We're All Mass Murderers

One week ago, a guy in Connecticut went and killed 20 young children, 6 adults, and himself. If you've been anywhere but under a rock for the past seven days, you've heard all about it, so I won't elaborate. It's a tragedy.

Predictably, in an attempt to make sense of it all, the media and the politicians have come up with a list of scapegoats against which the government is now being pressured to take action. You probably see where I'm going with this. It's the usual list of suspects: gun control, school security, and violence in media — specifically, in video games.

I understand the need to throw the blame around. No one wants to admit that a catastrophe like this one is almost completely unavoidable, so we narrow down the enormous list of contributing factors to an arbitrary few which might, we think, be controlled; we don't even think about the uncontrollable factors because that's just too depressing. So we say, let's tighten security at public schools, and let's tighten restrictions on guns. No one wants to accept that such a mentally disturbed and suicidal person, hell bent on taking people with him when he dies, is going to find a way to do it — even if it's difficult to obtain a firearm, and even if it's not easy to get into the building.

Take a look at this particular shooting, for example. The guy forced his way into a school which had already taken every reasonable security measure. The doors were locked so he shot through a window to get in. Short of multiple armed guards at every entrance (a ridiculously infeasible solution), what were they missing? Metal detectors at the doors, a common placebo in a post-Columbine world, obviously don't help when someone comes in shooting everyone on sight. Maybe bullet-proof glass would have helped, but then he might have crashed his car through the doors, or used a bomb, or waited until the kids went outside for recess. The reality of the situation is that there's no way to make a school impenetrable.

Likewise, there's no realistic way to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. We can try, but there's always going to be another tragedy that occurs despite whatever precautions we take. Bad people are going to get their hands on guns for as long as guns exist — which, by the way, is forever and always, because it's too late to stop them from being invented, manufactured, and sold to millions of people. I could go and steal a gun right now, from a legal gun owner, and kill a guy for no reason, and it will not have mattered what the gun laws were or how the gun's original owner obtained it.

So yeah, blame guns... but be aware that blaming guns only works if your solitary goal is to assign blame. If you actually want to get things done and solve problems, it's pointless. To use a classic (or perhaps trite but still valid) argument, even a total ban on guns would only disarm those civilians who obey the law, and murderers typically don't. Obviously, this is just an example to illustrate the futility of trying to place limits on something for which there's already a black market, and I'm aware that the goal here isn't to repeal the second amendment. Nobody whose opinion is worth a nickle actually wants to ban guns altogether, for then we'd truly be at the mercy of the thugs who still manage to get them. The sensible approach, anti-gun folks say, is to take a careful look at gun regulations and see if they need to be adjusted.

There's a lot of talk about smaller magazines, for example, but reloading isn't that hard, especially when the innocent children you're shooting aren't fighting back. In a perfect world, the ultimate goal of gun regulation would not be to make criminals kill us more slowly, but to keep guns only in the hands of law-abiding citizens. In reality, that's a pretty tough job. Everyone's a law-abiding citizen until his or her first crime, and if that first crime is mass murder then we're boned. If only real life were more like The Minority Report. If only we could know who the criminals are in advance and take away their rights accordingly. But there are some realistic precautions we can take. For example, perhaps the shooter's mother, from whom the guns were stolen, should not have been allowed to have firearms in the same house as a person who was known to be mentally ill. Although I suppose one doesn't always know when ones offspring is crazy enough to shoot up a school, dealing with mental health is probably a good place to start.

And that's what matters, really. The guy was crazy, and we might never know for sure why he did it. Yet, in looking for reason where none exists, politicians have been quick to point instead to a culture obsessed with violence — yes, the culture in which nearly all of us live healthy and functional lives without committing mass murder — and this, of course, is where video games are mentioned. After all, the shooter in Connecticut played video games, according to news reports. That's right, he played violent games, with guns in them, and that must have driven him to kill people... because, as we all know, that's a totally normal reaction to violent video games... and it's not like playing video games is totally normal behavior for an entire generation or two. (In case you missed the sarcasm, what I'm saying is that the killer's possession of violent video games is neither significant nor newsworthy, but that doesn't stop a bunch of technophobic old people from directing a large portion of the blame at the one thing they truly don't understand.)

I shouldn't need to point out that life-long exposure to war-themed, assassination-themed, murder-themed video games (and movies and books) has never given me any desire to kill a bunch of people in real life. But why not? Shouldn't I be going on a killing spree right now? I've killed so many virtual people in video games that, if they were real people, I'd be worse than Hitler. I'm a virtual mass murderer, just like everyone who ever played a first-person shooter. I grew up on shooting things. Even so, I turned out just fine, and I know a few million people who can say the same. Maybe it's because I know the difference between reality and fantasy. Maybe it's because I know the difference between right and wrong, even without the help of some religion to continually threaten me with the idea of eternal damnation. Maybe it's because I'm not mentally ill.

But hey, that doesn't really matter now; conservative politicians and sensationalist newscasters know that video games cause violence, because that's the only explanation for what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, right? A crazy guy played video games, and therefore video games made him crazy? Well, that's what we're supposed to believe, but I don't. If someone is evil enough or crazy enough to actually murder 26 people, he certainly doesn't need to play video games in order to get the idea of using a gun as his instrument of death. Furthermore, it's fairly obvious that people who don't play video games are vastly overestimating a first-person shooter's ability to immerse the player. Contrary to what pundits and crackpot psychologists will claim, players are aware that it's only a game and, in the absence of some crippling mental deficiency, they won't be led to believe that really killing real people with a real gun is just as fun and harmless as competing against friends in some crazy deathmatch-style game with cartoon violence and infinite lives.

The shooter played video games just like every other 20-year-old guy I know. There are reports that he was obsessed with them — that he spent all day in his basement playing Call of Duty — but if he truly had a video game addiction (and if such a thing even exists), that's more likely a symptom of his mental illness than a contributing factor. Surely we should all recognize that the act of playing Call of Duty, one of the most popular video game series of the past few years, is not a warning sign that we should hope to use in order to predict school shootings. At least, I certainly hope not. Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies worldwide in a single day, and 13.7 million copies to date in the United States alone.

That's a whole lot of potential school shootings. If video games create murderers, we should all be soiling our pants and heading for the bomb shelter. Fortunately, the available data doesn't really support the idea that violent video games cause violent acts. (Some further reading here.)

But I'm not too bothered by the blind insistence (regardless of the absence of any reliable evidence) that violence in media is destroying the moral fabric of our society. That's an opinion you're allowed to have, as far as I'm concerned, though I do strongly disagree. What really bothers me is that the people making these claims just don't know anything about video games. If they had pointed solely to the most gruesomely and graphically violent first-person shooters in their quest to find something to blame, then at least their arguments would be coherent. Instead, intentionally or not, the media is once again portraying all of gaming as an amoral pastime for misanthropes, while failing to realize that some of the most popular games of the past decade — I'm looking at you, Portal — simply aren't violent at all.

Things made some sense when they singled out Call of Duty, a game which does, in fact, put players in the role of a soldier who goes around shooting people (though, more accurately, the soldier shoots enemy soldiers in a time of war). But even if they hit the nail on the head, here, I think it was blind luck, since it's pretty clear that most of the people calling for a boycott or a ban on violent games can't even tell one genre from another. Immediately after the shooting, people were so quick to blame Mass Effect — a role-playing game better known for its sex scenes than its shooting — that a mob-like raid on the game's Facebook page began before the real killer was even identified (and ended shortly thereafter).

The media also pointed to StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game, and I think this is especially ridiculous. Not only is this not a mindless murder game; it's not even a shooter. As a strategy game, it's all about resource management, map control, and positioning of troops. Furthermore, StarCraft is to Chess as Call of Duty is to beating your head against the wall. You could judge StarCraft based on the number of virtual "people" who die in a typical match — surely, that number is well into the hundreds, or even thousands — but the player isn't assuming the role of a guy with a gun. The player is the commander telling all the guys with guns where to go. Since real-time strategy games like StarCraft don't put a gun in the player's hands, the experience absolutely does not bear any resemblance to walking into a school and murdering a bunch of children, not even to the sickest mind.

So yes, the game is violent in the sense that its central theme is armed conflict, but it's an idiotic example to use if you're trying to draw some tenuous connection between a mass murder and the killer's enjoyment of interactive media. To some, I guess, the presence of any violent theme is bad enough. But most of these "violent" games, I think, aren't simply violent for the sake of eroding our children's sense of morality. The typical video game has a story, every story involves some form of conflict, the most dramatic conflicts tend to be violent, and violent conflicts in the modern world begin and end with the pull of a trigger. Want fewer war-themed games? Let's have fewer wars. It's not that we should just give up and blame human nature, but we can't expect every video game to be full of super happy rainbows and sunshine either.

Video games consistently imitate life, so even if life does imitate video games on rare occasions, you can't say that video games are the source of all our problems. And, again, it's nothing if not completely illogical to blame video games for a mass murder just because the murderer was one of a billion people who play them. (I bet he also took history classes in high school, but I'm not blaming those history teachers and their lessons about war, because there's no real correlation, let alone any evidence of causation.) There isn't even a very good reason for the news people and the politicians to pick on video games, in particular, so much more than other forms of media that supposedly glorify violence. What about movies and TV shows?

You could say that video games are special because of the level of interactivity that's missing in other forms of entertainment, but I'm beginning to doubt very much that this has anything to do with it. No, video games are special because they're the "new" thing that too many people still don't understand. Fifteen or twenty years ago, they would have blamed rap music. Fifteen or twenty years before that, they would have blamed comic books.

But why does it matter what the news people think? It's not like they're actually going to persuade the federal government to ban violent video games. What they might do is try to keep violent video games out of the hands of minors, and if they want to do that, they can go right ahead. They've already been trying that for a long time, though. In theory, minors can't actually buy M-rated games from most stores, because these stores voluntarily enforce rules regarding the ESRB ratings, but most minors have these things called parents, and parents invariably buy video games for their children without even looking at the ratings.

If young, impressionable children playing violent games is indeed a problem, then irresponsible parents are the cause. They buy games like Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year-old kids, and then they turn around and complain when they see how violent the games are. If they educated themselves and paid attention to the ratings, there would be no complaints, because the video game industry is already holding up its own end of the deal. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that parents ignore ratings, because most parents are old people, and when I say "old people" I'm not talking about age; I'm talking about the fact that they don't know what's going on because they didn't grow up playing video games. As a result, they think video games are just toys, exclusively for children. So they think every video game is appropriate for children, and they're shocked when they find out the truth.

And that's why we have this funny situation in which video games are, according to gaming-illiterate folks, appropriate for no one. If you're an adult and you play video games, they say "you're too old for that!" If you're a kid and you play video games, they say "you're too young for that!" What's the appropriate age?

I say it's any age. There's a video game for everyone.

I think the average adult's completely inadequate understanding of video games is the source of a lot of confusion. They see that Black Ops is the most popular game, so they assume that every game is like Black Ops. But this is just so far from the truth that I don't even know where to start. So I won't start. I'm not even going to waste my time suggesting a list of wholesome and non-violent games for old farts to play in order to broaden their understanding of video games both as an entertainment medium and as a form of artistic expression. They should sit down and find their own way like the rest of us did. It's not hard. All you have to do is look past the mainstream garbage for one second.

Until they do, I'm going to disregard everything they say. Honestly, would you listen to a guy's proposal for a ban on violence in movies if you found out he had never watched a movie in his entire life? Of course not. So why would you listen to a guy talk about violent video games when you know he's never played a video game? I wouldn't, and you really shouldn't.

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Update: December 31, 2012

I haven't written anything new on this stupid blog for the past ten days, so instead I'll just post some additional reading here. Though I don't agree with everything contained within the following articles, I found them somewhat interesting:

Senator Calls for a Study of Video Game Violence
Violence and Video Games in America
The Numbers Behind Video Games and Gun Deaths in America
'Halo 4' Won't Make Your Kids Violent: Why Parents Should Play Video Games With Their Kids

(Wait a minute... why is the best gaming-related journalism coming from a site like Forbes?)

Boss Fights & The Suspension of Disbelief

I've been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the past couple of days, and it's been an interesting experience.

Just as when I played the original Deus Ex and its slightly awkward sequel Invisible War, I'm afraid my perfectionist tendencies (though not, I'd like to think, a lack of skill) are to blame for the amount of time it's taking me to finish the game. It's hard to resist loading my last autosave every time I trip an alarm or waste an item, but part of me still knows it's more fun to improvise when facing the consequences of a stupid mistake, so I'm trying to keep the save scumming to a minimum.

In terms of item hoarding, though, I'm still hopeless, just as I am in every game with an inventory. When I bought Human Revolution, it was on sale, but so was all of the downloadable content, and like a fool I bought the whole package. The end result was an inventory full of extra stuff — a few bombs, a silenced sniper rifle, and a double-barreled shotgun — and I've been carrying it around thinking "hey, I might still use this." More generally, my inventory is full of crazy things that I've been waiting for the right time to use, and some of these things are loud and explosive.

But they're going mostly unused, because I've decided to take the non-lethal stealth approach. It seemed like the easiest option in the beginning of the game, and it continues to be the easiest option now that I've had plenty of practice at sneaking and very little practice at shooting. Like its predecessors, Human Revolution doesn't seem to encourage players to charge in with guns blazing. Perhaps this would have been a viable option if, earlier in the game, I had picked up a nice assault rifle and every combat-oriented augmentation I could afford. But I didn't, and despite my extensive experience with more generic first-person shooters, I found myself dying very quickly whenever I made the mistake of being seen.

So I stuck to sneaking around, as the developers intended, and at this point it only seemed right to avoid killing people whenever possible. My weapons of choice are a tranquilizer gun and my own metal fists. I've probably left about 150 unconscious dudes in my wake, and I hope their imaginary families appreciate it. There have been times when lethal force would have made things easier, but I've already come this far. If it takes me twice as long to complete a mission because I've committed to carefully sneaking past the guards instead of blowing them up with fragmentation grenades, so be it.

But even a non-lethal run through the game will involve some necessary bloodshed. The bosses in Human Revolution are notorious for taking that element of choice away from the player; with one exception (or so I've heard), they all must be killed. So far, I've fought two of them, and both fights were an unwelcome departure from the playstyle I had already established. Unable to sneak away or knock my enemy unconscious with a punch to the face, I was forced into a brutal fight to the death. I realized it was a good thing that I kept all those lethal weapons in my inventory instead of dropping them on the ground when I made that commitment to imaginary nonviolence.

Of course, there are always weapons lying around in the room when a boss fight occurs — the developers make sure these fights are winnable — but running around the room collecting loot (and accumulating damage) before even starting to fight back is an easy way to die.

In any case, as with most boss fights in most games, I died more than a few times in each fight before getting the hang of the enemy's attack pattern and thereby developing a viable strategy. And in each case, the strategy I ended up using wasn't exactly as fun as I hoped it would be. It wasn't the jarring transition from methodical stealth to ultra violent carnage that spoiled the experience. It was the transition from a semi-realistic world into one in which a dude can take multiple shots to the head from a high-powered sniper rifle and not die, and in which a chick can happily absorb a hundred rounds from a heavy machine gun after stepping on a couple of landmines and then blow me to pieces. Yeah, I get it, they're mechanically augmented, but so is the protagonist, and the superhuman feats do need to be kept within reason. Even metal parts can be blown up.

When I nail a guy in the head with a sniper rifle (or any other weapon) I expect him to go down, or at least be severely wounded. Even with a pure adamantium skull, he should have a concussion. If the developers want a boss fight to be challenging, they should be able to think of ways to make it so without giving the enemy so many health points that the suspension of disbelief is utterly destroyed before the fight is half-way over. If they don't want the player to blow the guy's head off in one shot, they should find a clever way to keep the player from doing so, rather than making the guy's head (along with his other parts) nearly indestructible.

I suppose a force field would have been too much of a cliché, while taking away the player's sniper rifle would have been too restrictive. Maybe there isn't a good solution. That is, maybe — just maybe — games that strive for any amount of realism shouldn't be designed with long boss fights in the first place. A fight involving firearms should be over in less than ten seconds if both parties are mortal human beings, with or without super cool prosthetics.

Human Revolution isn't the first game in the series to have boss fights. The original Deus Ex had them too, and some of these bosses also absorbed an unreasonable amount of damage. However, I distinctly remember winning one of these fights in less than a second by blowing the guy up with a few cleverly placed bombs. I walked out of the fight unscathed. It wasn't the manliest way to win, but it was what I chose to do, and it worked. Furthermore, some of the boss fights in the original Deus Ex could be avoided entirely — for example, by using ones investigative skills to uncover a killphrase which causes the enemy to self-destruct.

So why does Human Revolution force players into long, grueling battles, even when the player has chosen stealth over brute force and non-lethality over wanton destruction? I almost think the developers were under the impression that video games just need bosses, which clearly isn't the case here. I'm reminded of the Mass Effect 3 director who took a lot of heat from fans for saying that boss fights were excluded from his game because they were "just so video-gamey." He went on to explain how he didn't want to include boss fights just for the sake of having boss fights. This whole portion of the interview is ridiculous for a lot of reasons (e.g., why the heck shouldn't video games be video-gamey?), but I think having boss fights for the sake of having boss fights — happily fulfilling this particular video game trope without regard for whether it really improves a particular game or the player experience — is exactly what the Human Revolution developers have done. The game might have been better without them, or at least without the necessity of participating in them.

All in all, I think Human Revolution could have learned a lot from its predecessor. The original Deus Ex is outdated, but it still has some good ideas that could have been put to use in the prequel.

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Update (November 18, 2012):

For the record, I did finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night. My opinion on the boss fights hasn't changed much. The game's third boss wasn't nearly as frustrating as the first two, since I'd dropped the unused double-barreled shotgun and amassed a small collection of fragmentation mines, but it still wasn't particularly fun. Based on my single brief engagement with this particular enemy, I have to surmise that he wasn't very bright. After taking a couple of hits from his plasma rifle, I simply ducked behind some nearby cover, and he just kept shooting (and missing) without attempting to move to a better position.

Since he didn't seem to be going anywhere, I started chucking those explosives at his feet, and from this point onward he was stun-locked by one explosion after another until he finally died. I would have expected him to be reduced to a fine paste after all that punishment, but instead he bled to death rather peacefully as if I'd shot him with a single well-placed bullet. In fact, that's how most of the bosses seem to die, even though killing them usually requires a whole arsenal of heavy weaponry.

Again, suspension of disbelief destroyed. But it didn't really come as a shock this time.

Only the final boss was really interesting, since the fight had multiple stages and multiple targets. This doesn't make it the most original boss fight I've ever seen — a lot of it was still "shoot this, shoot that, press this button, repeat" — but at least it didn't feel like attacking Superman with a BB gun.

Happy Halloween! Have Some Spoilers

Halloween is here, and Hurricane Sandy has passed my home, leaving it at least 99% intact. Meanwhile, I haven't much to write, since I already posted this week. So maybe I'll do what a lot of other bloggers do and comment on the news.

Where do I start? Well, Assassin's Creed III came out yesterday... for consoles. For some reason, PC players have to wait until November 20. Suddenly I feel like a second-class citizen. No doubt, if asked about this, the publishers would mutter something about piracy. But even if they were being sincere, I'd have no sympathy for them, since they've already gotten more money than they likely deserve.

Remember when I mentioned Assassin's Creed III in my tirade against the entire concept of pre-ordering video games? I can't shake the feeling that you've all let me down, since the game has broken Ubisoft's pre-order records. I can see why this might happen; it's a highly anticipated sequel in a popular franchise. Furthermore, by offering a "season pass" for upcoming downloadable content at a modest 25% discount, Ubisoft was clearly doing its best to make "buy it now and ask questions later" sound a lot less crazy than it is. But it's still crazy, especially when Ubisoft refuses to release a playable demo.

And then there's news that the game will feature microtransactions (which, in this case, seems to mean trading real-life money for in-game currency which may or may not provide players with an unfair advantage in multiplayer matches). The same people who pre-ordered the game at full price without even trying it first, and then pre-ordered a bunch of DLC packs without even knowing what they would contain, probably won't be able to resist partaking in this final moneygrab... that is, unless they very quickly become disappointed in the game after they've played it.

The critics' reviews are mostly positive, of course, but when the game's ending was (predictably) uploaded to YouTube as early as two days before the official release date, a lot of potential customers found at least one reason not to buy the game. Some fans of the series, even without taking the time to play through this final act, seem to be upset about how the story turns out, and there are plenty of comments along the lines of "wow, that sucked, I'm so glad I didn't spend $60 on this."

For the record, I haven't watched the video below in full, because I might yet decide to play this game (once all the reviews are in and a bribe-free consensus on its quality has been reached, once the price has dropped to a reasonable level, and perhaps once there's some kind of special edition for PC with all that silly DLC included). Needless to say, however, it does contain spoilers.

The conclusion of Desmond Miles' story arc has prompted not only a lot of complaints, but also some comparisons to the ending of Mass Effect 3... which, by the way, was poorly received, largely because the game's multiple endings were so similar. (The video below explains the frequent jokes about the different endings being the same except for the choice of color.)

From what I've heard, Assassin's Creed III doesn't have multiple endings, and the reasons that some people hate its singular ending are accordingly much different. Although (as I've pointed out) I haven't watched the ending myself, it sounds like part of the problem is another ridiculous plot twist out of left field. In a way, this isn't surprising. When a story like that of the Assassin's Creed series relies so heavily on plot twists and cliffhangers, two things happen. First, the story ends up feeling too random or inconsistent, usually after some "grand-finale" plot twist employed in a last-ditch effort to truly surprise players; second, the writers get so attuned to raising questions and leaving things unresolved that they forget how to answer all those questions without resorting to some stupid cop-out.

The one constant here — besides, of course, each game being the conclusion of a trilogy — is that hardcore fans of each franchise felt cheated. After sinking so much money into a series, that hurts.

A similar thing happened recently with Halo 4, whose ending wound up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, despite the game's official release date of November 6. Microsoft has been scrambling to take the videos down for obvious reasons, and it looks like they've been somewhat successful, because I can't seem to find a high-quality version. (The videos below, which I found and embedded in a playlist, are likely to vanish soon.)

An allegedly sub-par ending, combined with the most banal and corny tagline of all time, has drawn a lot of laughs at the expense of this futuristic shooter. (An Ancient Evil Awakens? Seriously? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that was a cliché long before the Halo 4 marketing team got a hold of it.) I'm not sure if I can fully grasp just how good or bad this ending is, because I haven't played a Halo game since the second installment, but some fans were upset about it. (Perhaps too upset, considering that, with Halo 5 and Halo 6 supposedly in the works, it's not really an ending at all.)

Ultimately, none of this really matters, as long as the bulk of the gameplay is enjoyable... at least, that's the theory. But video game sequels are almost always advertised as continuations of a story, with cinematic trailers featuring minimal gameplay footage. Perhaps the assumption is that we already know what the gameplay is like, since we played the previous game, or that we shouldn't need to ask about the gameplay because any product with a sufficient amount of hype is worth pre-ordering, no questions asked. In any case, the result is a game advertised on the basis of its plot, and purchased primarily by owners of the previous titles, who want to know how the story ends. A bad ending, therefore, is pretty hard to ignore.

So how does the industry avoid disappointing fans with bad endings? Simply to write better endings might not be the answer; that's easier said than done, and the quality of an ending is ultimately a subjective thing. (A vocal minority, at least, will always complain, no matter what.) I think a better solution is to stop making so many sequels — to create more stand-alone games to be judged on their own merit rather than allowing so many new releases to ride on the hype generated by their predecessors — and, by extension, to stop making games that end in cliffhangers in anticipation of sequels that haven't been written. They should stop deliberately writing stories that span multiple games, thereby forcing players finish an entire trilogy (tetralogy, pentalogy, hexalogy, etc.) to find out if the final "ending" to a given story arc is any good.

They won't listen to me, though; cliffhangers are a fantastic way to make money.

In other news, Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is out today. Unfortunately, given that it's just about the newest game on Steam, it hasn't joined the rest of the Painkiller series as part of their Halloween Sale. That's not really a big deal, though, since they've set the standard price at a reasonable $20 instead of jumping straight to $60 regardless of quality like most publishers/developers do.

Five Things I'd Like to See in Half-Life 3

First, a brief history of the Half-Life series:

1998 — Half-Life
1999 — Half-Life: Opposing Force
2000
2001 — Half-Life: Blue Shift; Half-Life: Decay
2002
2003
2004 — Half-Life 2
2005
2006 — Half-Life 2: Episode One
2007 — Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

I've left the uneventful years on the timeline to illustrate the gaps between releases and to show how long it's been since production of the series came to a halt. As of today, it has been exactly five years since Half-Life 2: Episode Two — a game which ends abruptly with a painful cliffhanger — was released to the public as part of The Orange Box.

A continuation, presumably titled Half-Life 2: Episode Three, was announced back in 2006, and it was originally supposed to come out sometime in 2007, but we still haven't seen it. There hasn't even been a demo or a trailer. To this day, the official website for The Orange Box still claims that Half-Life 2: Episode Two is the "the second in a trilogy" of episodic expansions for the popular first-person shooter, but Half-Life developer Valve has given us almost no information except for some weird ideas which, if the game is still in production, have probably been dropped already.

Valve is known for long development cycles, lots of delays, and drastic changes during those long development cycles, which lead to more delays. What makes their silence on Episode Three so frustrating is that the Episodes, like other "episodic" games, were supposed to be released in rather quick succession. The whole point, I thought, was to release content in small chunks, as they were finished, so that fans wouldn't have to wait half a decade for the next installment. But I guess that wasn't working out.

If another Half-Life game is ever released, it almost certainly won't be an Episode; Valve co-founder Gabe Newell says they're done with episodic content, which essentially translates to "Half-Life 2: Episode Three is never coming." Of course, that doesn't rule out a proper Half-Life 3, which is exactly what we need. The next addition to the series will have to be a full game (and a damn good one) if Valve hopes to come within reach of the impossibly high expectations generated by such a long wait.

It's likely that Half-Life 3 won't life up to these expectations at all. Valve kind of screwed things up by promising the prompt release of an episodic expansion which never came to be. The endless wait for Half-Life 2: Episode Three seamlessly evolved into an endless wait for Half-Life 3, and now many see Half-Life 3 as vaporware, despite the fact that the five-year gap in this series is nothing compared to the 15-year development of the poorly received Duke Nukem Forever.

But if we ever get a sequel, there are a few things I'd like to see. (Note that spoilers follow.)

1. A more open world (but not too open)

Nearly three weeks ago, some rumors regarding Half-Life 3 made the rounds on all the usual gaming sites. (This is nothing special, really; it's been nonstop rumors for five years, and they should always be taken with a grain of salt, but at least they give us something to talk about.) According to some anonymous but reliable source — sounds legit, guys — Half-Life 3 will be an open-world game, and will be released sometime after 2013. I'm not digging the 2014+ release date, but an open world sounds nice. Until now, the Half-Life games have been very linear. More exploration, multiple paths, and optional objectives would be a welcome addition to the series.

What we don't need is another S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or some kind of role-playing game. Those are nice, but they're not what Half-Life is all about. While I'm sure Valve is aiming to avoid accusations that their next game is too linear — that it essentially boils down to "shoot everything, move to the next room, shoot everything, repeat" — I hope they don't completely abandon the method of storytelling that has worked so well in their games so far. It would be nothing short of jarring to go from Half-Life 2: Episode Two, an action-packed but story-driven shooter with clear objectives, to something more like a free-roam sandbox with not enough direction and too much empty space.

2. A portal gun (or something like it)

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Portal and Half-Life stories are intertwined. Portal contained some funny references to Half-Life's Black Mesa, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two brought Portal into Half-Life canon with its mention of Aperture Science in the final act. It's an odd relationship, since Half-Life is a semi-serious first-person shooter whereas Portal is a humorous puzzle game... but there are thematic similarities.

While Portal's humor doesn't quite fit with the general tone of the Half-Life series, both franchises heavily feature teleportation, and this is probably why Valve thought it was appropriate to tie them together. The extent to which Valve plans to pursue this connection, obviously, is unknown — I certainly don't expect Gordon Freeman and Chell to team up against the Combine — but after making such a big deal out of the Aperture Science research vessel Borealis at the end of Episode Two, it's too late to drop the subject entirely. It will be downright silly if the next Half-Life game doesn't feature the Borealis and, by extension, other things related to Aperture Science.

With any luck, that includes some kind of handheld portal device, preferably one that's a little more stable than the Displacer Cannon from Half-Life: Opposing Force. Aperture's portal gun, if featured in Half-Life 3, could (in part) fill the role of Half-Life 2's gravity gun as the slightly-gimmicky puzzle-solving item that's also a weapon if you use it right. I know we've all had plenty of time to play around with the portal gun in Portal and Portal 2, but using it in a combat-oriented game could be kind of fun.

3. The extent of the Combine's power

While Gordon Freeman was in stasis between the end of Half-Life and the beginning of Half-Life 2, we missed an apocalypse. By the time we arrive in City 17, human society has already collapsed under the heel of an enormous alien empire, and the occupying forces, it would seem, have since largely withdrawn, leaving what's left of our species under the control of brainwashed transhuman soldiers.

Throughout Half-Life 2 and the Episodes, we see the aftermath of the Seven Hour War which ended in Earth's surrender, but we never see the Combine display the kind of raw power that could bring an entire planet to its knees in less than a day. What we see instead is a somewhat underwhelming uprising against what must have been a tiny fraction of the army that invaded Earth. This is why we know we're in a world of trouble when Dr. Kleiner speaks, after the uprising begins, of the Combine's "inevitable return and what is certain to be unimaginable retaliation."

But how unstoppable are they? What's their evil-alien-empire power level? Could they take on the Covenant from Halo or the Reapers from Mass Effect? We just don't know.

And this, in part, is what makes the story in Half-Life 2 as good as it is. Just enough is left to the player's imagination. We know the Combine are scary, but the fact that we don't know just how scary they are makes them even scarier. We don't need to see the Seven Hour War to believe it, and I honestly hope Valve doesn't give us a prequel to illustrate it. (That seems like a great excuse for a bad game.) But if Half-Life 3 continues (and perhaps concludes) the story arc left unfinished in Episode Two, it would be nice to see the bad guys step it up a bit.

After one game and two expansions, our alien overlords have only embarrassed themselves in their failed attempts to track down and kill a single theoretical physicist. It seems like the right time to see a glimpse of their true power. Besides, we've already spent enough time shooting metrocops and blowing up striders. We need something bigger.

4. A single-player campaign

This probably seems like a strange thing to hope for, since nearly every game in the series to date is primarily single-player. (The notable exceptions are the PS2-exclusive Half-Life: Decay and the Japan-only arcade Half-Life 2: Survivor.) However, we do have a reason to fear for the future of single-player games. Electronic Arts, for example, has abandoned them, and Gabe Newell himself said last year that Valve no longer had any interest in creating games "with an isolated single-player experience."

Naturally, Half-Life fans waiting for the next sequel were horrified, and even though Gabe later attempted to clarify his statement to let us know that the company hadn't given up on single-player games entirely, I'm still a bit worried. While they might continue making single-player games, they seem to have a lot of ideas about making these games more social.

It seems plausible, for example, that Half-Life 3 might be built for some kind of cooperative mode where one player controls Gordon Freeman and the other controls Alyx Vance. I hope this doesn't happen. I also don't want to see Half-Life 3 loaded with a bunch of pointless social features. I like single-player games, and I prefer to play them without being bothered about friend requests and leaderboards.

I'm sure that Half-Life 3 will have its own analog to Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, but it would be great if they could just keep the single-player and multiplayer components separate, so I can play one and ignore the other.

5. An ending (I know, it's a stretch)

The Half-Life games are fun, but they tend to have terrible endings which hardly qualify as endings at all.

The original ends with Gordon Freeman being kidnapped by the so-called "G-Man" (whose identity and motives are never explained), Opposing Force ends with the same fate for Adrian Shephard (who is never seen again), Half-Life 2 ends with Freeman being whisked away by the G-Man again (leaving the story at an explosion-related cliffhanger), Episode One ends with another explosion (followed by a train crash and a fade to black), and Episode Two ends awkwardly with one supporting character crying over another supporting character's corpse. (It was the worst finale I've ever seen in the history of video games, and perhaps that's because it was never meant to be a finale. Keep in mind that, at some point, they were actually planning to finish Episode Three.)

Blue Shift has a happy ending, but it isn't a particularly interesting one.

So I won't be surprised if Half-Life 3 ends with another suspenseful but unresolved situation — another set-up for another sequel that might take another ten years to make — but it would be great if Valve could just give us some kind of satisfying resolution instead. I'm not saying they should end the story entirely, but they could at least cool it with the unbearable cliffhangers. In other words, if Valve plans on rolling the credits right after an important character dies, or having the G-Man stop by for another inexplicable kidnapping, I'd rather not play the game at all.