The G-Man, and the Mystery Box

J. J. Abrams has often talked about a narrative convention he likes to use which he calls "The Mystery Box." Supposedly, at some carnival or fair or some such thing many years ago, he bought a novelty "mystery box" that was really just a big cardboard box with a question mark on it, and claimed to have some incredible thing inside, but you would only know once you opened it.

Abrams, realizing (almost certainly correctly) that the truth of what was in the box would be a disappointment, has kept the thing for decades, never opening it, and just allowing the mystery to be preserved.

When I was in college, I was a big fan of Lost, the show that really put Abrams on the map in Hollywood (though he had worked on other projects previously, like Felicity.) Indeed, there is a lot about the show that I still find very compelling - the beaten up, 70s/80s aesthetic of the various hidden facilities on the island, and the gradually unraveling mystery about "the Others" and such.

But like a lot of viewers, I was left a little underwhelmed by its conclusion. Partially, there was what felt to me like a superfluous element to the final season that had the unfortunate consequence of sort of, except not really, confirming the "they were dead the whole time" fan theory that had been quite popular (in fact, the preceding seasons and the "present" timeframe of the final season are implied to be totally real and on the real world), but also, the ultimate explanation for things was left vague after six years of build-up, in which we hoped to find some real answers.

The mystery box style of storytelling can be very effective as a way to start a story. You introduce an element that is unexplained but remarkable, and the audience naturally wants to keep watching/reading/playing in order to discover the truth about that what that element actually represents.

The mystery genre is built on this, but that genre is also one of the most rule-bound genres that exists - there's a promise that every notable detail will be accounted for, even if they're misleading.

Speculative fiction is the supergenre (containing within it science fiction, fantasy, and most horror) that allows the answers to those mysteries to be profoundly extraordinary.

That being said, I think you can run into issues with this device in the long run, and frankly, it's an issue I've started to have with works by Abrams and those inspired by him (though my biggest issue with Abrams is his insistence on playing things safe by just remaking movies he liked in his youth claiming them to be sequels.)

See, that promise that the truth will come out is the thing that gets people hooked on the mystery box in the first place. An audience will invest in it because of the promise of an answer. So the way I see it, if you are going to use this device, you are obligated to do one of two things:

Have an interesting answer to reveal later in the story that justifies the mysterious build-up, or

Make the mystery a revelation in and of itself.

Let me get to the point here: Half-Life: Alyx came out recently, the first game in that series in 13 years. The Half-Life games, and particularly Half-Life 2, have been hailed as masterly crafted game experiences that explored environmental storytelling and a number of innovating gameplay mechanics.

While the vast majority of these games has you shooting aliens and humans who have chosen to collaborate with the conquering alien Combine or solving various physics puzzles that are worked diagetically into the environment, there is one figure who, to me (and I imagine a lot of players) is the most fascinating character in the series: The G-Man.

The G-Man is a perfect enigma, including the fact that that name isn't even mentioned in-game, and has become just a way to refer to him.

The G-Man takes the appearance of a middle-aged, thin man in a crew cut and a dark grey suit, carrying a briefcase. The name is a reference to the image of mid-20th century government agents of the FBI or CIA. The G-Man was actually considered a sort of heroic figure, the kind of straight-talking, strait-laced guy who lives for his work, and his work is keeping America safe from authoritarian threats. Of course, in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate world in which American trust in the government started to degrade, these figures took on a more sinister tone (considering what J. Edgar Hoover was up to when he was running the FBI, it's not as if that's undeserved.)

But in a lot of ways, the G-Man also resembles the trope of the Men in Black. While most of my generation is probably more familiar with the Men in Black from the Will Smith movie from 1999, which riffs on the notion by suggesting that the organization is actually a benevolent one that protects Earth my regulating alien visitation, the MIBs are the subject of some of the creepiest stories form UFO folklore.

The G-Man is far more than just a weird (and also kind of weirdly normal) guy who would look at home in 1949, though. Because while he can be glimpsed occasionally in the distance throughout the games (or at least Half-Life 2,) generally when he speaks directly to the protagonist (which is usually Gordon Freeman,) he does so by warping reality, playing even with the visual conventions of video games by freezing the 3D environment being simulated and seemingly occupying different places at the same time.

He seems extremely sinister, given that he has captured Freeman and transported him, perhaps through time, and certainly across great distances, supposedly "hiring" Freeman for his "employers," who seem to be above even the inter-universal Combine whose conquest of Earth takes place before the events of Half Life 2.

The G-Man appears only rarely. I believe in Half Life 2 proper, he is only there at the beginning and the end - seeming to have placed Freeman exactly where he needed to be at the start to get to where he was at the end.

And we know almost nothing whatsoever about what he is, who he works for, what he really wants, and even if he could be considered a good guy or a bad guy, in the grand scheme of things.

What I find particularly compelling is that he must be some kind of incredibly powerful otherworldly entity - an eldritch abomination, to use the TVTropes term - and yet he appears to us only ever as this odd-looking and off-putting but ultimately passable facsimile of a human man.

So, what to make of the G-Man?

The truth is, I don't think they could ever provide a satisfying answer. If we ever see a "true form" that looks like some blobby alien, it'll feel like a let-down. And if we ever find out for certain that he's evil, or for certain that he's good, it might also rob him of that mystery.

The thing is, Half Life as a game series is now 22 years old. If this were some tight trilogy released in a span of six years or so, it could be the kind of situation where one should just let the cat out of the bag finally.

And yet... at this point, the defining characteristic of him, the whole reason why the G-Man is so cool, is that we have no freaking clue what his whole deal is.

It puts me, at least, in a frustrating position. I want to know all about him, but I also think that we'd lose something if we ever got definitive answers about him.

So, I guess I'll have to give this one to Abrams.

The Mystery of the G-Man

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.)