in video games) and his speech patterns are highly unusual.
And he can warp reality around himself. The Half-Life games take place entirely through the first-person perspective, and interacting directly with the G-man can be very strange. For example, the beginning of Half-Life 2 sees the G-man waking you up from your long hibernation, but as you look at him, it's as if the positive space of his face is actually the negative space in the darkness around you - a window into the train that you find yourself. These sorts of shifts in perspective happen a lot when you talk to the G-man - it's really cool and mega-creepy.
On top of that, the G-man is hidden throughout the games, often visible in the distance across long expanses or even on the screen of a malfunctioning television screen.
One thing remains certain: we really have no clue what the G-man is.
The series has its share of interdimensional monsters, but the G-man seems to almost transcend that category. Barring some more out-there theories that the G-man is some kind of future post-human (or even, more whacky, a future Gordon Freeman himself,) the G-man's human appearance is almost certainly a lie. But what is he then? There's a definite Lovecraftian quality here - that he might just be incomprehensible to human eyes.
We also really don't know where he falls on the good/evil spectrum. Gordon Freeman would, I imagine, have a lot to hate about the G-man, given that he kept him imprisoned for, like 17 years (though how much of that time Freeman actually experienced is questionable - given that he didn't age a day) and how the G-man dumped him out into a situation that required Freeman to shoot his way through an entire city of bad guys and monster aliens.
But on the other hand, he has certainly seemed to undermine the Combine - dispatching Gordon Freeman against them (which works way better than you'd expect) and does seem to be furthering humanity's interests. Still, he's super freaking shady.
Of course, the thing about the G-man that's perhaps frustrating is that any real explanation is almost sure to be a let-down. And that means that we probably won't ever actually get an explanation, even if Half-Life 3 does eventually wind up happening. It's probably for the best, though, because a lack of an official explanation means that we can come up with our own headcanon versions.
(I'm always a big fan of post-human time-travelers guiding their own evolution, but that's just me.)
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