I still feel a bit crazy every now and then for seeing a wonderful, Weird work where others see The Funny Sound Effects Game, so let me recapitulate the following for myself as much as for anyone else:
Half-Life tells a story whose inciting incident is a “man in black” (extra-dimensional alien infiltrator) manipulating the US military-industrial complex (“the Combine,” Ken Kesey would call it) into disrupting the Earth’s Tesla resonance with weaponised orgonite-consciousness-crystals so that the resulting climate collapse can be used as pretense for the formation of the New World Order. You liberate the clockwork-elf-machines from slavery (admittedly this is cribbed from Marathon, which is a wilfully esoteric work but also clearer about its storytelling than Half-Life is) and in the sequel are subject to a personal manhunt by the Blue Helmets. It comments on the storytelling implications of FPS game mechanics by taking a note from the writer’s novel about people being possessed by extra-dimensional avatars of chaos and implying that to be exactly what the player is (compare with Negarestani’s essay “Parasitic Gamer”). Before Half-life 2 had its script pared down at the last minute, it had Dr. Breen namedropping a Borges story as though it were a historical document. I love this trilogy.
half life wiki page doing a lot of work selling half life 3 here
