The idea of an article about the science behind some aspects of the Half-Life games popped into my head when I was listening to a physics podcast. It was talking about Zero-Point Energy and of course I immediately recognized the term.
I performed a quick search to see if somebody else had already written something and was initially disappointed to find somebody had. However, after scanning it and seeing the author say that the “Zero Point Energy” was just “a pointless quasi-scientific name that has no serious grounding in genuine physics”, I decided I would write my own.
I am no scientist or even have any formal qualifications in physics, but I am interested in the field and have read a fair bit (most of it forgotten though!), so please feel free to correct me if I am wrong. However, remember, I am trying to cover the “idea” behind the science not teach the detailed science to readers.
I’ll be linking to the CombineOverWiki as well as Wikipedia for readers to explore the topics in more detail if they wish.
Over a series of short articles, I will be discussing different aspects of the games and the science in them and today it’s the game names.
So, put your lab coat on & adjust your safety goggles and let’s get to work…
I can’t remember how many times I have seen the following question asked: “Why is Half-Life called Half-life?”. Too often the answer simply give the definition of the term Half-Life and doesn’t discuss the WHY. I’ll try to do that with all the game names.
Half-Life
Actually, let’s come back to this one.
Opposing Force
This is the first game with a clear double meaning. Opposing Force describes the fact that you are the military force opposing or fighting against Gordon & the scientists but also is a reference to Newton’s third law of motion, which states that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. So, we have the reason for the game: Opposing Gordon AND a scientific name that relates to that meaning. Pretty clever really.
This is my favourite name of all the games. the scientific name and its meaning IN the game are essentially the same. You have this EQUAL and OPPOSITE concepts. Adrian is just as bad-ass as Gordon. Whilst he never fights him, he is trying to do the same as him (EQUAL) but then finds that somebody opposes him (OPPOSITE). I love the double, double meaning.
Blue Shift
This follows the same ideas as Opposing Force. Blue Shift is the name of the work shift that Barney is working. A work shift is the period of time a person works. For locations that work 24 hours a day, the shifts are normally split into three. For example, 6am until 2pm, 2pm until 10pm and 10pm until 6am. These are normally described as Morning, Afternoon and Night shifts, but many places name them. In this case, each shift might have a different colour.
The scientific meaning is related to the Doppler Effect, which describes the change in the frequency of a wave (or other periodic event) for an observer moving relative to its source. This means that if you are on a road and a police car is coming towards you, the frequency of the sound is a little higher than if it were stationary next to you and when it passes, the frequency is a little lower as the sound waves get spaced out. There are two types: Red Shift, when the source is moving away from the observer and Blue Shift when the source is moving towards the observer.
What we now have to ask, is why was BLUE chosen and not RED. Is there a meaning behind that or was it just a random chose. I don’t think ANYTHING Valve do is random, so what theories do you have for Valve choosing BLUE?
Let’s go back to…
Half-Life
From the scientific point of view, Half-life (notice the lower-case L) is the scientific description of exponential or gradual decay, meaning the amount of time required for a quantity to fall to half its value as measured at the beginning of the time period. It is often used with radioactivity (more on that later) but there are also Effective Half-life and Biological Half-life. For the purposes of this discussion, we don’t need to worry about them.
The scientific symbol for Half-life is this: λ. It’s called Lambda and if you take a look at that Wikipedia page, you will see that it has a lot of different uses, both in upper-case and lower-case. We are interested in the lower-case version, because that the one we see in our Half-Life, although it’s actually a stylized version of the letter. This is the upper-case if you are interested: Λ.
Obviously the Lambda symbol is also the logo of the game and is see all over Black Mesa. So we are at that point where we have to talk about WHY. Why is the game called Half-Life?
Well, a search of the internet brings up some crazy theories: It looks like an arm holding a crowbar, half of Gordon’s life was scientist and the other half is as a bad-ass. But the simple answer (and I think Valve has confirmed this) is that they needed a sciencey name that was connected to some elements in the story.
The Lambda Complex is one of the seven main sections of Black Mesa. There are crystals that glow, which probably mean they are radioactive. There is radioactive waste and materials ALL OVER Black Mesa. It all points to selecting a name that relates to the content.
Alas, there really doesn’t seem to be a double meaning to this game. Do you have any well-thought out theories?
And finally…
Decay
So that just leaves us Half-Life: Decay, an add-on included in the PlayStation 2 port of the first-person shooter game Half-Life, developed by Gearbox Software and published in 2001. The word decay is very closely related to the scientific meaning of Half-life: the rate at which something decays.
I looked for a double meaning, especially because Decay is a co-op game but I couldn’t find any. Personally, I would have called this Entanglement, which means that pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently. The idea here is that each person in the game HAS to have the other to progress.
Do you have any theories for a double meaning for Decay?
That’s it for now
Well, there you have the first article. I hope you both learnt something and enjoyed it (see what I did there with the double meaning?!)
The next article is about Weapons and will appear in about a couple of weeks.
yeh,i remember the first time i saw “half life” and my first thought was “isnt that something to do with how long a chemical can be used ?” …. however the official meaning is ” the amount of time required for a quantity to fall to half its value as measured at the beginning of the time period”
that said the name “half life” is more associated with the game than its official meaning … even a guy i know who,s around 60 knew half life was a game rather than a chemical meaning !
As someone who is quite interested in physics and mathematics myself I very much enjoyed this article! I’m looking forward to the next one.
As for why the choose “Blue” Shift, I guess it is just because the uniforms of the guards are blue and that it makes a nice contrast with the green of OF and orange of HL. Maybe we shouldn’t read to much into that 😉
well, I think the uniforms are blue because of the name, not the other way around. They could just as easily been red.
Actually, I have just emailed Randy Pitchford at Gearbox Software, let’s see if he is able to respond.
I’m not sure on this but I think Blue Shift came out after HL, didn’t it? So I don’t think they would have changed the model texture for the guard NPC after the fact, would be a bit weird I think.
But I’m interested to see if he responds to you.
Indeed Blue Shift came out after HL and OF so I would guess the same. As a chemist who daily uses mass spectrometers, I noticed that the instrument causing the cascade in HL itself is called an “anti mass spectrometer” which does not make any sense but sounds cool!
Okay, Randy has indeed replied and said there was no deeper between red and blue, except having the double meaning.
Half-Life is one of those titles that becomes weirder the longer you think about it. It looks weird. It sounds weird. And at first glance, it doesn’t really explain anything about the game, other than perhaps suggesting a scientific theme.
But, in the context of the game, I think it’s probably meant to refer to the constantly deteriorating circumstances that Freeman finds himself in. Furthermore, almost all the supporting characters have a lot of hubris at the start of the game which decays as the events of the Black Mesa disaster unfold. Hubris turning to desperation is a running theme. Soldiers kill the scientists. Aliens kill the soldiers. Until eventually this laboratory, once the envy of the scientific community, is nothing more than a burned-out ruin.
By the way, for my money, “Fallout” is probably my favorite game title for having multiple meanings. Nuclear, political, cultural and deployment. In fact, if that title wasn’t already used, you probably could have called Half-Life that. 🙂
Whether or not it’s “well-thought out” is a matter of debate, of course, but I’m of the view that the title “Half-Life” also refers to the nature of Gordon Freeman. As a silent protagonist, he’s got a name and face, but that’s about it. He himself is only half alive, with players’ free will making up the other half.
I’d also imagine it’s not too far fetched to say that Gordon being the only player character in the game is the reason his last name is Freeman; he’s the only one in the world with any agency. That idea, in concert with the Wise Vortigaunt’s musings, have led me to my favorite tinfoil hat theory that the Vorts know they’re in a computer game, and the GMan’s “employers” are in fact Valve Software. Plucking Freeman out of one scenario and keeping him in stasis until the next one, the “interesting offers” he’s received for the use of the character are in fact pitches for future Valve games. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that the end of the Black Mesa/Combine/Barney/Alyx arc isn’t actually the end of Gordon Freeman as a vessel for players.
I don’t think that theory about the G-Man is far fetched at all. I consider Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, to be a key inspiration for the G-Man. Both have an unsettling cadence in their voice, both are well-dressed men in business suits, and both bookend episodes where weird things happen that they don’t acknowledge as being odd, as if they are above it all.
Valve will never come right out and explain the G-Man. I wouldn’t want them too either – that would be narrative suicide. So, he might as well be their avatar.
Well I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree, because the one thing I want most from Half-Life 3 is to find out who the hell the guy is. 😛 I know The Rules of Storytelling say it’s better to keep things mysterious, but the HL series has dragged on for so long now that my tastes have changed, and “he’s whoever you want him to be” would just be too predictable to be satisfying. I’m done trying to convince myself I have an appreciation for gourmet cuisine when all I want is a damn cheeseburger from McDonald’s.
Similar frustrations are expressed on the HL Reddit all the time. I maintain that Valve really has no interest in answering any of the questions they posed.
One thread asked whether or not the anticipation of HL3 would have been as strong if we didn’t have the two Episodes, and instead ended where HL2 did. I hypothesized that the reason why people feel like they were left hanging is because the Episodes were intended to answer some of the remaining questions after HL2’s “arbitrary imposition” of an ending. But what questions did the Episodes answer? I can’t think of a single one. All they did was kick the answers even further down the road. And worse, they posed even more questions.
At some point, you get the impression that they don’t want to explain anything, and then you just accept that. Again, it’s my belief that HL’s story isn’t remarkable for what it is, but rather for how it was conveyed and the fact that it popularized these techniques. There are other games that have far more interesting stories to tell, in my opinion, so I’m not too hung up on waiting for Valve to finish their narrative.
Okay, this thread is a little bit old already, but as Phillip linked to it in the other one, I read it again and maybe others will too. My theory about Gman and the HL background is that at least in HL1 is was a bit like the Babylon 5 backstory. Two powerful fractions fighting each other and using the humans and Xen aliens as pawns. On one side the unknown power that enslaved Nihilanth and the other Xen aliens with implants and used Nihilanth to open portals to attack earth. On the other hand Gman’s side who uses the humans and more technical means to fight back. A little bit like Vorlons against Shadows! Sadly HL2 forgot all about the bigger picture and only concentrated about the fate of Earth itself…
There’s a great article on LambdaGeneration by ThePerson5 about the science of ‘lambda’ http://lambdageneration.com/discussion/half-life/many-meanings-of-lambda/