Science Is Fun! Half-Life, Portal, and Science

All hail the Enlightenment — Thomas Freeman has an interesting look at science and attitudes towards science in Half-Life and Portal. What do such attitudes spell for future releases?

For the last few years, the buzzword for game engine design has been physics, but most games didn't use it for anything more than the most basic eye-candy. HL2 showed that the model itself could actually be fun and interesting as part of the gameplay. I like to imagine doing the same thing for other fields - chemistry, for example, which has never been one of my strong subjects but would almost certainly make for amazing puzzles a la MacGyver. To some degree, this progression is already taking place; what's Spore but an expansive biology toy?

A fun and thought provoking read, even for those of us who run screaming from labs of any kind. Give me musty library stacks any day.

Anomalous Materials [The Escapist]

Half-Life To Have Plenty Of Life After Episode 3

In a recent interview with StuffWeLike, Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed that the wide world of Half-Life won't end after Half-Life 2: Episode 3. There's more on the way: plenty more.

Question: Are there any current plans after Episode 3 to have a Half Life 3?

Answer: We haven't announced anything specific, but Half-Life won't end at Episode Three - hang on to your crowbars!

Half Life 3 [via videogamesblogger]

There's not an auteur, not the fiction that movie people tell themselves about the movie occurring in the director's head, and it being your job as someone who's witnessing that on the screen to connect with that vision. That's a terrible way to think about videogames, because they're a collaboration. You've got this lead actor and they don't have a copy of the script, but if they're not having a great time then it doesn't matter what you thought you were doing. All that matters is your ability to engage with him. You have to focus on collaboration, you have to focus on this sharing of authoring the performance with gamers.

Kill The Silent Protagonist?

Over at Midway studio Surreal's 'Surreal Game Design' developer weblog, Rick Luebbers, has found a blight infecting games, and he's not afraid to shout about it. What is it?

This evil, this disease, is the idea of a Silent Protagonist. Its symptoms are easy to diagnose: the protagonist never speaks and as seemingly important events fly by he/she says nothing... further, all the NPCs go to great lengths to talk around the player and advance the story almost in spite of him... It appears as a terrible, horrific, mark upon otherwise good or even great games. Half-Life 2 and Dragon Quest 8 are perfect high profile examples in people's recent memories.

Kill The Silent Protagonist [Surreal Game Design]

Ten Years Ago: Half-Life Writer Marc Laidlaw

Grubbing around for some original content to post on Kotaku this week, I came across some interviews I wrote for the now-defunct Videogamedesign.com - which, odd fact fans, was acquired by previous Kotaku guest blogger Geoff Keighley, and then seems to have blinked out of existence.

Luckily, I still have copies of the 1997-1998 chats with interesting game developers archived somewhere obscure, and I thought it might be fun to reprint highlights here on Kotaku, and compare and contrast them to what's happened to their careers since then - and how their statements have held up over time.

We'll start out with sci-fi author and Half-Life series guru Marc Laidlaw, whom I chatted to in late 1997, significantly before the game's November 1998 debut, and a few months after the writer got hired at Valve.

The Portal Cake Is Real...and Tasty!

Who said the cake was a lie? This user-created movie over on GameTrailers shows a real-life version of the Portal cake and it sure looks yummy. But is it tastier than the Companion Cube cake? It doesn't matter. Just watch the clip so you can hear Jonathan Coulton's great song from Portal yet again.

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