Those were the last words I uttered to Half-Life 2.
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I am almost never affected by horror films. I don't know if it's an inability to suspend disbelief or a general desensitization to media violence, but I've always found the genre to be more comedic than frightening. Of the dozens of horror flicks I have seen, only one has really gotten under my skin. I react more to the disturbing nature of something than the types of fear shilled by the typical Halloween movie season.
Games are different. Games scare the shit out of me.
I'm not just talking about horror games. Any game made to instill any type of fear gets to me without lifting a finger. Sewer level in Dark Forces? Freaked out. Even the creepers in Minecraft turn me into a panicky mess. I am a complete wuss when it comes to games, and it has come at what many would call a terrible price.
When a game scares me, I do the most logical, sane thing I can think of: I quit. With horror movies, I find myself rolling my eyes at the characters and their blatantly stupid actions. It takes a tremendous willpower to keep from yelling at the screen. Why are you doing that? What are you expecting? How can you all be so stupid? It would do no good, even if I did shout at the top of my lungs. The character on screen's getting a chainsaw to the face, preordained long before I became an observer. That is how games are different for me. I am not the observer, I am the participant. When I yell, "Don't open that door," at my TV, I'm not yelling at the character.
I'm yelling at myself.
And I take my own advice. I don't open the door. I don't round that corner. I take the route of safety, which in the world of games does not exist. The game does not progress if I stop doing what it wants me to. No door, no more game. The only true choice, the only true freedom given to a me is whether or not to play. So I stop.
The worst offender of this is one of my greatest shames as a games enthusiast. My own fear has kept me from playing Half-Life 2, considered by many to be the pinnacle of PC gaming. Once I hit the point where I know something is waiting for me, I pop Gordon Freeman in reverse. Which you can't do. Freeman, like most every other game protagonist, is a shark. If he's not going forward, the game dies. I save, quit, and come back when I'm ready to deal with the threat waiting for me.
I'm never ready. That headcrab in that vent is bigger than me, bigger than my ego, and it crushes my will to continue even without a physical presence. The idea has defeated me. I eventually decide to start over, let momentum carry me past my fear. It doesn't work. It never works. I have restarted HL2 well over a dozen times and each playthrough finds me cowering to the known unknown.
It's time to put a stop to this.
At the request/suggestion of a few friends, I am going to chronicle my playthrough of Half-Life 2 as a way to push past these moments that have kept me from enjoying what is universally accepted to be a damn-good game. I'll journal everything, both what I'm playing and how it affects me. I have no idea how long it will take, but I will finish. I hope to stream my playthrough as a fun opportunity for the internet to watch a grown man lose his shit (because I'm sure there's a lack of that out there). Details will come when they are available, so check back.
Mark Twain once said, "courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."
I have none of these. This is gonna suck...
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