61.Half-Life 2 (2004)

So I don’t have any kind of moral problem with Half-Life 2, or with First Person Shooters in general. There’s no evidence that in-game violence makes kids (or adults) more violent outside the game, and people having preferences different from mine makes the world go round. Also, I tend to like violent forms of other media with a morbid fascination—I never miss an episode of The Walking Dead, and I’ve watched enough zombie movies to write a paper about them. I do, however, seem to have a violent (haha), visceral hatred of Half-Life 2. I’ve now tried to play this game three times and never gotten more than 10% through. Multiple friends have confirmed this as an absurd reaction; I cannot name the number of men in my life who love Half-Life 2, because it is all of them. But. My experience of playing (and I’ll accept the possibility this is a reaction partly provoked by the current US administration) is too real, too anxiety-inducing, too interpolated. It’s like playing the game of Althusser, but with actual guns making manifest the state-sanctioned violence, the surveilling gaze. Everywhere you go, terrifying little drones blind you while taking your picture, and who knows what gets done with those pictures later. You’re in a ramshackle, iron-curtain-esque city with more police presence, robots, and aliens than other citizens, and your escape is predicated on your ability to keep solving spatial puzzles while the city’s agents shoot you, loudly and bloodily. The first time I died, I was shrieking in terror for several minutes after. The second time I died, I dropped my controller, cowered, and sat on my hands waiting for it to be over. It didn’t feel like a game at all, in the sense that a game is unreal. All I wanted was to cross some train tracks, and my character wasn’t doing anything wrong, but my fingers kept slipping on the buttons every time I tried to jump from one train car to the next and the police kept shooting. Red flashes fill your vision every time a shot lands. I screamed every time. By the time I got through the scene, I was crumpled on the floor next to the couch, twitching and sobbing. I tried to keep going, numbly making myself half-sandwiches of peanut butter and honey, and drinking a full cup of tea every time I died particularly badly. It reminded me of my very first gaming experiences—that hopeless feeling that this is wildly unfair in some deep sense, but you know it’s probably not, you’re just not any good at it. But, no, *unfair* is not the right word—it’s perfectly fair, or maybe it’s simply a world (like ours) where fairness often does not matter. “Well, life’s not fair,” was always my mom’s response to my youthful demands for justice against whatever crime my brothers had “unfairly” perpetrated on me that afternoon. Perhaps that’s where my sense that it’s “overly real” comes from. Games are assumed to be going for some semblance of fairness, life is not. Half-Life 2 just feels like life, Hobbesian life—cruel, nasty, brutish, short, authoritarian, filled to the brim with murderous police, and me, some small thing who’s forgotten my brain and courage at home because those things keep trying so hard to kill me.

#FPS #death #experience #struggle #fairness #QualsList