Touching a virtual world
On Half Life: Alyx and virtual embodiment.
I’d like to start with a confession: I’m a VR guy now1.
What I mean is that I recently finished Half Life: Alyx, and I think I finally get why people are so excited by virtual reality. Not that I think VR is going to be the next big thing, or whatever.
The first time I put on a headset was way back in 2015 or 2016; I’d fled a breakup and freelance writing in NYC to spend a bit of time in LA doing “consulting”2 and trying to heal. The firm had formerly been a video game magazine that I’d interned at while I was in college. And it was nice in theory to work on something that was different than pitching blog posts to the various editors around New York who still had healthy freelance budgets. (It was also nice that my old boss had offered me a gig right when I needed it.)
It was good, for a time, to work in Video Games. The weather was beautifully the same every single day. I get why a lot of people feel like time passes differently in Los Angeles.
In the office, which was right across the street from the big blue Scientology building, I spent most of my time working on projects for a couple large tech companies that wanted to do something interesting with VR. I don’t remember exactly what they were trying to do, and I’m not sure if anything ever came of our efforts. Work got done. That was all.
We had a VR area in the main bit of the office, the part that looked and functioned like a living room. I think I mentioned to my boss that I’d never done VR before, and he immediately told me to strap on our headset and try SUPERHOT. It’s a first person shooter puzzle game; your goal is to defeat every enemy in the room, but the trick is that time only moves when you move. If you move slowly, so do your enemies. Etc. It’s genius; you become a person who can perceive and operate in bullet time. And in virtual reality, it was a revelation: I felt fully embodied in a virtual world. The gray, low-poly environments thrummed with possibility.
I played a few other games, but none left quite an impression on me3. On one hand, I felt like I had seen the future: the experience virtual embodiment was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. On the other hand, everything about getting to that embodiment was cumbersome. It was easy to trip over the headset wire, the play area was defined by very fragile hardware, and getting everything to work correctly felt like trying to cast a spell without the right incantation or components. And yet I found myself spending hours in that gray world just trying things out.
I returned to New York after a month or so, not even a little over that particular breakup but having broken about even financially. I went back to playing pancake4 video games.
I didn’t get back to VR in earnest until a couple years ago, when my friend Cooper and I started playing through Half Life: Alyx. The pandemic wasn’t quite so new, and we had our boosters. Cooper had acquired a VR headset from work, and I had finally decided to get a gaming PC, so I downloaded the game and we took turns playing through it.
In Alyx, you play as Half Life’s Alyx Vance, daughter of genius scientist Eli Vance, 5 years before the events of Half Life 2. In short: an alien empire has conquered Earth, and oversees an extremely repressive police state. As Alyx, your initial goal is to rescue your father, who's a member of the resistance movement; once you find him, he tells you that the empire — The Combine — has a secret superweapon tucked away in a vault above the brutalized city, City 17. Your job is to get it and use it against the Combine.
You battle alien zombies, state police forces, something called an "antlion," and more, across the buildings and secret passages of City 17. There are climactic battles and touching reunions. It is a video game-ass video game.
But something about playing it in virtual reality makes it feel totally sincere. There’s a section of the game, for example, where you have to sneak through a vodka factory while being chased by a blind, terrifying alien named Jeff; you grab bottles off of stocked shelves and chuck them into corners to throw him off your metaphorical scent.
But if you happen to have a free moment, perhaps while he isn’t actively searching for you, you can pick them up and admire the Cyrillic labels. Shake them up and they behave exactly as vodka does IRL. And it’s a wonder: everything in the game is like this. Things work as they should. If you venture into an apartment, you can rifle through people’s drawers; you can use the dry-erase markers you see to write on the windows. You can tune radios. You can throw televisions. All of this is of course extraneous the the gameplay and the plot, but it makes the world feel real5.
Now that I’ve rolled credits, I can say that not only is it one of the best games I’ve ever played — it’s the best VR game I’ve ever encountered. I think it’s a master class in how to design for a system where the main character is literally you; you, the human, with all your various human capabilities. You in the living room that looks like a living room.
When you have to shoot a headcrab6 — alien thing that tries to jump on your head to presumably suck your brain out and turn you into a zombie — and run out of bullets, you have to actually take cover and go through physical motions to reload your virtual gun. There are no quest markers. You’re set free to roam around the world of Half Life. You, the human.
And that feels revelatory, almost like you’ve put on a mech suit. There is a tactility to the world that feels genuinely astonishing. And it makes the game terrifying. Alyx is more survival horror than it is traditional shooter, like the other games in the series.
Part of that is the scale, which is hard to convey in a video; a car onscreen is the size of a car in real life. You can open the trunk and see what’s inside. This also means that the Combine overwatch soldiers — Alyx’s human enemies — are as tall as you are. The guns fit your hand.
I don’t want to call this realism, because it’s obviously not real, but it is a genuinely different experience because a layer of abstraction is removed. Instead of pressing a button to reload your pistol on a controller, you use something that feels like a grip with triggers to release the empty magazine, grab a fresh mag from your backpack, slam it into the receiver, and then release the safety before firing again.
“It’s not just that you have to do it, it’s that your mind processes it as happening to you,” Cooper texted me the other day. “I remember us finishing up a firefight mid-game and having to go to a bar down the street until the adrenaline wore off.” Despite being superficially similar to, say, SUPERHOT, Alyx’s fidelity to the physical world made it a much more visceral experience.
I think part of the genius of video games is how they put you, the player, into these fictions. They embody you, and then give you tools and agency — or at least a simulacrum of agency, as making players feel in control is a big part of the discipline of game design — and then they let you loose into a world that you can actually impact. I suspect that this is partially why games seem more popular and mainstream than ever, these days: they give people a feeling of control that’s very often lacking IRL. You might not be able to get your elected representatives to listen to you about the climate crisis, for example, but in video games you are empowered to do something about the problems in front of you.
Alyx makes that feeling tactile. You can touch the virtual world. And because the team that made it designed around that feeling, everything feels like it just works the way it should — the way it does over here.
You are embodied; you have agency. You, the human, are aiming and firing and taking cover. You’re over there, and yet you’re still you.
With love,
Bijan
I mean, kinda.
I am still not totally sure what consulting is. Do not enlighten me.
Other than Sansar, which isn’t really a game — it’s more like the virtual reality version of Second Life. If you’re interested, here’s a podcast I did with my friend Ryan about Second Life and the metaverse.
Yup. That’s what some VR gamers call any game that isn’t in VR.
Me and Cooper spent a lot of time throwing beer bottles at things and watching them splash open. You know how it is.
You have to shoot them to kill them, BUT I’m pretty sure you can also kinda just bat them away with your hands when they jump at you. They’re kinda cute, tbh.