by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Phantom Fingers“; here is the article in full.

We make communication so darned difficult. We create languages, manners, rules, syntax, subtext, irony… We learn to love the language and its artifice – and the more we cherish our tools, the more signal that gets lost in transmission. Soon we get so caught up in what we’re saying that we no longer have any anchor in our surroundings, the foundations give way, and all our facades collapse around us.

Words are very unnecessary / they can only do harm…

So little is necessary to communicate, and so much can be said with so little. Communication is, basically, an awareness of something outside one’s self; a distinction between one’s self and one’s environment, and an identification of each in the context of the other. If things are close by, we reach out and touch them. Each touch gives us information. How does it feel? What shape is it? What are its properties? For things outside our reach, we rely on secondary or passive input: reflected color, vibrated air. We see how objects look, and and hear how they sound, and imagine their properties, based on our experience.

We can also actively engage targets at a distance – use “phantom fingers” to determine shape, distance, physical properties. Bats use echolocation, or SONAR. Though we are less equipped, we can use external tools: throw stones, shoot firearms.

Now imagine, for a moment, that we had no bodies, no sense of touch. Or if everything we touched had the potential to hurt us. How would we engage our environments? Answer: through some form of SONAR. Ping, pong. Internet packets. Phantom fingers don’t get burnt.

There we have videogames, in a nutshell. From Spacewar! to Pong to Breakout to Space Invaders to Doom to Rez to Everyday Shooter, videogames are obsessed with resolving the gap between the player and the gameworld – and the simplest solution is the phantom finger. Since the player’s experience is disembodied, treat him as at a distance, tossing stones into a well. Ping, pong. Since game worlds tend to be hostile, and anything might hurt or kill us at a touch, our phantom fingers tend to be pointed, making them both probes and weapons, creating a sense of cosmic tag. It’s you against the masses; whereas they can foil you by touching you, you can foil them back by phantom-touching them. So long as you keep everything at a distance, so you can safely study it, you’re all set.

They got the guns but we got the numbers / gonna win, yeah, we’re taking over…

One thing that made the original Half-Life so novel is that, for a first-person shooter, it is only unconcerned with shooting. Instead, the player spends most of his time whacking at things with a crowbar. Though still violent – still all about lashing out and seeing what breaks – the game is less disembodied, more hands-on than it might be. Oddly so, for a game with a mute, invisible protagonist. The sequel builds on and around that structure, to the point that it comes close to subverting the whole concept of a shooter. Failing that, it sure hangs a huge lampshade on the idea.

The two basic functions in Half-Life 2 are picking stuff up and manipulating it, and tapping on the scenery with some wrought iron. Although one is more important than the other, as evidenced in the game’s structure, the game sends the player on wide enough a tangent to distract most players with familiar sights and sounds and ideas before it kicks in with the real point. Even then, the game waits until the final stretch to drop all its genre pretenses and just do what it wants to.

The Free Agent

The player starts with nothing; no resources except bodily motion – which includes picking up small items – and a narrow kind of liberty. Although there is only ever one way to go, the level design is clever enough to make the player think he is exploring on his own. That little nook off to the side of the main track, which anyone with a dose of curiosity will dip into before continuing on the obvious path, will turn out to be just where the player is expected to go – every time. Trying to be clever and outwit the level design will again, almost inevitably, lead the player down the right path. This in itself is kind of an amazing work of psychology, though I won’t dwell on it here except to point out its role.

So the player trots along on a rail, figuring things out as they come, reacting instinctively instead of deliberately. There is always something else pressing, distracting the player from what he just did, keeping the player from dwelling, keeping the momentum up. The player might fiddle with trash on the ground or vending machines. Picking up an item causes it to hover in the air, in the center of the screen. Tossing it sends the item in a limp arc. Presently, a security guard orders the approaching player to pick up a can. The guard blocks the passage ahead. If the player obeys and tosses the can in the trash, the guard steps aside and chuckles. Otherwise, he whips out his stun baton and moves toward the player, offering an alternative strategy. Later, a friendly character orders the player to stack boxes so as to escape through a window – forcing the message on anyone who missed the earlier hints.

The first task? Find a nearby lab, and teleport (experimentally) to a distant location, to pick up a secret weapon: the gravity gun. The teleport misfires, and the player is forced to flee on foot. Finally, two full chapters into the game, a character tosses the player a crowbar. A self-conscious guitar riff sounds; everyone knows what this means. It’s Link picking up the sword. It’s accepting the quest. The nature of the quest: the search for the “real” sword. So for half the game, Valve amuses the fan and gamer with a retread of Half-Life: a clever and quirky, panic-fueled first-person shooter that really isn’t about the shooting even though it contains guns. If anything, it plays like Super Mario Bros as designed by Cyan Worlds.

Finally the player reaches the more-distant lab, is introduced to the supporting cast, accepts the gravity gun, and is set loose – and Half-Life 2 proper begins. Appropriately enough, the next location is a sidestep; a playground for the new tool, around which the entire game will revolve. The chapter has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the game. It’s kind of bizarre, actually: a haunted town filled with saw blades and compressed gas canisters. For an hour or two, as the player learns to rely on the gravity gun, the game turns into Silent Hill. After that, it’s back on the road; bright sunshine, on to beat the bad guys with all these new skills.

Phantom Fingers, Phantom Hands

The thing is about a gravity gun: it’s a gun that grabs. It doesn’t directly hurt anything; all it does is allow the player to reach out and take hold of anything. Nearly anything. Anything of a reasonable size. And then once it’s in hand, the player may do whatever: place, stack, repel/shoot/throw. Hang onto, for protection or later use. It is, in effect, a super power-up for the player’s innate ability to grab and throw stuff – one that also works from a distance.

The gravity gun turns phantom fingers into real fingers. Smash goes all we know about personal boundaries. With the gravity gun you don’t just ping your distant environment; you drag it toward you or push it away. The player can, in effect, touch everything in sight – without the need to virtually stroll over to it. Since the player is not himself moving – he’s sitting at his computer desk, eating Chee-tos – it is only reasonable shorthand that he can touch anything laid out before him, on the screen. From the perspective of the player’s own personal space, it is all equally within the player’s grasp. And here – here is where Half-Life 2 gets brilliantly weird.

Recall that the player’s avatar, Gordon Freeman, is never seen; never heard. Instead, supporting characters look right in the player’s eyes. They speak to the player, lead the player, wait for the player. They treat the player as a mythical hero, dropped in from nowhere to save them all – when in fact, from the game’s perspective, that is accurate. When the game begins, a figure known as G-Man looks into the players eyes, tells him he is being thawed out and inserted into a situation because he is just the right man for the wrong time. The implication is that the entire game is planned out for the player – who has, in effect, sat in stasis since the original Half-Life – as an adventure that only the player, a free agent within the game world, can handle.

The player’s role, or destiny, is as the player of a videogame. As the only element within the gameworld with that crucial gift of liberty, it all hinges on him – and every friendly character admires the player for it. Every success the player incurs just fuels the flames, convincing his game-friends of the player’s ability, of their rightness in trusting him. By the end of the game, everyone looks up to the player as a minor god. They will follow the player and obey orders without question.

Furthermore, no character expects anything more from the player than what he is able to provide. No social graces or niceties, or even the manners to stay put when they’re talking; just free action, and savior stuff: the will to follow the paths they lay out and play through to the scenario’s end.

In the last segment of the game, and in an analytical article you really can’t complain about spoilers, all of the player’s tools and weapons are confiscated, except for the gravity gun. That, instead, is overloaded. The final portion of the game, then, turns the player into exactly the figure the entire game has gone to lengths to establish: the god and hero of this little experience, able to touch and grab and spin and launch anything at all within the gameworld. The player is granted full, unhinged, stomping communication with the game, and it is all so very simple.

The game has reached out to the player, and allowed the player to reach back in – through one of the more ironic conceits in gaming history. It has bridged the communication divide about as well as a videogame can, given current technology and methods. And then with no fanfare, without even seeing the consequences to his final deeds, the player is put on ice again, to wait for another game, another day. Or another episode, as may be.

[name redacted] lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with [her] dreams and [her] clutter. Sometimes when the sun hits the leaves outside [her] window, [she] remembers fond times that never were. [She] also likes ice cream.