Hello

I’m Daniel Stange, I enjoy video games.

The first movies with actual audio were similar to plays. The cameras did not change position very often and the actors would rarely move to other rooms. The movies were essentially recordings of plays being acted on a stage.

I feel that there is a parallel between the jump from plays to movies, and the jump from movies to video games. Most video games today are telling a linear and obvious story (usually getting heavy influence from past movies) through a series of cut scenes that take away control from the player. In effect, you get the feeling that you are playing through a series of unconnected "areas" or "levels", and forced to allow the story to unfold without your control.

I really feel that we are only scratching the surface of what is possible with video games, and that some of the greatest, most emotional stories ever told could be from this medium. What the industry needs right now is a demand for professional writers who specialize in the proper pacing of video games in order to tell a story through in-game events, similar to what Half-Life 2 is doing.

In Half-Life 2, there are no cut-scenes, the game starts from your eyes and it ends from your eyes, you do not have a voice either. Now to begin with this was okay, the developers were telling a simple story about one man (you) making a difference in a world of extreme oppression (and asking the question of whether your actions are your choice or the work of an unknown force). For most of the game, you were alone, only meeting up with key characters to progress the story line or introduce you to a new area.

After the end of Half-Life 2 the developers at Valve knew that players were not going to be emotionally invested in the story anymore without a main character. Since you can’t see yourself in the game (not even your legs) or speak they had to do something that few games had done WELL before, they had to give you a character that:

A) was in the game with you from start to finish, fighting along side you

B) would not get in your way or piss you off

C) would be a character I was emotionally invested in

So once half-life 2: Episode 1 rolled out (which should have been called Half-Life 3: Episode 1…) what we got was this:

From this point on everything we did in half-life was for her, even though we were playing as a silent character named Gordon Freeman, Alyx Vance replaced my goals with her goals. Her problems were my problems and her emotions were now my emotions… and it worked out extremely well!

I had shivers from the sheer emotion of this scene at the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2: