Half Life 2: Do, Don't Show

20 Years ago, when I was little more than foreshadowing, I played something that sparked my interests in storytelling through video games. I’ve always enjoyed stories, I’ve always enjoyed games, but Half Life 2 showed me something I didn’t expect. I originally played through it without thinking, simply enjoying what was happening. When I finished, I went and bought Half Life 1 because I’d never played it and I wanted to understand what was going on in HL2. I needed the backstory. If any readers are familiar with the original Half Life they will already know what I discovered: There is no backstory there. This led me to a more careful second playthrough of HL2 and a discovery that would forever change me. Half Life tells its story in the margins. It doesn’t care if you stop to understand. It makes no demands on you at all, it just lets you play as you will and understand as much or as little as you like. 

My second playthrough revealed a secret world of environmental storytelling and sequenced actions that were a lot richer than I first realized. Half Life 2’s story is so frictionless I’d slipped right past it and in doing so I learned to pay attention. I learned that it was up to me to seek understanding, rather than to expect that understanding to be handed to me on a silver platter. I’ve long held Half Life 2 up as one of the greatest stories in all of video games, and that’s an opinion I maintain to this day. 

The impetus for this blog was in part to try and understand how this game works. My second ever blog post was an examination of the story of Half Life 2. Since then I’ve written many times about storytelling through gameplay, and my recent How Not To Need A Cutscene post culminates that research. This blog post exists to expand on those ideas and to create a philosophy that I have started to call Do, Don’t Show.

Do, Don’t Show borrows from the classic writing advice of Show, Don’t Tell and adapts it into interaction. It is my belief that actions speak louder than words, and that a story which the player participates in will sink in more powerfully than a story they only watch or read. After all, every other animal learns best through play, why not us? At the very least, playful storytelling is worth understanding better than we currently do.

Today I’m here to once again study Half Life 2. This time specifically the intro to the game leading up to the Kleiner’s Lab scene. I’m going to study this series of events piece by piece to understand the lessons we can take from it, and then I’m going to ask myself how we might apply these techniques to a modern, open world game. It’s my hope that in doing so I’ll better understand how to recreate the techniques Valve used, and how to apply them to any game in any genre. 

Let’s go!!

Half Life 2 starts with a sequence where a mysterious man’s face appears in front of you, giving you the following speech:“Rise and shine, Mister Freeman. Rise and... shine. Not that I... wish to imply you have been sleeping on the job. No one is more deserving of a rest, and all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until... well, let's just say your hour has... come again. The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So, wake up, Mister Freeman. Wake up and... smell the ashes...”This speech tells us a bit of important information. We understand that You are “Mister Freeman”. We understand that you have been “sleeping” and will now “wake up” and that your time has come to be the right man in the wrong place, whatever all that means. Essentially we’re learning that this person is in control of us, and that we are being given a job without being told what that job is. We’re also being told that the world is in a state where we can “smell the ashes” which implies that things aren’t great right now and that your role is probably to fix that.

It’s not much to go on, but that’s what’s so interesting here. The game tells you almost nothing. Many stories use their intros to do extensive worldbuilding, but Half Life 2 gives you the bare minimum. This is a good thing. The player doesn’t need to know the details yet, they just need to be motivated to act. “The world is in trouble, go fix it” is perfect to get the player moving. We see this kind of scene in lots of stories, lots of games, but what’s notable here is how little information is given to us to start. Keep that in your mind.

After that scene, we are given a long sequence of gameplay where we walk through a busy train station that the Combine control, and we get to see citizens and soldiers existing together in their antagonistic way. I’m going to gloss over this section for now and skip to the next “scene” which is where we meet Barney.Barney pulls us out of the Combine checkpoint we walk through and locks us in a room with him to reveal that he’s an ally hidden among the evil troops. He calls Dr Kleiner and we learn that there’s a resistance fighting back against Combine control. Barney then shuffles us off through a window when the Combine knock on our door and we continue on our way, but now with a goal. Where we began knowing that we were being tasked with a job, we didn’t know what that job was. Now at least we have Barney telling us to head to Kleiner’s Lab, where we can meet the resistance.

After that sequence, we leave the train station and enter the city. We see how citizens are living, and being abused in their homes the same as they were in the train station. I’m going to once again gloss over this section because it’s another gameplay sequence rather than a narrative scene.

We eventually reach Kleiner’s Lab. We are introduced to two scientists, Kleiner and Vance, and Vance’s daughter Alyx. We are told that the scientists are people we worked with back at Black Mesa in the first game, and that they are working with the resistance to build technologies that will help humanity fight back. A new experimental Teleporter is the first of such technology that we see, and the sequence ends with us attempting to travel with it. We then see a final bit of scene as we use the teleport, it goes wrong, and we show up in various places before we land outside the window of the room we started in. In the process we see Breen is reporting to the alien leadership, telling them that Freeman is back.

What I’ve outlined is all the information that’s handed to us in the traditional narrative way. In this game these aren’t full cutscenes, control is never taken from the player in HL2, but the player is locked in a room with a heavily-scripted narrative moment that serves the same purpose. The use of cutscenes, or these kinds of scripted sequences, is mostly a style choice I’ll let your team decide your own opinions about. However, what’s interesting for me today is how incredibly little information we’ve gotten so far. We’ve had 3 “cutscenes” and all we know is that there’s a hostile occupying force, and a resistance that’s building technology to oppose them. We’ve mostly just met relevant characters. There’s been little to no exposition throughout all of that, and certainly no lore dumps so far. This is especially strange given this is an intro sequence, where most stories choose to include the entire history of the world to give context.

In fact, let’s look specifically at what we know at this point. Here is a bullet list of facts we’ve learned:

• We are being deployed by some mysterious man to accomplish some unknown task

• The world is in some kind of state where we can “smell the ashes”

• Barney is a double agent inside a hostile force, helping a resistance movement

• Dr Kleiner & Dr Vance are developing new technologies to fight the hostile force

• Dr Breen is reporting to the alien leadership, working against the needs of humanity

Everything I’ve described so far is what the game Tells us. This is the Tell layer of our narrative. When writers say “Show, Don’t Tell” this is the stuff they’re trying to get us to minimize. HL2 does this quite well, it doesn’t Tell us hardly anything at all. HL2 chooses to Show quite a lot, and to allow us to Do as well, so let’s dive into those parts that I skipped over before.

When the introductory scene with the mysterious “G Man” ends, we are left in a train with 2 other passengers. If you approach them they comment that they didn’t see you get on the train, implying that you appeared out of nowhere. They also talk about how they’ve both been relocated multiple times recently, which tells us that forced relocation is normal in this world.

When the train lets us off, we’re greeted by a giant TV showing a man welcoming us to City 17. He says that his administration works out of this city in “The citadel so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors.” which strongly implies that some greater power is in charge of the government.

As we walk around the train station, we see people being pushed around and abused by uniformed soldiers. We see drones flying around taking photos of us without permission. We see an alien person sweeping the floor under the watchful eye of a soldier. All of this tells us that this world is one of constant surveillance and one where the people have few rights. We immediately see the oppression being perpetrated here.

Continuing on, we meet a woman waiting for her husband. She says he was taken by Combine in the woods, and that they’re “Being nice, letting me wait for him”. We hear others whispering their hatred of Dr Breen, showing that not everyone agreed to this new world. Just before we reach the Barney scene, we see a man who seemingly followed all the rules still being carted off for mistreatment.

After the Barney scene we get to enter a more open world area full of exploration. While we explore the world we hear Breen talking about the real stakes here, that the Combine have created a suppression field that prevents reproduction. The future of our entire species is under threat, and we pass by an empty playground as part of this revelation. We also start to ramp up the abuses we’re seeing. We see people being forced into interrogation spaces while officers beat them. We see bodies lining the street and enormous weapons walking by to enforce the Combine’s rule. We start to hear of people truly talking resistance as Combine start raiding entire apartment complexes. We get swept up in one such raid and flee across rooftops until Alyx finds us and guides us to Kleiner’s Lab and the small resistance base there.At the end of the Kleiner’s Lab sequence we get teleported into Breen’s office by accident and learn that Breen reports directly to some kind of Combine alien, which prompts the Combine to go on high alert and start sending out patrols to hunt for you.

This is the show layer, it has allowed us to see quite a lot more about this world than what we were force fed through “cutscenes”. This Show layer is made up of the environment art and animations we see all around us as we walk, it’s those carefully crafted moments that happen everywhere we go, and it’s the bulk of the storytelling that happens in Half Life 2.When we finished the “Tell” portion of the game, all we really knew was that aliens had taken over and a resistance had formed. Now with the addition of the “Show” layer, we can make another bullet list of all new details like so:

• You are being controlled by someone with the power to teleport you onto a train, a technology neither side has available

• The Combine are abusing and killing people with relative impunity

• Vortigaunts are also being subjugated, and are aliens working alongside humans

• Combine have sterilized the human race and are using that control to subjugate them

• Combine have massive weaponry that far outpowers what humanity wields

• Dr Breen is working with the aliens directly, spreading their propaganda

• A resistance movement has popped up but is being crushed by the enemy

• Humanity as a whole is desperate and needs something to incite a proper rebellion

• Kleiner and Vance are working to even the playing field

• Alyx is their field agent

This information added to the Tell layer above means we have a much more complete picture of what’s happening here.

All of this tells us much more about the world and the story, but I want to go one layer deeper into our narrative analysis to discuss something I don’t see talked about much: The “Do” layer. Half Life 2 Tells us quite a lot about its world, and it Shows us even more, but is all of that backed up by what you do in the game as a player? If we’re told that the world is being run by aliens, and we see all the various ways that manifests, does what we do reinforce that same story?

Returning to our intro section again, the moment the player gains control over Freeman, they begin shuffling through the bureaucracy of the Combine world. We walk through the train tracks, following a very linear path laid out for us by “our benefactors” and search for purpose. We’ve been told we have a task, but we don’t know what it is and are just wandering aimlessly for now. Of note here is that at this point we don’t have any choices to make. We are being forced to walk a linear path by the Combine, physically incapable of doing anything else.

I would say that forcibly having our picture taken actually counts as something we “do” on this layer, as well, it’s the actions of an external agent, but it’s action all the same. By a similar token, we can also get ourselves abused by Combine during this section if we stand too close to a soldier. They’ll club us with their little stun baton and curse at us for not complying enough. We, of course, also see other people experiencing this as well.

Another of our actions that we do during this section is walking up to other citizens. As we get within range of them, many will talk to us and ask us questions. It quickly becomes clear that the human citizens rely on one another for survival as you wander through this space and the people around you implicitly trust you and bring you into their community. They don’t hesitate, just being a human is enough. This tells us that Breen is by far an exception to the norm. People don’t worry that you will betray them because there are so few people who would. This paints Breen as clearly the monster in this world, and paints all humanity as his opponent. He may be willing to lay down and allow alien fascists to control humanity, but no one else is with him on that one. Or at least so few that people will start from a place of trust and only move to a place of hostility if you prove yourself an exception to this established norm.

The train station is mostly about moving forward towards our only other possible destination, but when we meet Barney we start to move outside of our rails. He tells us to sneak out of a window, and we start to engage with the world through moving boxes, climbing ladders, and breaking rules. All of these actions make a lot of sense for a revolutionary, the enemy isn’t going to give you the tools you need so you’re going to have to make do with whatever you can find. Crawling out windows atop stacks of wobbly wooden crates is exactly the kind of thing you must do when you have no resources and a hostile force is in power.

After this sequence, we run into perhaps the most iconic moment in all of Half Life 2: Pick Up The Can. A Combine soldier walks out, knocks a can of some kind of drink onto the floor and tells you to put it back in the waste bin he knocked it off of. This moment allows us to choose whether we comply, ignore him, or throw the can back in his face. It perfectly encapsulates everything we’re learning and, indeed, the entire narrative thrust of the game.

The city section of the game has you running from a Combine raid, dodging bullets while running across rooftops, and eventually getting pinned in and beaten up by Combine soldiers. Again, all of which is very consistent with being a revolutionary. 

At Kleiner’s Lab you are given your HEV suit and can start to draw energy from Combine power outlets, which is a great little metaphor about them literally providing the fuel for their own destruction.

This introductory part of the game wraps up with us being handed a Crowbar which then expedites all of the above. We can now destroy boxes and wooden planks that try to restrict our movements, and of course we can use this crowbar to attack as well. A crowbar may not be much of a weapon, but it’s also something immensely practical and cheap for members of a resistance movement to use in the absence of any better weaponry. We’ll get all kinds of fancy guns later, but all of the above serve a single narrative purpose: To let us fight back against our oppressors.

The actions we take in this sequence do, indeed, reinforce the same messages we were shown and told in those previous layers. Everything Freeman is capable of doing tells us that he is all about getting into and out of places he shouldn’t be, and causing havoc while there. These are the exact skills that led to him being put into stasis by G Man and used as a tool to overthrow the Combine. Even the progression of the game is just him becoming more and more effective at what he set out to do from the start.

To wrap our Do layer into a list, we get the following:

• You can only follow the Combine’s predefined path, unless helped by others

• You can use boxes and open windows to move more freely

• You can resist the Combine and break their rules

• If you break rules, the Combine will attack you

• Others around you are not yet ready to help you fight

• You can steal the Combine’s power and use it for yourself

• You can wield weapons to become even more effective

  
  

So in the end what did we learn from this exploration of HL2? We learned that only a tiny fraction of the game’s story exists on the “Tell” layer. The game doesn’t really mind if we slip right past its frictionless storytelling, it’s completely content to let us experience as much or as little as we like.We learned that the vast majority of storytelling is done with the “Show” layer. The environment art and background animations tell us so much of what we learn about this game’s world. All major plot points are at least expanded upon through the environment, and some of them are ONLY discussed there, such as the fact that the vortigaunts are helping the humans resist (something that becomes relevant much later on in the game).

Lastly, we learned that the “Do” layer is all about reinforcement. No new plot beats are established only through the actions of our player, but those actions do reinforce all of the ideas we see above. We act as a resistance fighter as much as other people tell us that’s who we are. When we gain new abilities, those abilities are for the purpose of fighting back in more and more powerful and direct ways. Throughout the rest of the game, beyond the scope of the section analyzed here, we see more and more nuanced ways of interacting with our world to achieve our goals of getting into and out of places we are not supposed to be, and fighting back against the alien oppressors we find.

The “Do” layer here doesn’t do much heavy lifting in our narrative in this game, but I posit that it is the reason we can rely so much on our Show layer, and that it enables us to get that frictionless story I mentioned. Because our Show and Do layers are so much in harmony, we don’t need to Tell very much at all, since everything we see and do in the game is already telling us the story without us needing to stop.

I want to take this idea and analyze something that does more Telling than Showing, to see if the Do layer is as disconnected as I suspect it would be in that kind of game. I may also take some time to survey a whole host of more narrative experiences to see how their Tell, Show, and Do layers all interact with one another and if there are patterns to be found.

But all of that is some thinking for another day. That’s all for this blog post. Check back in later to see if Future Nathan actually did the explorations I mention above.

Either way, thanks for reading! Hope something here was useful for you!