Gordon Freeman: Strongest personality in gaming
How Valve created the most complex and best-realised character in videogames without a line of dialogue.
In their early days, videogames were a crude and unsubtle medium, Technological restraints reducing character motivations to blunt and simplistic variations of “Save the princess” or “Kill the villain and save the world” when sending us bleeping away to shoot up the monotone bricks of evil. As technology has developed, designers have been eager to make games a more sophisticated experience, and many have understandably, but perhaps misguidedly, attempted to ape the conventions of cinema to make their videogames more realistic or involving. Thus, cut-scenes and protagonist dialogue have become the standard model with which to tell a story.
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