Gordon Freeman, who?

[Dracos]

Preface: I was asked to write this for a class assignment.  The specific assignment was to address gordon freeman's character on a set of specific layers of character design based on <4 hours of play.  In my case this was >6 hours of torture for 2 levels of play and 2 minutes of actual interaction with any other character.

Anyhow, folks expressed interest in reading the invariable flame that resulted towards his character design.  I'd just like it known beforehand, I actually don't think it is a bad choice for the game at all.  Were I asked to analyze why a Gordon-like character was used, I would be telling a very different story.  That said, I wasn't and thus didn't.  Enjoy.

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"I think there was supposedly a character I was playing.  He may have been named Gordon Freeman."

   While it has been many years since I stopped after twenty five minutes worth of Half-life one, distracted by pretty butterflies, I'd heard much on Gordon Freeman being a particularly impressive character.  I also heard a fair bit negative on him, deeming him an empty shell filled largely with over-analysis when his sole purpose is to provide a neutral vessel for a story filled with wild plot twists.  It was with this mixture of hope and negativity I started the ridiculously overlong process of trying to actually play the game.  Ten gigs of moved data later, I was eventually playing the demo with only a vague hope that the negatives heard were misinterpreting.
   Blanking my mind of what I knew previous, I started off sitting on a train.  Looking around, folks apparently didn't mind me running into them, tapping buttons randomly as I tried to talk with them.  I discovered during this part an interesting fact: Gordon had neither feet nor legs.  In fact, no matter how I twisted the rather flexible camera angle, I could not actually ascertain that I was playing a physical character.  The game did not even give me a face of Gordon to look at, nor did I ever encounter so much as a mirror within completing the entire demo.  Picking up an object, I was made aware that as far as I knew, Gordon did not even need hands to interact with the world, levitating things mystically before him of all different kinds of weights and dashing about with them easily.  This created a rather disjoint sensation between what was happening and the actual feeling that I was in fact playing a character instead of simply interacting through a surface.
   This though, was minor comparatively versus the really neat part of Gordon's visceral feedback.  I learned, shortly after, that Gordon, beside being a silent invisible character who gave no physical sensation of being there, was immortal.  At least in the first level he was.  There were a variety of individuals in this level who would not hesitate to beat your skull in with an electrified club.  Through testing, I determined that not only does Gordon have a ridiculous pain tolerance, giving no audio feedback to being hit brutally with one of those wicked looking clubs, but in fact is completely invulnerable to it, not falling over no matter how many hundred times in a row they hit.  This invulnerability appeared to go both ways, as when I tossed large metal barrels into innocent people repeatedly, they'd do nothing aside a momentary complaint, not even being moved back or fleeing my violent attacks.  As far as feedback went, the first chapter served both to disassociate me from the notion I was a character there and dissociate me from any sense of feeling like there was real characters in the city.
   Giving me the visceral ability to interact by smashing things violently at other people ensured that the social presence of Gordon Freeman had an odd discontinuity.  On one hand, the folks that knew him treated him with respect.  It felt like playing something of a legend, a hero.  Of course, only two people encountered during the game time recognized him to provide this sort of social interaction, but it at least gave some measure of social context. Calling it interaction though is, perhaps, a poor term for it.  It really was no more interaction between Gordon and the characters talking at him then it is interaction when one sits at a movie theater between the characters on the screen.  Gordon, neither through any physical presence or verbal tones, reacted to the characters, providing nothing more than a screen from which to hear the information they were giving.  The character both freed from impressing a specific motive upon the player and at the same time robs the player of any sense that Gordon exists.  There's no real feeling that this is Gordon's motivation or that he exists as anything but a useful vessel for you to travel through the game.  Effectively, the social indicators given portray Gordon as nothing more than someone who does what others tell him to.  For all that he displays through the social interactions with other characters, the only reason he doesn't sit down like the rest of the newcomers is because it'd be boring for the player.  There is nothing distinct, either in his personality or in his motivations, that make Gordon any more appropriate for what's going on than random guy in prison type suit 6 that sits across the table from him, grumbling about listening to the noisy guy on the big screen.  
   To be clear, there's no interest expressed by the character in what's going on.  This lack of two way interaction on a social field combined with the lack of any visual stimuli for the character makes Gordon one of the most hollow shell examples of the mute hero  ever (Minor aside: I think I heard him say something once, but I'm not sure and one line in two full chapters mumbled while walking down a corridor does not really do much), lacking even the fantasy personality that is used.  Compared with other mute heroes, he lacks the body language of characters like Crono, which contribute to the overall strength of character, or Max Payne, who provides character backstory and motivation through his own dialogue, or even the Doom Marine, who provided visual feedback through his facial reactions during the game.  As a character to be played, he's pretty much a failure in all regards, solely providing a hollow vessel to experience the game mechanics from.
   Of course, this means on a cognitive mapping level, he succeeds tremendously.  There is pretty much nothing to get in the way of interacting with the game world.  With a lack of social repercussions limiting action choices, no physical representation no real representation of the character in how you interact with the world, the only way they can go further in this regard would be to remove his name, jumping limitation, and inability to walk through solid walls.  Those are pretty much the only representations that you're playing a character during the early game.  Remove the name, and the player would have no in game indication that they were playing anything but a human with a gloved hand who may be male or female.  Remove the jumping limitation, and you would have a hard time guessing human for what the character was.  Remove the fact that walls block you, and you'd have no reason not to believe you were playing a ghost.
   Gordon works as a character solely because he's a hollow vessel for the story to be perceived through, lacking any other positive trait to be acknowledged or anything that truly differentiates him as a character in any sense.  Even doing research upon him and questioning a variety of fans about him, the most that they could tell me was that he was male, named Gordon Freeman, had a picture on the box, got a degree in theoretical physics from MIT, and that they might have heard his age somewhere but no one remembered it.  Other than those largely out of game traits, they knew nothing about a character they'd been playing with for two full games.  This, of course, was far more than I discovered about him during my two chapters worth of play.
   Of course, this is part of why he works.  He presents nothing to get in the way of what the game wants.  There are no human fears or frailty in his character because that'd involve a slight delay from the FPS action and the alien threat.  As a choice of character 'Gordon Freeman' was idea for what was being played out, providing a simple base to interact with other characters, get told what to do, and be manipulated by the player with nothing in the way.  It allowed simultaneous immersion into the plot as a named character while at the same time stripping away any inherited notions on how he should act.  As a character design though, he is without merit, for all intents and purposes, having actual depiction as a human being within the game that was exceedingly minimal, lacking in personality, personal motivation, or any sense of actual character.  If anything, I would say that placing Gordon Freeman in any other FPS would result in a complete lack of any actual discussion of the character.  Similarly, replacing Gordon Freeman with any other character from pretty much any other FPS would result in little, if any, change from the game.  In truth, the character of Gordon Freeman does not even present a particularly interesting advancement over the standard FPS character, being beaten out by previous character designs in background and history and personal motivations that are well integrated into the game, such as Hexen 2, or even other named characters with whom the character designers and writers discover ways to provide an active personality while still maintaining the same freedom of motion as Gordon provided, such as in Max Payne.
   Adding in one last thing, at the end of this spurred by a discussion, I realized that the more interesting question isn't really Gordon's character at all, but why such a character was used.  Gordon, analyzed directly, doesn't give much to talk about that is worthwhile.   Analyzed indirectly through what was achieved and the goals behind the design, it is far more interesting, giving a depth to the hollowness that's otherwise not there.

[Brian]

Aww....  You didn't use, "vehicle for the story". ;_;

Generally, good essay.

[Dracos]

Thanks.  Got into an argument earlier today with the professor on it.

Dracos

[Brian]

Tell me more~! :D