Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

Half-Life 2 - PC
M. O’Connor
The gray drab of Half-Life 2 lifts for a bit
when you drive along the shore by the highway
and stop to tour those mostly empty pockets of
civil society from before the Combine. Even
infested with soldiers those modest houses feel
far more human than the concrete and glass of
City 17; even before the walls begin eating the
city it embodies the cold gray predetermined
days of control and decay. Along the train route
from Schipol Airport to Centraal Station in The
Netherlands you can see the elements cribbed
from the architecture along the way.
But most of all you see that eternal gray in
a couple found in the first set of apartments; a
woman sobs uncontrollably in the arms of a man
with hopeless pity written on his face. He knows
he’s lying as he tries to comfort her. The same
scene – identical dialogue – plays out during the
uprising at the end of the game, just more
hopeless wailing and gnashing of teeth as the
world crashes down around them.
The police state is a drag, man.
If you want a solid dystopian template, you
can’t go wrong with 1984. Brave New World
lacks the malice required for nonstop action and
not enough people value anti-social individual
sovereignty enough to look past the rape and
murder habits of the victims of A Clockwork
Orange. But 1984 has malice in spades. There
are nods to other horrific futures written into
being – Burroughs is evoked in the prison death
camp of Nova Prospekt right down to the name,
and headcrabs look like something that crawled
right out of an Interzone sewer – but Valve
managed to capture a tiny bit of the hopeless-
ness and helplessness of power being exercised
over the powerless.
I discovered recently that 1984 matches
the weighty municipal grind of waiting in a jury
pool. Brooklyn Supreme Court is decorated only
with browns, beige and shades of off-white,
having the usual granite façade of Very
Important Places. One of the functions of
governance, judging by the similarities between
the houses of civil government, is reminding the
citizenry that Very Important Places are filled
with Very Important People.
In New York State, potential jurors are
shown a video featuring Ed Bradley and another
on-air personality from 60 Minutes – a woman
with platinum blonde hair and the same
measured diction of Very Importantness that
marks Mr. Bradley’s brief history of trials in the
western world. That history, for those who may
never have the pleasure, begins with a sequence
involving a guy thrown into a river in a sack for
his “trial by water,” after which Mr. Bradley
makes the point that trial by jury is far better
than being tossed into water while wrapped in
burlap.
I was reading 1984 because I knew from
experience that jury pool waits are long and
dull, and because that book is both Important
We Shall Meet in the Place Where There is no Darkness 23