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feels like the entire plot of the half life series emerged from the game design decision to never take control away from the player, even in “cutscenes”. it’s all fixated on agency - in half life 1, the heavily controlled environment of a laboratory is thrown into chaos and invaded by more powerful forces, the US government and an alien monarch. in half life 2, it’s a totalitarian regime and a struggle for freedom for the masses. all of the enemies share the common theme of not being control of their bodies: zombies, aliens controlled by the nihilanth, heavily disciplined soldiers, the antlion hivemind, combine drones (valve has explicitly said they worried players would not want to kill them if they looked too human). Gordon Freeman himself is famously an empty husk only given life through the player’s input (the games constantly lampshade his muteness). the only flavor he gets is being a white male with a STEM degree, so basically a reflection of the majority of valve employees and what they would likely unconsciously consider “default” or unremarkable. attention is always called to those rare moments where control must be taken from the player, which is why both games begin on trains, the player is literally being “railroaded,” and the game truly starts once you begin walking freely.

taken at face value, it’s one subject vs a world of objects. (garry’s mod even takes this a step further by turning the player into god, the world into props, characters into dolls.) in reality though, this is an obfuscation. the games, like all singleplayer games, are a dialogue between player and developer, but through famously relentless playtesting valve has made their hand as invisible as possible. they have prioritized above all else the idea that the player should always feel they are singlehandedly guiding their actions, unaware of subconscious details like lighting, framing, sound, etc that direct the player along a predetermined path.

this is why the G-man is so interesting: he IS valve, the true higher power in this virtual world, the actual Other. he decides when the games start and end. he decides where the games will take place. in half life alyx we even see him retcon one of the previous games. it’s through his existence that the player can even be a meaningful subject in the world, as he is the only one who talks to YOU, the player, not the mind-controlled object that is Gordon Freeman, and he too experiences the world of half life as a fiction controlled by forces outside of the bounds of its reality. he is a constant reminder of the flimsiness of the solipsistic fantasy inherent to single player video games, and therefore proves that in real life too we are not just one single conscious mind in a world of NPCs, that meaningful difference does exist, and that our experience is so often a product of something beyond ourselves