Half Life: How to Tell a Story without Exposition
"Jesus wept!" — Dean Craig Pelton
IN 1998 I was the proud owner of a Pentium II personal computer with 128 megabytes of RAM and a 56k modem. It’s difficult to explain to modern folk how much of an upgrade this was for me, considering the computer I’d owned before this had a small rodent inside spinning a wheel1. The improvement was significant.
At the same time, I was entering that awkward moment in a young man’s life when he finds himself with a lot of time on his hands. A lot of time. And as I learned from painful experience, you can’t drink alcohol all the time, or terrible things happen to you. So you wind up with some time on your hands no matter what you do2.
My friend bought me a copy of Half Life, which had just come out and which just barely ran on my new rig. If you’re not familiar with Half Life, it’s a first-person shooter video game in which you play as a scientist named Gordon Freeman who works at a sketchy secret government lab where an experiment goes awry, opening up a rift into an alien dimension. Then things get weird and extremely violent.
If you don’t know what a first-person shooter is, I question your life decisions. Also, your reading comprehension, because it’s pretty much right there in the name.
I’d played first-person shooters before, but I’ve never been what you’d call a ‛gamer.3’ I was and remain as casual as they come4. But Half Life was an incredible experience, both from a gameplay perspective and a storytelling perspective. It was immersive in a way other video games—even ones with first-person engines—hadn’t been, for three basic reasons. One, it actually told a story. Most first-person shooter games prior to Half Life had concentrated mostly on the shooting, offering thin, meaningless storylines and often nonsensical graphical environments5, but Half Life had a real, actual narrative6.
Two, the game designers made the critical decision that the character you played would be completely silent and never actually seen by the player. This made it incredibly easy to just focus on the environment and the story as it unfolded around you.
And three, and most importantly, the game is a masterclass on telling a story and building a fictional world without exposition—or the video game form of it, the cut-scene.
You’ll Watch This and You’ll Like It
A cut-scene in a video game is when you lose control over what’s happening and you’re forced to passively watch an animated scene, often with dialog and point-of-view shifts like you’re watching some demented TV show7. They often get used for exposition because they remove any chance you, the player, can screw things up by messing with the game mechanics or otherwise sabotaging the sequence.
They’re also deadly boring. There’s a place in hell for programmers who create unskippable cut-scenes in video games, and that level is deep in hell, like underneath the pedophiles and the kitten-murderers deep. Cut-scenes have every sin associated with exposition: They’re often boring and poorly written info-dumps, they snap you out of your suspension of disbelief, and they absolutely destroy the rhythm of the story. In a written work of fiction you can skim sentences until you get past the info dump, at least. In a video game you’re often locked in.
But the creators of Half Life had nearly zero cut-scenes, and even in the few that exist you retain some measure of control over the action, which at least allows you to feel like you’re engaged. And most of the sequences that would qualify as cut-scenes in the game are actually exposition-free: No one talks at you for three minutes, dumping everything you need to know. Instead, the game uses scripted events to tell the story. Things happen and it’s up to you to pay attention, gather details, and figure out the why.
Things Left Unsaid
That restraint extended throughout the game, and its many expansions and sequels. What remains kind of amazing about the Half Life games is that they embraced that fundamental rule every writer hears: ‛Show, don’t tell.’ Not only did they embrace it, they offer a kind of master class in it. If you’ve ever wondered how in hell you tell a complex, intricate story without resorting to info dumps and exposition, play Half Life8.
The game can be fast-paced and you’re always on the move, but the secret is the details and the unobtrusive way they’re littered about. Newspaper clippings, photos, overhead conversations, graffiti on the walls—it’s possible to piece together to complete story of what happens without having a single character freeze time so they can make a lengthy speech that begins with “As you know ...” and concludes with “And that’s all we know so far.9”
The other key component here is how the game allows the player to linger and explore. There are several locations in the game where you can just sort of wander about getting into minor mischief and avoiding the exit, where you’ll trigger the next event and transition to the next exciting battle or puzzle. These moments let the story breathe, because you can mine them for information in a natural believable way.
And part of what makes this technique so effective is how it’s also how you learn your own story. Half Life manages to convey the impression that the universe moves even when you’re not paying attention, because the character you’re playing grows in reputation and legend as the story plays out. After all, you’re single-handedly defeating hordes of alien invaders and ruthless Black Ops soldiers sent to clean up the mess, all while manipulating your environment in surprising and inventive ways (in one chapter, for example, you have to dodge and outrun an enormous leviathan spewing energy at you while racing around trying to get a power plant back online; in another, you have to fire a huge rocket engine in order to destroy a ... thing that keeps trying to murderize you with its huge razor-sharp talons). Of course you slowly become a legend. But it’s fascinating to discover the legend growing up around you not by being told about it, or watching a hackneyed news report or some other device that’s really just exposition-in-disguise, but by observation10.
The Moron Line
There’s a risk in avoiding exposition, of course. I’ve written before about what I call “the moron line,” which is a bit of exposition that gets repeated solely to ensure that the dimwitted or the distracted—your proverbial Moron in a Hurry—catch some detail11. The thing is, morons will read your story. Morons will watch your movie and they will play your video game. And those morons will miss all those rich details you scatter about, hinting at a larger world and a richer mythology. And so the temptation will always exist to create Moron Lines in order to ensure that even the dimmest person will get the whole story, or at least as much of it as they can retain in their tiny, over-stressed brains12.
Including Moron Line safety bumpers in your story may avoid the immediate problem of people acting like a video game storyline is far too complex and convoluted for them, but it downgrades the overall experience, meaning your story will have less of a chance to survive the test of time. Half Life came out in 1998. That’s 23 years ago. And people are still talking about it. When the main writer of the game’s story, Marc Laidlaw, despaired of ever getting to work on the final chapter of the game (if you want to know what video game nerd frustration looks like, Google “Half Life 3”) he posted a summary of where he would have taken the story—and it made Internet headlines. One reason people still cared? The lack of Moron Lines.
Of course we’re not going to talk about the fact that it took me 23 years to finish this game because I have the hand-eye coordination of a skunk.
Next week: Puzzling your way to a better story.
I purchased that computer, my first, from my roommate, so it was already fairly outdated when I got it. We used to play Wolfenstein 3D on it. If I recall correctly the monitor was about the size of a postage stamp. I think you needed to put on some of those magnifying goggles from the film Brazil to see anything.
This was back in the age of AOL and dial-up, so the online porn wasn’t up to our current standards either. So again: A lot of time on my hands.
I now only play games that offer God Mode, because ain’t nobody got time for that.
My friends and I used to set up LAN parties to play multiplayer Unreal and I quickly became notorious for camping. I would find a nice dark hole to hide in, then wait for someone to walk past me, and blow their heads off. I was … not popular.
For example, Quake, which was set in a … medieval … hellscape of some sort with … laser weapons?
It also had Non-Player Characters (NPCs) who had a modicum of personality, which made it doubly hilarious when they were later eaten by aliens.
Saying that the Uncanny Valley is strong in these cut scenes, even today, is an immense understatement. If you want to drive someone insane, tie them down and force them to watch a few hours of video cut scenes. That’ll do it.
Just whatever you do, don’t play it alone in the dark.
If I could freeze time, believe me there’d be a lot more bank robbing and revenge schemes than “As You Know” speeches.
Have I pitched the idea of dressing up for Halloween as Exposition, which involves dressing as I normally do but spending every minute explaining what’s happening to people? No comment.
Trust me, I know of which I speak, because I am that Moron. And I am in an incredible hurry.
Cool article. I like your explanation of Moron Lines. It is shocking how many people consider skimming a story to actual reading.