Overthinking Half-Life 2 [spoilers]

During my morning crawl, I came across this via UnrealOps. It's more or less a literary deconstruction of Half-Life 2.

It also reminds me how easy it is to write bullshit academia. I mean, take this:

As Freeman, we have to enter a casket and move onwards and upwards to confront and challenge those who've managed to decide what happens directly below. Yet through such change of environment, it becomes evident that the cold sterilised factory portion of the building, which harshly sits on the surface of City 17, is also cut off from the clean, pristine look of the upper floors. There almost appears then to be a clear fragmentation too within the Combine partnership and where the hierarchy and foot soldiers fit in with each other.

Funny, I thought that part of the game was merely a poorly contrived game mechanic to force a relatively non-existent plot forward. Here is our man Freeman, mysteriously dropped into a mysterious city, finding himself in the Citadel of HorseHead Evil or somewhat, having eluded capture a dozen different ways ... and he willingly places himself into constraints and gets delivered via crane not once ... but twice.

C'mon people, I like Half-Life 2 as much as the next guy ... but let's be honest. The story was seriously lacking. Gordon, having just spared Black Mesa and swept away by the bizarre G-Man is dumped ... into the future? A future where the aliens of Black Mesa have taken over the world in a time about equivalent to Freeman's escape from his lab and the administrator of this lab, now responsible for countless deaths and the inevitable downfall of mankind ... is somehow charged with running the whole place? The whole Earth that is?

Putting aside for now that much of this is told through a single bulletin board in the game, since none of the main characters seem to bother with actually explaining to Freeman what's going on, this smacks heavily of trying far too hard to make two completely divergent story lines appear connected. There is nothing particularly logical or realistic about that premise, it just makes it seem more like a sequel since they can rehash characters.

Half-Life 2 had some interesting mechanics. As Penny Arcade pointed out, it's unabashedly first-person, even when third person might serve better, which works to a good effect. It's got some of the best design in video game history. It does not, however, have a story meriting thinking like "As such, if her first and second betrayals are so close, both from decisive calculation to heated indecision, what does that say about the lack of instinct over our fundamental grasping of it?".

The article does, at the end, make some interesting points about game design in general - basically exploration versus expedition, but it takes way too long to get there. Let me make it simpler for you. Valve does good level design.