The way you’re meant to go is signposted so naturally that it’s all but impossible to get lost or even realise you’re navigating at all, from the first moment stepping off the train all through the sewers and the canals. You know exactly which kind of headcrab is hiding behind those boxes based on its unique chitter, or that a boss battle is coming from the distinctive infinite ammo crate squeezed in the shelter of a tellingly open area. It also creates a world that’s easily legible, even when it’s foreign. These automatic actions belong to Half-Life 2 for me, or it’s the game that gave them to me I will always see Half-Life 2 as a place more than a game. In the intervening years I’ve approached 100 hours with the game, played countless other shooters, and even wrote my library school Master’s thesis about Half-Life 2 and ‘affective information behaviour.’ But it’s still hard for me to look at Half-Life 2 as anything other than where I learned video games, where I first encountered all of the things that have become a core part of how I find pleasure in the world: navigating a first-person perspective with a mouse, switching weapons with the number keys or the mouse wheel, jumping with the space bar. He had also recently dumped me, so playing it, even though I’d never played an FPS before, felt like some kind of escapist middle finger, or at least something to do besides cry. My partner had had no interest in Half-Life 2 or in any game involving shooting, now one of my favourite genres. I picked it up after watching a partner play Portal, intrigued by the hints to the world of Half-Life Valve peppered the Aperture labs with. Half-Life 2 is the first shooter I ever played all by myself. This was also my first encounter with this feeling. This kind of moment is one of my favourite things in games - that combination delight/horror of asking “What the hell is that?” The scanners and Barney’s clandestine operations clued me in that we weren’t in any usual rendition of Earth, but it wasn’t until I turned that corner and saw that Strider lumber by that I knew I was distinctly somewhere else. Breen’s nervous introduction to City 17, the totalitarian anxiety that seeps from the civilians in the train station. Half-Life 2 makes it clear from the get-go that something is wrong: your sudden appearance on the train after G-Man’s eerie monologue, Dr. I never played the original Half-Life, so I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on in Half-Life 2’s opening minutes.
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