Imagining the Combine version of Reddit where one of them posts "The humans should be thanking us for giving them teleporters but they're too savage to appreciate it" and gets a million upvotes
The seven hour takeover of the entire planet screams settler colonialism
So much of early science fiction was Victorians and Yanks cluching their pearls and bolo ties while fretting, "but what if we become the colonized?"
It's fitting that Half-Life continues that trend. Also, police radio-chatter sounds just like Combine Overwatch audio.
Isn't it possible that the sci fi trope is actually being deployed as a critique of colonialism?
I'd definitely say that's the case with Half-Life. Depends on the execution and, unfortunately, what the audience actually picks up on. A lot of g*mers would be frothing at the mouth to see an even vaguely leftist read of HL.
This is the case in War of the Worlds, and Wells does not beat around the bush about it (very unfortunate bit of wording aside):
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
Dr Breen kinda has Jordan Peterson energy, too.
"You've destroyed so much but what have you created, you postmodern neo marxist?!" :jordan-eboy-peterson:
Oh, definitely. The fact that he's a member of a colonized people siding with the colonizers gives me Dinesh D'Souza vibes myself.
The entire plot of HL2 (not including EP1 and EP2) almost entirely resembles the occupied Gaza Strip.
The sectioned-off areas of City 17, the walls/crushers, constant raids by CPs or OWS, open executions, rationed food and water, no freedom of movement, strider and mortar bombardments for days after some sort of unrest. Breen of course also constantly virtue signals on Combine-controlled mass media. I'm sure you won't have any difficult at all drawing parallels.
wait a minute, valve is based ???
Too bad its entirely lost on gamers because they used an east european aesthetic instead of a MENA one.
Yeah its not exclusively easteuro but at least from what I recall its a lot more eastern than western inspired, IIRC the art director was from Bulgaria and took inspiration from his hometown, plus theres all the cyrillic text on signs and stuff like that.
Its probably mostly meant as a generic amalgam of "Europe" than a specific place, though that brings up the question of why everyone who survived Black Mesa went from like Nevada to Europe? That would honestly have been a cooler journey to base a game on than the Alyx story IMO, the Black Mesa crew banding together and escaping.
I always got the impression that people got shuffled around based on the whims of the combine and the breen administration, lots of citizens mentioning stuff like that in the train station.
Yeah, its just odd that apparently every surviving member seems to have gathered in the vicinity of city 17, I dont remember that being a specific plotpoint or anything so its probably just narrative convenience.
It would still be a cool part of the story to explore somehow, setting up the resistance and all that.
Yeah it's probably just for the plot, but one could imagine that the Vortigaunts or G-Man helped things along, guiding people to the location where they could help Gordon the most.
I somehow missed that during all my playthroughs. Guess that's another point for the "the Combine are European colonizers" pile.
To add to my speculation, likely the Portal generated by the resonance cascade meant that the Black Mesa area became prime real estate for the fatcat slugs and they moved the riff raff out. Gentrification strikes again :kitty-cri:
Half Life 2 is, I think unintentionally, but undeniably, about the collapse of the Soviet Union
it's set in eastern Europe, and everything's going to shit as a malevolent, solely destructive force moves in to extract all the resources.
dats it lol :shrug-outta-hecks:
Well that just blew my mind. I've got two mint condition copies of that book.
Ken Birdwell's overview of the design process for HL1 is pretty interesting. Really shows how the culture at Valve was very AnCom in many ways.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php?page=4
The Workers Control the Means of Production
Even with all emphasis on group activity, most of the major features of Half-Life still only happened through individual initiative. Everyone had different ideas as to what exactly the game should look like, or at least what features we just had to do. The Cabal process gave these ideas a place to be heard, and since it was accepted that design ideas can come from anyone, it gave people as much authority as they wanted to take. If the idea required someone other than the inventor to actually do the work, or if the idea had impact on other areas of the game, they would need to start a Cabal and try to convince the other key people involved that their idea was worth the effort. At the start of the project, this was pretty easy as most everyone wildly underestimated the total amount of work that needed to be done, but toward the middle and end of the project the more disruptive decisions tended to get harder and harder to push through. It also helped filter out all design changes except for the ones with the most player impact for the least development work.
the HL2 cabal process was tweaked a bit:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/259479/Classic_Postmortem_The_making_of_HalfLife_2.php
