~That road you're on? Leads to nowhere.
I've been lazy about writing entries lately I'm sorry, haha. I do have some things to post but I'm gonna put them off until tomorrow I think, I sort of want this entry to just have the one focus.
So, I've been playing Black Mesa Source! And I want to write an in-depth post about that fan-mod at some point with screencaps and comparisons and changes and additions and removals and what I liked and what I didn't like, kind of a big general post about it at some point when I actually finish it and also get in the mood to put it all together. MIGHT TAKE A WHILE. But for now I want to talk about something specifically, so I'll leave the general talk for later.
So last night I got to Questionable Ethics, and was mostly pleased with the atmosphere and how things were expanded and all the new details and such like that, and then I ran into something that really bothered me, to the extent that I know if I don't get it down somewhere it's just going to keep bugging me for ages. I've been trying to articulate exactly how it made me feel in my head for a while, so time to see if I can do it in text! We'll see how successful I am.
This is going to be a pretty serious business entry from this point on with a lot of talk about sexual violence, so feel free to bail now if either don't interest you.
Anyway, here's a bit of background. Black Mesa Source (BMS from now on so as not to confuse it with Black Mesa, which is the lab where Half-Life happens) is a fan-made recreation of the first game with modern graphics and the like. Most of the time it follows the original game very closely, just expanding the world around you. Some areas got streamlined or changed, but mostly it just makes everything a lot bigger and more detailed. Which is cool, don't get me wrong. For example, here's the desk with the guard and scientist at the beginning of the first Half-Life...
And here they are in BMS.
So you can kind of get an idea of the scale of changes here. Along with reinterpreting the older game into the newer engine, BMS added a lot of new content. This is risky business when you're playing with something that's already well-established, and there are some new lines of dialogue that feel a bit try-hard or too in-jokey, but there are others that fit in perfectly well. I expected that coming into BMS, sort of like what I expect when I go into any fanfic - it's not going to be perfect, there'll be pieces of the author shining through in some way or another. But even the most :/ lines in BMS were harmless and easy to shrug off or go "eh, it's not like it's canon" to, so it's not something that particularly bothered me.
Then I got to Questionable Ethics, as mentioned. And in the courtyard near the door leading out, they added some new dialogue for some soldiers there.
This is jarring as all get-out.
This is the soldiers talking, to be clear, after which they laugh and wolf-howl at each other. I was able to forgive a lot of BMS's shakier points but this is not at all like anything else it changes or adds or takes away. This is not cool.
And it's sort of hard to exactly pin down how this made me feel, somewhere between alienated and disappointed I think but even that doesn't quite cover it. I'm not even really sure to begin with the problems I have with it.
I think part of what made this feel so inappropriate was the general context to me. There's no line like this in the original game. And you could say oh, well that's because in the first game, there weren't any female scientists, and that would hold except in Half-Life 2 and all its sequels, which have plenty of female scientists and rebels and citizens all wandering around under military rule, there's no sexual violence either. There's not even the threat of sexual violence at all towards anyone at any point that I can remember. And this doesn't just apply to Half-Life, it also applies to the other Valve games I played - no one threatens any of the women in Left 4 Dead with rape, no one threatens Chell with rape, it's not a thing that happens. And I'd like to think it's because Valve sat down and realized that the stories they wanted to tell about women did not need rape.
But basically I went into this mod expecting Half-Life, that's what I was told it would be, and when they added the female scientists, I expected them to be treated like the female characters in HL2 and its episodes. Suddenly coming across a line like this threw me out of the game like nothing else.
And it's disappointing because the female scientists were treated like their male counterparts for the most part up to this point - they had jerky or silly or sciencey lines, they died and got scared and hid just like the male ones, and considering that Valve at one point actually had intended to add a female scientist to Half-Life but ended up scrapping the idea, it felt like oh, they're adding what Half-Life couldn't before, that's cool! I appreciate that.
And then there's this line. This isn't a fun line. This isn't a funny line. This isn't a joke. This isn't a casual thing you can just say. This is not something you can imply and then handwave away like it's not a big deal. This opens a box you can't close. When I was playing this before and I saw a dead female scientist, I assumed she'd been shot like her colleagues. Now when I see one, I think to myself, was she raped first, and that wasn't a thought I had before. This was not a thought I needed to have. THIS IS NOT A THOUGHT I WANT. This thought does not enhance the experience for me. And once you put that out there, you can't take it back. It's done. You added the specter of sexual violence to a game that had none before.
And why? For what? What is the purpose of this line? What value does knowing the soldiers gang raped the female scientists add to the game? What made this line important enough to pass the cutting board? Why is it here when there's nothing like this in the rest of the series?
To make you hate the soldiers even more? Just in case them executing helpless unarmed civilians wasn't enough? Are we assumed to be so jaded that we can't really hate the soldiers until they threaten to rape some women? Even this doesn't fly as an excuse because in the few glimpses you get at the soldiers' thoughts in the game, they try to humanize them. And in fact, I thought at first that BMS was deliberately trying to humanize them MORE than before. The original soldiers have heavily distorted voices that can be difficult to make out, and BMS makes them completely clear so you can't mistake them for anything but human. BMS added new dialogue depending on where you shoot them, so they scream in pain when you shoot them in the arm or leg.
BMS reworked the area where you overhear the soldiers talking about shooting scientists ("I shot twelve of them and they didn't even fight back") so you can't see the soldiers speaking, you can't get to them, and the soldier speaking sounds upset and his friend calms him down. If anything they made it MORE clear that the soldiers don't want to be shooting these people. And they kept the line near where you launch the rocket where one goes "Monsters, sure, but civilians? I didn't sign up for this", and the conversation where the soldiers talk about wanting revenge for all their dead friends. These are humanizing conversations that are meant to give you a little insight into these guys, despite the fact they're murdering all of your coworkers. And all of these were in the original game, and all of them were kept.
So not only does this new gang rape line seem gratuitous and inappropriate, it's almost counter-productive. And if you say adding the fact that the soldiers want to rape women is humanizing in some way I will stab you in the kidney.
Why does this line exist? To add realism? Because fighting an eight-foot alien with three arms that shoots BEES OUT OF ITS HANDS is fine, but a game with women where no one tries to rape them is just too fantastical?
"But Zar," you may be thinking, "women face sexual violence all the time in their real lives, it's realistic that adding women to a game would mean adding sexual violence." and you know what, it's true that women face sexual violence in real life all the time. You don't have to tell me that. What I don't understand is why people draw their line of suspension of disbelief at the thought of a world where women don't get raped, when they can't draw it at an enormous floating telepathic space fetus with a giant crystal in its flower head. How is that where things get too unrealistic for you?
Not only that, I reiterate again THIS LINE WAS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL GAME. And you know what? Half-Life did perfectly fine without it. And then Half-Life 2 added a whole bunch of new female characters, including practically a second female protagonist, and guess what, there was no sexual violence in that either. And it did perfectly fine. And so did all of its episodes. IN FACT, SO DID ALL THE HALF-LIFE SPINOFFS. Half-Life: Decay had TWO FEMALE PROTAGONISTS, AND IT DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL VIOLENCE AT ALL IN IT ANYWHERE. The closest you can get is the guards clumsily flirting with you sometimes but that's not nearly on the same level as implying there are soldier gang rapes going on all over Black Mesa.
I did not play Half-Life thinking "boy, this game is great, but I wish it was more realistic." And I certainly did not play Half-Life 2 and think "boy, I'm glad they added Alyx and Mossman, but I wish someone would threaten to rape them, then that would be realistic."
You know what happens when I play games where there's no sexual violence? I don't think about how it doesn't accurately reflect my reality as a woman, I think thank God I don't have to deal with it here. I'm relieved.
This is not a void that needs to be filled. And the thing is, if BMS wanted to make Half-Life more realistic, it already did a fine job of that just by improving the environments and making some things make more sense (no more floating platforms, machinery that stops and starts in ways that actual machinery does, the layout of the levels and the posters and warnings that look like things you'd see in real life). THEY HAD ALREADY DONE THAT. THEY ALREADY MADE THE GAME MORE REALISTIC. This line does not add anything of value.
What would happen if you cut this line? What would you lose by cutting this line? I remind you, this was added. Someone thought that what Half-life needed was gang rape, and they put that in their mod. This isn't an accident, this was a person who decided to add this. They made that choice. They got a voice actor to record this line. They decided this fictional world needed gang rape, even when all other installments of the series had nothing of the sort. Even when the other installments of the series accomplished great success without it.
There were a few moments in BMS when I was reminded that it was a fan-mod, the same way I'd be reminded while reading a fic that I'm just reading a fanfic. Little things that didn't feel right, dialogue that didn't sit well, and I could forgive most of it, they're doing their best, maybe that line isn't for me, it's a fan-mod, it's going to be a bit rough around the edges. I'd be jarred out of the experience a bit, but I'd settle back in quickly enough.
This line threw me out of the game completely, and the feeling I got was this game is not for you. We do not want you here. And I started wondering how many members of the development team were men, did they think about how women might react to this line? Did that cross their minds? All at once the game felt hostile to me in a way it didn't feel before. Not in a way that heightened the gaming experience, not in a way that heightened tension, not in a way that built emotional investment, but in a way where the game itself was making me feel unwelcome.
Was this supposed to make me angry at the army guys? I was already angry at them for murdering the scientists. Was it supposed to make me want to kill these army guys specifically? I was already angry at them for what the others had done. Was this supposed to make me think the army guys were evil? Every effect this line could possibly have on the player has already been done.
Except raising the specter of rape over every dead female scientist. And for what? For what purpose? What value does this add? How does this improve the gameplay? How does this make the game more fun? Valve once did an interview about how they play-tested every area in Half-Life and cut everything down to only the fun parts and it worked. Half-Life got like a million awards and is considered one of the greatest games ever.
And what is this? What does adding gang rape to Half-Life accomplish? What is this supposed to do?
It's just... gratuitous. Childish, even. Thoughtless. And like I said before, disappointing. I was really enjoying BMS a lot up to this point, and now this line is going to be hanging over my head, making me wary of every new change. Reminding me every time I see a dead female scientist. I was so happy to see them at first and this is what I end up getting.
And this is supposed to be like the definitive remake of the original game, I've seen people recommend BMS over the original. This is more than just a tasteless fanfic or creepy bit of fanart, the scale of this is much bigger and it's much harder for me to ignore.
And so on and so forth. I anticipate being told I'm being too sensitive over this light-hearted gang rape gag so BRING IT, I KNOW IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!
So, I've been playing Black Mesa Source! And I want to write an in-depth post about that fan-mod at some point with screencaps and comparisons and changes and additions and removals and what I liked and what I didn't like, kind of a big general post about it at some point when I actually finish it and also get in the mood to put it all together. MIGHT TAKE A WHILE. But for now I want to talk about something specifically, so I'll leave the general talk for later.
So last night I got to Questionable Ethics, and was mostly pleased with the atmosphere and how things were expanded and all the new details and such like that, and then I ran into something that really bothered me, to the extent that I know if I don't get it down somewhere it's just going to keep bugging me for ages. I've been trying to articulate exactly how it made me feel in my head for a while, so time to see if I can do it in text! We'll see how successful I am.
This is going to be a pretty serious business entry from this point on with a lot of talk about sexual violence, so feel free to bail now if either don't interest you.
Anyway, here's a bit of background. Black Mesa Source (BMS from now on so as not to confuse it with Black Mesa, which is the lab where Half-Life happens) is a fan-made recreation of the first game with modern graphics and the like. Most of the time it follows the original game very closely, just expanding the world around you. Some areas got streamlined or changed, but mostly it just makes everything a lot bigger and more detailed. Which is cool, don't get me wrong. For example, here's the desk with the guard and scientist at the beginning of the first Half-Life...
And here they are in BMS.
So you can kind of get an idea of the scale of changes here. Along with reinterpreting the older game into the newer engine, BMS added a lot of new content. This is risky business when you're playing with something that's already well-established, and there are some new lines of dialogue that feel a bit try-hard or too in-jokey, but there are others that fit in perfectly well. I expected that coming into BMS, sort of like what I expect when I go into any fanfic - it's not going to be perfect, there'll be pieces of the author shining through in some way or another. But even the most :/ lines in BMS were harmless and easy to shrug off or go "eh, it's not like it's canon" to, so it's not something that particularly bothered me.
Then I got to Questionable Ethics, as mentioned. And in the courtyard near the door leading out, they added some new dialogue for some soldiers there.
This is jarring as all get-out.
This is the soldiers talking, to be clear, after which they laugh and wolf-howl at each other. I was able to forgive a lot of BMS's shakier points but this is not at all like anything else it changes or adds or takes away. This is not cool.
And it's sort of hard to exactly pin down how this made me feel, somewhere between alienated and disappointed I think but even that doesn't quite cover it. I'm not even really sure to begin with the problems I have with it.
I think part of what made this feel so inappropriate was the general context to me. There's no line like this in the original game. And you could say oh, well that's because in the first game, there weren't any female scientists, and that would hold except in Half-Life 2 and all its sequels, which have plenty of female scientists and rebels and citizens all wandering around under military rule, there's no sexual violence either. There's not even the threat of sexual violence at all towards anyone at any point that I can remember. And this doesn't just apply to Half-Life, it also applies to the other Valve games I played - no one threatens any of the women in Left 4 Dead with rape, no one threatens Chell with rape, it's not a thing that happens. And I'd like to think it's because Valve sat down and realized that the stories they wanted to tell about women did not need rape.
But basically I went into this mod expecting Half-Life, that's what I was told it would be, and when they added the female scientists, I expected them to be treated like the female characters in HL2 and its episodes. Suddenly coming across a line like this threw me out of the game like nothing else.
And it's disappointing because the female scientists were treated like their male counterparts for the most part up to this point - they had jerky or silly or sciencey lines, they died and got scared and hid just like the male ones, and considering that Valve at one point actually had intended to add a female scientist to Half-Life but ended up scrapping the idea, it felt like oh, they're adding what Half-Life couldn't before, that's cool! I appreciate that.
And then there's this line. This isn't a fun line. This isn't a funny line. This isn't a joke. This isn't a casual thing you can just say. This is not something you can imply and then handwave away like it's not a big deal. This opens a box you can't close. When I was playing this before and I saw a dead female scientist, I assumed she'd been shot like her colleagues. Now when I see one, I think to myself, was she raped first, and that wasn't a thought I had before. This was not a thought I needed to have. THIS IS NOT A THOUGHT I WANT. This thought does not enhance the experience for me. And once you put that out there, you can't take it back. It's done. You added the specter of sexual violence to a game that had none before.
And why? For what? What is the purpose of this line? What value does knowing the soldiers gang raped the female scientists add to the game? What made this line important enough to pass the cutting board? Why is it here when there's nothing like this in the rest of the series?
To make you hate the soldiers even more? Just in case them executing helpless unarmed civilians wasn't enough? Are we assumed to be so jaded that we can't really hate the soldiers until they threaten to rape some women? Even this doesn't fly as an excuse because in the few glimpses you get at the soldiers' thoughts in the game, they try to humanize them. And in fact, I thought at first that BMS was deliberately trying to humanize them MORE than before. The original soldiers have heavily distorted voices that can be difficult to make out, and BMS makes them completely clear so you can't mistake them for anything but human. BMS added new dialogue depending on where you shoot them, so they scream in pain when you shoot them in the arm or leg.
BMS reworked the area where you overhear the soldiers talking about shooting scientists ("I shot twelve of them and they didn't even fight back") so you can't see the soldiers speaking, you can't get to them, and the soldier speaking sounds upset and his friend calms him down. If anything they made it MORE clear that the soldiers don't want to be shooting these people. And they kept the line near where you launch the rocket where one goes "Monsters, sure, but civilians? I didn't sign up for this", and the conversation where the soldiers talk about wanting revenge for all their dead friends. These are humanizing conversations that are meant to give you a little insight into these guys, despite the fact they're murdering all of your coworkers. And all of these were in the original game, and all of them were kept.
So not only does this new gang rape line seem gratuitous and inappropriate, it's almost counter-productive. And if you say adding the fact that the soldiers want to rape women is humanizing in some way I will stab you in the kidney.
Why does this line exist? To add realism? Because fighting an eight-foot alien with three arms that shoots BEES OUT OF ITS HANDS is fine, but a game with women where no one tries to rape them is just too fantastical?
"But Zar," you may be thinking, "women face sexual violence all the time in their real lives, it's realistic that adding women to a game would mean adding sexual violence." and you know what, it's true that women face sexual violence in real life all the time. You don't have to tell me that. What I don't understand is why people draw their line of suspension of disbelief at the thought of a world where women don't get raped, when they can't draw it at an enormous floating telepathic space fetus with a giant crystal in its flower head. How is that where things get too unrealistic for you?
Not only that, I reiterate again THIS LINE WAS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL GAME. And you know what? Half-Life did perfectly fine without it. And then Half-Life 2 added a whole bunch of new female characters, including practically a second female protagonist, and guess what, there was no sexual violence in that either. And it did perfectly fine. And so did all of its episodes. IN FACT, SO DID ALL THE HALF-LIFE SPINOFFS. Half-Life: Decay had TWO FEMALE PROTAGONISTS, AND IT DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL VIOLENCE AT ALL IN IT ANYWHERE. The closest you can get is the guards clumsily flirting with you sometimes but that's not nearly on the same level as implying there are soldier gang rapes going on all over Black Mesa.
I did not play Half-Life thinking "boy, this game is great, but I wish it was more realistic." And I certainly did not play Half-Life 2 and think "boy, I'm glad they added Alyx and Mossman, but I wish someone would threaten to rape them, then that would be realistic."
You know what happens when I play games where there's no sexual violence? I don't think about how it doesn't accurately reflect my reality as a woman, I think thank God I don't have to deal with it here. I'm relieved.
This is not a void that needs to be filled. And the thing is, if BMS wanted to make Half-Life more realistic, it already did a fine job of that just by improving the environments and making some things make more sense (no more floating platforms, machinery that stops and starts in ways that actual machinery does, the layout of the levels and the posters and warnings that look like things you'd see in real life). THEY HAD ALREADY DONE THAT. THEY ALREADY MADE THE GAME MORE REALISTIC. This line does not add anything of value.
What would happen if you cut this line? What would you lose by cutting this line? I remind you, this was added. Someone thought that what Half-life needed was gang rape, and they put that in their mod. This isn't an accident, this was a person who decided to add this. They made that choice. They got a voice actor to record this line. They decided this fictional world needed gang rape, even when all other installments of the series had nothing of the sort. Even when the other installments of the series accomplished great success without it.
There were a few moments in BMS when I was reminded that it was a fan-mod, the same way I'd be reminded while reading a fic that I'm just reading a fanfic. Little things that didn't feel right, dialogue that didn't sit well, and I could forgive most of it, they're doing their best, maybe that line isn't for me, it's a fan-mod, it's going to be a bit rough around the edges. I'd be jarred out of the experience a bit, but I'd settle back in quickly enough.
This line threw me out of the game completely, and the feeling I got was this game is not for you. We do not want you here. And I started wondering how many members of the development team were men, did they think about how women might react to this line? Did that cross their minds? All at once the game felt hostile to me in a way it didn't feel before. Not in a way that heightened the gaming experience, not in a way that heightened tension, not in a way that built emotional investment, but in a way where the game itself was making me feel unwelcome.
Was this supposed to make me angry at the army guys? I was already angry at them for murdering the scientists. Was it supposed to make me want to kill these army guys specifically? I was already angry at them for what the others had done. Was this supposed to make me think the army guys were evil? Every effect this line could possibly have on the player has already been done.
Except raising the specter of rape over every dead female scientist. And for what? For what purpose? What value does this add? How does this improve the gameplay? How does this make the game more fun? Valve once did an interview about how they play-tested every area in Half-Life and cut everything down to only the fun parts and it worked. Half-Life got like a million awards and is considered one of the greatest games ever.
And what is this? What does adding gang rape to Half-Life accomplish? What is this supposed to do?
It's just... gratuitous. Childish, even. Thoughtless. And like I said before, disappointing. I was really enjoying BMS a lot up to this point, and now this line is going to be hanging over my head, making me wary of every new change. Reminding me every time I see a dead female scientist. I was so happy to see them at first and this is what I end up getting.
And this is supposed to be like the definitive remake of the original game, I've seen people recommend BMS over the original. This is more than just a tasteless fanfic or creepy bit of fanart, the scale of this is much bigger and it's much harder for me to ignore.
And so on and so forth. I anticipate being told I'm being too sensitive over this light-hearted gang rape gag so BRING IT, I KNOW IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!