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Seeing VS. Being

The moviegoer files into the crowded theater, popcorn and carbonated beverage in hand. The goer finds a seat, puts the beverage into the cup holder sits back and prepares to let the images of the film wash over from the screen and speakers into the eyes, ears and mind. The goer is not alone in this. On any given Friday night, the cinema is full of patrons all wanting an escape from the daily toil of life. During the film, while there are some crowds of moviegoers who may yell and talk to the screen, they are generally frowned upon. Instead, the preferred method of viewing is to give silent, physically passive, rapt attention to the screen and the images displayed upon it. In its form the preferred demeanor and actions of the crowd are not unlike that of the congregation in a church service. When the bad guy jumps out, the crowd is supposed to gasp. When the good guy wins the crowd is supposed to cheer. The patrons in a movie, just as those in a church, have been taught by our culture how to react. However, whether or not the crowd cheers does not affect the film. The film goes on and does not notice the attention or lack thereof on the part of the watcher(s). Whether or not anyone watches the film does not effect the content of the film.

The single player First-Person Shooter (FPS)¹ player goes to the computer alone, starts the program and begins to play. During the game, the player is interacting with the game in a direct cause and effect way. If the player moves the mouse left, the images on the screen move to the right, simulating the turning of the body to the left. For successful completion of the game, attention is not only expected, as it is in cinema, but required because if the player's attention is turned away from the game for a moment, when attention returns to the game, the player will in all likelihood find that they have been killed. Sherry Turkle points out that computer games are like race cars in that the person in control "does not dare take his attention off the road" or, in the case of the player of a FPS, the screen (83). If you do not shoot when the bad guy jumps out, you will get shot at, game over.

While the player is not alone in playing FPS's, in this instance the player is playing by themselves and not with or against anyone else. While someone may watch the person play, this is rare, as watching is not the same as playing. This is the essential difference. While movies have watchers, First-Person Shooters (and games of all types) have players. Clearly, what goes on when watching a movie is different from what goes on when playing a FPS. Much has been written about the ways in which film goers identify with the characters of a film, however, the ways in which game players identify with the characters in an FPS are substantially different. Before detailing the ways in which identification in a FPS different from that of film, it is first necessary to detail what exactly a First-Person Shooter is.

The First-Person Shooter, made famous by games such as Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem, is arguably the most popular form of computer game on the market today and the type of videogame that is the most likely to be criticized for its lack of plot. In the FPS, the attempt is made to immerse the player into the game by showing the game from the point of view of the character. The player sees the game world through the character’s eyes (hence the term first person). In most FPS, the player sees an arm jutting up from the bottom of the screen that is most often carrying a some sort of gun, hence the use of the word shooter (see figure 1). The intent is to make the player feel as if they are in the game.

In comparing pinball to videogames, Turkle notes that while some players call the physical interaction with the mechanically based pinball machine a conversation, "players describe the experience of being with [a video game] as less like talking with a person and more like inhabiting someone else's mind. Conversation gives way to fusion. In pinball, you act on the ball. In Pac-Man you are the mouth" (70). In a FPS, this fusion is intensified by the fact that you are not simply the mouth, you are the main character in its entirety.

Gameplay in the FPS most often consists of running through a series of corridors shooting anything that moves and looking for a way out.² Critics are correct when they say that the plot of these games is shallow and secondary. The plot for Doom can be summarized as being about demons that have taken over and you are the last man who can stop them. The story for Quake and Duke Nukem both involve repelling alien invasions. In many of the games, the plot is only told through the manual that comes in the box.

The kinds of identification that occur when people play single player First-Person Shooters is similar to the kinds of identification that happen when people enter online chat rooms or online Role Playing Games (RPG's). However, the key difference is that in chat rooms or online RPG's people are dealing with other people. They are interacting with and taking part in a community. When a person plays a single player game, they are, as the term suggests, the only player. While there is a community of people who play these games and there are mulitplayer components, when people play single player games, they are doing so alone and they are dealing with only the computer and their own minds. It is a solitary environment. It is man against machine.

While this work is, in part, an effort to shed light on one of the ways in which a FPS is different from film, others have discussed the ways which film is different from live theatrical performances or television. In his discussion of these differences, Gerald Mast notes that "the insistence on projection has theoretical advantages" (287). He continues by saying that "The fact that film is projected alters its tense (it must necessarily have been photographed and processed in the past) whereas the tense of a live theatrical performance (dance, drama, opera) is the now" (emphasis his)(287). With this theoretical framework in mind, a natural question seems to be what tense is a FPS? The vast majority of modern FPS's do not use actors, or if they do, it is only for motion capture. The game has not been photographed, but programmed. However, all of the programming has already taken place by the time players begin their interactions with the game.³ Therefore, in this sense, it could be argued that First-Person Shooters take place in the past tense.

However, the game is not truly complete without a player. While it may certainly be argued that, in some real sense, a film is not complete without viewers, it seems that this is not true to the same degree in which it is true for games. A film can be shown in its entirety to an empty crowd and the actual content of the film will still go on and no one will notice (of course this can easily get into "if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it does it make a sound" types of arguments, but it does not seem that anything productive can be gained by engaging in this argument at this point).⁴ A FPS without a player, however, is not the same. Without players, nothing will happen. At the very most, a creature will kill the main character, thus ending the game. Without a player, the main character is nothing. Therefore, the tense of the playing of a FPS (and any game) is the now.

So does a game exist in both the now and the past? It is certainly possible to see it this way. However, it will be more fruitful if the programming of the game is not seen as equivalent to the filming of a motion picture. It is not an equivalent art form. The programming of a game should be seen as more akin to the actual writing and construction of a thing (be it a movie, a play or a game), or the preparations that must go on before the thing is performed, rather than the thing itself. In this way, game players are more akin to actors in the play or film rather than watchers of the play or film. Computer games are not pre-produced in the same way that other mass mediated forms of entertainment are. They are only wholly produced when they are played. The creators can create the back-story, and a situation as well as a setting, but it is up to the players to act out that scenario. If the player decides, for whatever reason, to end the scenario, then on some level it can be said to have ended. So that the tense of a FPS can be said to be present rather than past, indicates that these kinds of games are doing something distinct from cinema, and that the ways that people identify with what occurs within each may also be distinct.

To deal more directly with issues of identification, André Bazin states that what we experience at the end of a play "has a more uplifting nobler, one might say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film" (377). He states that there is a disenchantment which follows the film as it compares to a play and that in film goers "one could doubtless detect a process of depersonalization" (377). In the attempt to find a reason for this, he quotes Rosenkrantz who wrote:

The characters on the screen are quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real presence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imaginary world the will of the spectator has to intervene actively, that is to say to will to transform their physical reality into an abstraction. This abstraction being the result of a process of the intelligence that we can only ask of a person who is fully conscious. 377

Bazin clarifies this by saying that:

A member of a film audience tends to identify himself with the film's hero by a psychological process, the result of which is to turn the audience into a 'mass' and to render emotion uniform... Let us compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen, they satisfy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them he satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlookers as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an object of jealousy and envy ... the cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites him. 377

Despite his use of gendered terminology, it is clear that within Bazin's framework, there is a distinct difference in the identification that occurs between the filmgoer and the theater patron. While there do not seem to be any FPS's which feature dancing girls, there is one which has strippers. That game is Duke Nukem 3D (the third Duke Nukem game). While it is unfortunate that Bazin uses gendered pronouns, in the case of discussing Duke Nukem, it is appropriate since the creators of Duke seem to have posited a heterosexual male audience in the creation of their game. The "plot" of Duke Nukem 3d is: "Your job is to destroy the alien forces that have come to take earth's babes. Every now and again a guy needs to take a breather at a strip joint or two. Who doesn't" (PlanetDuke)? In the game, the player goes through a strip club (see figure 2) and the player, as Duke, can tip the strippers, or shoot them. However, if you shoot them, the game punishes you by having several monsters appear.

It can be assumed that there is be a thrill in seeing bare flesh, even if it was only a pixilated representation of flesh. The question is, however, does the player identify with Duke or become jealous of him? The reason that theater goers are supposed to become jealous of the hero for his interactions with dancing girls is that the hero is doing something that they, as members of the audience, are not allowed to do, namely interacting with dancing girls. In a play or film, the actor is playing a character and is doing what he has been told to do. In Duke Nukem, however, while there is a preferred playing style that in some way can guide or influence the players actions, there is no script that must be followed line for line, step by step. No one tells the players to go up to the strippers. The player tells Duke to go up to them. In effect, the player has become Duke. Therefore the player should not become jealous of Duke for being able interact with the strippers, because it is, in reality, the player who is interacting with the strippers.

The players are playing the role of Duke. The players are, again, more akin to actors than they are watchers. Thus, players do not really identify with the characters in the same way that watchers do, because they are not watching the characters, they are the characters. No one has ever stopped playing a FPS because they did not like the main character. There is a way in which actors must identify with the roles they are playing. However, it is not quite as simple as saying that players of FPS are merely acting out the part of the main character. Here we must examine what are the characteristics of the main character in a First-Person Shooter.

In a FPS there are two extremes. At one end of the spectrum there is the character of Duke Nukem who says numerous witty sayings (mostly "borrowed" from Bruce Campbell's films) at various points in the game. At the other end is Gordon Freeman from the game Half-Life who does not say a word. Either in the introduction or via the instruction manual, the games tell the stories of these characters which can be quite thorough, as is the case with Half-Life (See Appendix A). However, none of this backstory really matters, as a) most gamers do not even read instruction manuals and b) once the game is begun, there is little time to ponder, "What would my character do in this situation?" As Turkle has said, playing these games is like being a racecar driver, if you become distracted, even for a moment, you will lose (83).

This leaves only what the characters say as possibly being able to give the player a sense of what the character is like. In the case of Half-Life and its silent protagonist, Gordon Freeman, there is no way of knowing what his character is like. The only way the player even knows Gordan's name is because other characters call you that. Duke Nukem's utterances are not intended to impart plot, they are intended to be funny and give the player as sense of Duke as being a irreverent, cocky guy. As previously stated, the game makers relied on lines from Bruce Campbell's movies to do this and thereby drew upon a built persona to create their character. This does not really seem to work, however, as there are a limited number of things that Duke can say, they become predicable and, to some extent, even irritating. The player eventually ignores them so that they may better get down to the real business of killing the bad guys and tipping strippers.

In this way, it can be seen that players of these types of games are not really playing the part of the main characters. Any sense of style or attitude is really created by the visual design of the enemies the player fights, the weapons, and the settings of the levels. So it appears as if the player does not really identify with the character even to the extent that actors must identify with the roles they play.

Players of these types of games can, however, identify with the situation. Everyone has dreamt of saving the world, of being important, of acting rather than thinking. In this way, they can be seen as utopic places full of empowerment and conflict resolution. In these games while the details of the situation may vary, it almost always comes down to one man against the world. It is kill or be killed. This allows for the players to test their skills against computerized enemies and to save the day. So in this way the player is not really playing out a role but acting out a fantasy. While what is occurring is a type of identification and this kind of utopic fantasy is part of what occurs in the viewing of the cinema, it is of a different quality and different kind because the viewer is watching someone else deal with problems and issues. In games, it is the player who is forced to deal with things. While those who watch film can be said to be actively watching it, there is a difference between that and the act of playing.

Although it has been quoted numerous times, Turkle puts it best when she says:

When you play a video game you enter into the world of the programmers who made it. You have to do more than identify with a character on the screen. You must act for it. Identification through action has a special kind of hold. Like playing a sport, it puts people into a highly focused, and highly charged state of mind. For many people, what is being pursued in the video game is not just a score, but an altered state. 83

The state that Turkle refers to is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow state. Victor Turner credits Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with defining flow as “a state in which action follows action according to an inner logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part; we experience it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future” (47). When a person plays a FPS, they enter this flow state. Just as athletes or rock climbers say that they are "in the zone," so too do game players.

This is obviously a big break from what occurs when a person watches a movie. While there may be said to be a flow state in movie watching, it does not create the same intense state that one gets from playing an intense game. When a person is asked what a movie is about they will most likely respond with something along the lines of, "Oh, its about this person who does this stuff and then this thing happens and in the end the main character wins." Ask the same person what a game is about and they will say something like, "First you have to do this, then you do that. Then you end up with so and so and you have to do this other thing and in the end you win." Notice the different phrasing. "This person" versus "you." In effect what happens is that the player internalizes what has happened. They do not say, "My character died." They say, "I died."

In his work the Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz wrote that in the cinema, "the spectator is absent from the screen" (48). He continues by describing what occurs at the cinema:

At the cinema, it is always the other who is on the screen; as for me, I am there to look at him. I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all-perceiving. All-perceiving as one says all-powerful.... all-perceiving, too because I am entirely on the side of the perceiving instance: absent from the screen, but certainly present in the auditorium, a great eye and ear without which the perceived would have no one to perceive it... 48

While it may be entirely true that the spectator or a film is absent from the screen, it cannot be said that the player of a game is entirely absent from the world within which the FPS takes place. While the viewer does not have a noticeable effect on the film being watched,⁵ the player of a FPS has definite and quantifiable effects one the world of the game.

While it can be said that the characters in the game are there for the player to look at, it certainly is not in the same way that the characters in a motion picture are there to be looked at. The characters in a FPS (be they monsters or computer controlled allies) are not only there to be looked at (and listened to) but to be interacted with as well. In this way they may be said to be something more than simply objects of the gaze, but also interact with the subject.

However, it is unclear whether or not the player of the game may be said to be all-perceiving. Metz says that he is all-perceiving because he is entirely on the side of the perceiving instance and absent from the screen. As the player is not entirely absent from the world of the game, it would seem as if it is not possible for the player to be all-perceiving. Nothing happens without it being for the purposes of entertaining the player, however, so it would seem that the argument could be made that while the player may not be all-perceiving, if the player does not perceive it, then it does not exist. To rephrase Metz's statement, the player is present both within the game world, as well as the real world, a great eye, ear and gun without which the game would have no one to perceive it.

Videogames are microworlds that the player can enter and exercise control over (Provenzo 47). Thus, it comes back to being able to exert control over something. Patricia Greenfield wrote that, "Video games are the first medium to combine visual dynamism with an participatory role...." (Quoted in Provenzo 47-48). Thus, the beauty of the videogame is in its combination of video with game. Because all modern videogames, not just First-Person Shooters, are games that are presented on a video screen they take from both mediums. They have the flow of a game (or sport) and the ability to dazzle with moving pictures. However, just because a game does not allow for the same sort of identification as a movie does not mean that people understand that a First-Person Shooter is not a movie, never will be one and does not need to be .

Published in 1984, during the first videogame crash in which the market was flooded with cheap videogames (in terms of price as will as quality), Turkle's book, The Second Self, was written at a time when arcades were still king of the videogame scene and many were afraid of the videogame's captivating power. Turkel notes that, "Those who fear the games often compare them to television. Game players almost never make this analogy. When they try to describe the games in terms of other things, the comparison is more likely to be with sports, sex, or meditation" (66). Today, while few could be said to truly fear videogames or computers, outsiders are still making inaccurate comparisons. Most people who do not actively play games, but who have written about them, compare them to motion pictures, and so the thought that videogames should be like movies perpetuates itself over and over.

Turkel herself states that, "the entertainment industry has long believed that the highest payoffs would come from offering the public media that combine action and imaginative identification" (75).

Technological advances have enabled designers to create games that provide visually appealing situations and demand a diverse and challenging set of skills. But the ambition is to have the appeal of Disneyland, pinball, and a Tolkien novel all at once. Games like Joust do not offer the imaginative identification with a character and a situation that literature does" (Turkel 76-77).

But can a First-Person Shooter?

The question is flawed. Can literature give the adrenaline rush and the visceral excitement that a FPS can? No. Are they expected to? No. They why should a FPS be expected to do what a work of literature (however narrowly or broadly that term is defined) does? First-Person Shooters have several appeals all their own. First-Person Shooters, as with most videogames that do not seek to replicate real life games (such as a sport sim), seem to go on forever, to be eternal. With a board game, the players can see the end of the board. With a film there is a limited number of minutes for which a story can go on. In a videogame, however, the players cannot tell when the game will end. It could go on forever.

In a FPS, not even death seems to be a limitation, as almost all FPS's place no limit on the number of lives the player can have. Players can die a million times and start right back up wherever they last saved the game. Thus they "provide a setting in which individuals can take a series of risks with few negative consequences attached" (Provenzo 37). This allows the player to feel as if they have a real kind of power over their situation. Videogames are rule-governed, logical worlds and as such, they represent a refuge from a world that is neither rule-governed nor logical.

While the world of the First-Person Shooter may represent a utopic place where players may symbolically overcome challenge by using logic and determination, they are not ungendered spaces as they are masculine in their goals. The gameplay is literally kill or be killed. If you do not shoot and kill your enemies, they will kill you. In this way it is not unlike a game of football or other activities that are seen as traditionally masculine. The games are goal oriented: kill these monsters, find the keys and complete the level. In the single-player they also encourage competitiveness because they allow the players to play the game over and over at different levels, and so the player is encouraged to compete against others who can beat the game at higher skill levels, as well as compete with themselves to see if they can better their previous results.

That these games are created and structured with traits that are deemed by society to be masculine can help to explain why it is primarily males that play these games. While there are many older people (both men and women) who play these games, the segment of people who seem to be most into these games are males who range in age from teenager to mid-twenties. These men obviously identify with the masculine traits of the game and see themselves in these games.

Our culture is structured in such a way as to encourage males to conform to these goals and so by playing them, these males receive pleasurable experiences because of it. Just as athletes are doing activities that are both sanctioned for their gender and encouraged to do, so too are men who play these games. However, there is certainly a way in which traditional sports are naturalized and seen as normal while a FPS is seem as being something less than normal and somewhat unmasculine (of course in our society anything unmasculine is almost always equated with being feminine, and thus bad or dangerous).

In this way there is a transgressive as well as ironic element to the identification that occurs within the FPS. Transgressive for the simple fact that some see it as unmasculine and therefore bad or dangerous, but ironic in that, as stated, they are really ways of enacting traditional masculine roles. The difference is that the enactment of masculinity is not in a traditional way because it is not a physical performance of masculinity, but rather a virtual one. The virtual, or imaginative and mental, has a different quality than that of the physical. Our society values the physical over the mental.

Here again is another irony as these First-Person Shooters are not games that require deep planning and contemplation as some types of computer games do and so are not mentally taxing in the same way that more purly logicaly games are. These are action games that are virtual enactments of violence. They are simulations of physical activity. It would be easy to say that the only people who enjoy these types of games are those who cannot engage in real physical activities. However this seems hasty, judgmental and narrow minded. The experience of playing a sport, such as football or basketball, is much different from the experience of playing a FPS such as Serious Sam although, in terms of gender performance, they are doing the same things. One is not simply a replacement for the other, something only people who can't do the other do, or you only do on rainy days.

In addition to this, the games can be seen as displaying traits of hypermasculinity and either hyperfeminity or women as predators. The men are portrayed as being hugely muscled killing machines who are fearless and formidable (see figure 3). The women on the other hand are seen as either being distorted caricatures of supermodels or hulking and overweight (see figure 4). One character from Quake II named Iron Maiden gives a ghostly, breathy harpy-like gasp and is described as being, "The cyber-bitch from hell…not the kind of girl to take home to mom" ("Collectibles"). Clearly what this does is to naturalize the idea that men are huge Schwarznegger types and if women are not supermodels, then they are horrible creatures who are akin to the sirens of the Greek epics. For the males who play these games, it is a way to be a supermuscular male without having to do the work. Since the games require that you fill the shoes of the main character, to become the main character, then if only for a short while, the players can become these things which society tells them they must be.

In discussing masculinity and cinema, it is only natural that a discussion of the masculine gaze arises.⁶ In a FPS where the player decides what and where to look it would be logical to assume that the gaze contained within the game is ungendered. However, this is not entirely correct. While it is true that the player can decide to guide their "gaze" in consciously non-masculine ways, it must first be remembered that the masculine gaze has been naturalized and therefore it is "only natural" that the players direct "the camera," or their gaze, in gendered and masculine ways. Therefore, even if the content of the games were explicitly gender neutral, it would be very hard for the players to play the games in a decidedly neutral fashion.

Of course, this idea that the games may in fact be gender neutral is untrue because, as has already been explored, the games are masculine in nature and they do reproduce and reinforce masculine traits. Men are told to be masculine. This is one of the reasons why they identify with these games so strongly. There is great pleasure in embracing the dominant ideology.

A question that may be more interesting than, "Why do males play these games?" might be "Why do some females play them and why do not the majority of females?" This is a very complex question and one that cannot be answered completely in the space or time allowed here. However, in relationship to the masculinity inherent within the game, there is something that can be said.

To first suggest why many females do not play these games, recall that they are made for men. With that in mind it should seem that there is implicit within that statement the corollary that if they are made for men, then they are not made for women. This by itself seemingly is enough to possibly deter many females from even attempting these games. For those that do, they will find themselves immersed in a world that is all about power, competition and aggression. These are the very things that the dominant ideology tells women that they should avoid.

There are however some females who play these "men's games." One thing that they could derive from them is a pleasure in the forbidden. They are doing something that is (however mildly) frowned upon for women. Therefore they are being transgressive and they are doing something outside the norm. There is also the factor that in playing these masculine games they are performing masculinity. They are killing the monsters. They are beating the games. Since these games are not seen to be the equivalent of playing a physical sport, they have the license to do something that is seen as being not for their gender.

While it is no longer as overt, there is still implicit sexism in our culture. Therefore women are still oppressed and still have the glass ceiling to deal with. When playing a FPS, there is a liberation that may not be possible for some women to achieve within the real world. The same power fantasies inherent within these games that motivate and fascinate males also fascinate females. Privilege is seen as pleasurable, otherwise no one would want it. However, females are told that they either should not want it, do not deserve it, or do not need it. This would explain why there are fewer females than males playing these kinds of games.

Becoming a player of a First-Person Shooter is different than becoming a watcher of a film. The identification that occurs within each medium is very different in that one involves, as the title suggests, seeing the character and wanting to be like that character, the other involves seeing what the character sees and becoming that character. The experience of each is unique and distinct. For too long scholars have said that videogames were simply "interactive movies." To say so is to diminish and ignore what these things are and what they should be.

To continue this research it would be fruitful to further explore the ways that playing First-Person Shooters is similar to playing games such as Dungeon's and Dragons which require the players to become the characters. It would seem that a FPS is not as involved as these types of games since there is no emphasis on pretending to be someone else, and in the single player game, there is no interaction with other people. It may also be fruitful to discuss the ways in which the identification that does occur within a single player FPS is different or similar to the kinds of identification that occur in a multi-player FPS.

First-Person Shooters are their own form of entertainment. While they are similar to board games and films, they are distinct and separate from them in key and important ways. One of these ways is the kinds of identification that occur while playing these games. To assume that it is just like watching a movie is foolish and naïve.

The End

Appendix A:

In Half-Life, you play Gordon Freeman. A native of Seattle, Washington, Gordon Freeman showed high interest and aptitude in the areas of quantum physics and relativity at an extremely young age. His earliest heroes were Einstein, Hawking and Feynman.

While a visiting student at the University of Innsbruck in the late 1990's, Gordon Freeman observed a series of seminal teleportation experiments conducted by the Institute for Experimental Physics (see Bowemeester, Pan, Mattle, Eibl, Weinfurter, Zeilinger, "Experimental Quantum Teleportation," Nature, 11 December 1997) (see also http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122297teleport). Practical applications for teleportation became his obsession. In 1999, Freeman received his doctorate from M.I.T. with a thesis paper entitled: "Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures By Induction through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array."

Disappointed with the slow pace and poor funding of academic research, and with tenure a distant dream, Gordon cast about for a job in private industry. As fortune would have it, his mentor at M.I.T., Professor Alex Kleiner, had taken charge of a research project being conducted at a decommissioned missile base in Black Mesa, New Mexico. Kleiner was looking for a few bright associates, and Gordon was his first choice. Considering the source and amount of funds available to the Black Mesa Labs, Gordon suspected that he would be involved in some sort of weapons research; but in the hopes that practical civilian applications would arise (in areas of quantum computing and astrophysics), he accepted Kleiner's offer. Apart from a butane-powered tennis ball cannon he constructed at age 6, Gordon had never handled a weapon of any sort-or needed to... until now. (“The Half-Life Story”)

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

WORKS CITED

Bazin, André. "Theater and Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism:Introductory Readings, 4^th ed. Ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 375- 386.

"Collectables." id Software. December 4, 2001. .

Mast, Gerald. "Projection." Film Theory and Criticism:Introductory Readings, 4^th ed. Ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 286-290.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 1977.

"Walkthrough." PlanetDuke. December 4, 2001. <http://www.planetduke.com/duke3/features/walkthrough/>.

Provenzo Jr., Eugene F. Video Kids. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Turner, Victor. “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality.” Performance in Postmodern Culture. Madison: Coda Press, 1977.