"Deep" clearly means emotional depth here: Attachment to characters, thought-provoking, response creating, emotional engagement. Deus Ex is not deep, it's a complicated playing experience.
Halo and COD do not give the same emotional depth. There is no attachment to any of the characters, no thoughts about your actions, no worries about what's happening. That's largely because there are no meaningful characters in those games - you're a soldier in a war zone with enemies and allied soldiers, that's all. There's no civilians in these war zones, no development between team mates, just the occasional joke or pleasantry. There's no emotional connection to anyone in the playing world at all - no pictures on walls, no children's rooms, no dead family members, no sign of any life at all. You can't worry for the people here as it feels like once the fight moves on, they'll all just come out of hiding and move back into their houses like nothing happened. The characters may as well be targets who can shoot back, and your allies could be moving turrets, and the game would be the same. Yes soldiers are brave, but when they're special forces (or in the case of Halo, rendered super human), this is their job every single day. It isn't bravery and purpose thrust upon them, it's a job they've chosen (or were born into), and as such it carries less importance. I will give COD a basic point for the nuke scene, since it does make you pause for a second, but the rest of the game is the same bland shooter paint by numbers material.
Whenever I play Half Life 2 on the other hand, I often find myself questioning what I'm doing. I'm the symbol of the resistance, fighting to reclaim the Earth - and my presence means a death sentence for every rebel in sight. Fleeing through the canals, you pass small rebel groups, fighting to hold out, and they're immediately destroyed either fighting beside you, or by the full force of the combine coming behind you. Fighting in the cities, you have every rebel in sight throwing their arms up to stand beside you - and they're usually killed within minutes. There's even that couple throughout each of the games that shows just how tired, strained and emotionally screwed everyone is by the ordeal. Your character is not a soldier, but a scientist thrown into the situation. Your allies are either poorly civilians who have to fight for their lives and freedom, or friends from your past who put far too much emotional weight onto someone they haven't seen in 10 (or is it 20?) years. Worst of all - Alyx is in love with someone who's never even spoken a word to her. Breen raises an interesting point at the end of HL2, saying "You have destroyed so much, what is it exactly that you have created?" It made me pause and think, and I realised that I have managed to completely upset the balance of life on this world, to ruin any chance of humanity simply continuing to exist until their time is up. You've sped up their destruction for the small chance of freedom. It may pay off, or it may be their end, and it's questionable whether you're the right person to be making that decision for them.
Half Life 2's world is an ongoing holocaust, it's time spent in a ghetto watching their world be destroyed. Anyone who has an understanding of history, or about the horrors of war, should at least be pausing for a minute to consider things while they play. It's still a game, and there's a lot of pure shooting, running, puzzle-solving, average writing game-ness in between, but the game world itself is quite deep, and none of the above stop that emotional connection.
I will have to agree though that Half Life is hardly the most emotionally deep game out there. Heavy Rain is a perfect example of a game that makes the emotional attachment the entire purpose, living those events and their decisions afterwards. Consider any truly good game (we're talking classics here, not the latest FPS you enjoyed) and you'll find an emotional attachment. It's a staple of true art - it makes you think and feel. As a side-note, I'd love to see some other examples of good games that manage this, they usually form a pretty decent "must play" list.
Portal gets points for building a connection to an enemy, building a character out of an empty shell that doesn't speak, and taking a lot of emotion from very little material (empty test chambers, some scribbles on the wall, a heart on a box and a few phrases from a robotic voice is all they use). I wouldn't say it's more emotionally engaging though.
dogstile said:
That's not deep, that's convenient events within the game world to get around real life issues. No children? In game reason? Suppression field. Real life reason? Showing kids getting killed is a hot button issue.
Writing within the constrains of the medium does not rule something out as good writing, or emotionally engaging. Some of the best writing, particularly in movies, has done just that - work with limitations to create a great story.
Side-note: For the Halo fanboys who jumped out simply to take down their sworn enemy Half Life 2, it's time for a reality check. The only thing Halo gave to the world of gaming was multiplayer shooting. It helped popularise and fine-tune some factors of console multiplayer games. That's all. Its single player campaign is not good, never has been, and will not stack up to anything but the most average FPS.
