Save The Vents

Of all the things Gordon Freeman has acquired a reputation for doing over the years—bludgeoning alien zombies with a crowbar, staring mutely at the characters emoting around him, applying his PhD to patronisingly simple Newtonian physics problems—I think the one I’d be most hesitant to do in real life is just crawling through a vent. You’re stuck in a dark, claustrophobic, maze-like space, getting a faceful of stale air blowing in from god-knows-where, and since you can’t turn around without a five week course in advanced body contortion, your only option when attacked from behind is to flail hopelessly and hope your buttocks don’t look too enticing. Oh yes, and as Mythbusters handily showed us, you can’t actually move anywhere without making enough noise to alert everybody in the building to your position, direction, and clumsy lack of progress.

Worst of all, in both real- and Half-Life, vents are just really bloody boring.

They are, though, aren’t they? Crawling through a vent in Half-Life is like being forced to walk down a very long, dark, featureless corridor with both your feet tied to a reluctant St. Bernard, and despite many efforts to the contrary, there are only so many ways you can spice up the experience before I begin to regard their entrances with the resigned sigh of a sewage technician who wore his good jeans to work on the day that the mains burst. The architecture is inherently dull, no matter how many dusty fans and offshoots you add, and unfortunately one set of metal duct panels looks more or less like any other set of metal duct panels, so meaningful navigation is out of the question. Combat encounters are limited to headcrabs leaping out in a fruitless attempt to surprise you, and puzzles aren’t even on the table. The only particularly interesting thing Valve has ever really done with vents is set-pieces, and even then, after the second or third one collapses out from underneath him, one can’t help wondering if Gordon needs to cut down on the headcrab hamburgers.

And yet it wouldn’t be Half-Life without vents. Vents are an icon of Half-Life, every bit as essential as the crowbar, and they didn’t earn that distinction just because somebody on the team got off on the thought of a theoretical physicist struggling to make headway in a cramped, sweaty, metal hole; they’re a fundamental tool of the level design, and Half-Life couldn’t have been the same game without them.

To understand vents, we have to realise that they are nothing more than the most common representation of a level design trope that gets used all throughout the Half-Life games. I dare say that professional level designers have some wonderful term for it, but since I’m just a hack with a desk covered in coffee stains and a hard drive full of lousy deathmatch maps, I’m going to call this trope the ‘intermediate space’. Intermediate spaces don’t show up on the map; they’re behind the walls, beneath the floors, above the ceilings. They’re the places that normal people are never supposed to traverse; the spaces that practically defined Gordon Freeman’s journey through the ruined Black Mesa: vents, pipes, chutes, wiring ducts, false ceilings, gangways, crawl-spaces, elevator shafts, rafters, dumbwaiters, maintenance holes, hatches and tunnels. They’re cramped, they’re dangerous, and they worm their way unseen throughout the facility, momentarily surfacing only to disappear back into its depths. Vents are simply the most famous and widespread of the litter.

Why does it matter if these spaces exist? To answer that, we have to realise that Half-Life’s level design—as well as the level design of the innumerable games that borrowed from it—is, at its heart, a compromise. To you and I, fans of the golden age of first-person shooters, the word ‘realism’ can leave a bit of a sour taste depending on your personal experiences, but in their own way, that’s exactly what Half-Life’s environments shot for. Whatever creative license the mad science of Black Mesa gave Valve, they were still frequently creating contemporary, believable spaces: offices, storage rooms, hallways, parking lots, bathrooms, warehouses, security checkpoints, all logically arranged and framed by sensible architecture. Black Mesa was supposed to feel realistic, unbroken, seamless, like a proper place, free of such fundamentally video-game-y concepts as 'levels’ or 'zones’.

Except you can’t really do that. No seriously, you can’t. If you want to make a linear first-person shooter with finely-balanced pacing and interesting combat encounters, the absolute last thing you want out of your level design—the abstract structure of the maps, not all the visual stuff that gets slapped into them—is realism. Architects don’t plan for gunfights; warehouse workers don’t arrange their cargo into stacks of cover. Buildings are supposed to facilitate free movement through them, not squeeze everybody through choke-points and one-way corridors. Half-Life is a twelve-hour-long tube with train rides at both ends, but does it feel like it? No, Black Mesa feels like a believable space in a way that few first-person shooter settings at the time could claim. It takes realistic architecture and carefully moulds it around areas, arenas, routes and transitions, like papier mâché around an unnerving wireframe skeleton, to create a space that superficially looks convincing but ultimately puts gameplay first.

But of course, as is usually the case with this kind of thing, the logic of the world doesn’t always fit snugly to the structure of the levels. Freeman enters the freezer through the door, but where’s he going to come out? How’s he going to get from this rocket exhaust tunnel to this train station, or from this office corridor to this cargo bay? With vents, and pipes, and crawl-spaces galore, that’s how. Are there structural conventions that ventilation systems ought to follow? Of course, but nobody knows or cares what they are. They can start anywhere and finish anywhere, needing nothing but a small section of flat wall and an unobstructed flow of air to seem believable. Intermediate spaces are the semicolons of Half-Life’s level design; an elegant way of having one space logically follow from another without having to explicitly show how they’re related. They are the paste that seals the cracks in the façade; the kind of all-purpose, industrial-strength filler that makes your nostril hairs shrivel up in disgust but grips like the jaws of death without so much as a seam.

But that’s far from the end of intermediate spaces’ virtues. One of their more interesting applications, exemplified in Office Complex and the chapter that follows it, We’ve Got Hostiles, is where they’re used not just as a way of smoothing out the transitions between areas, but as a way of making our perception of how those areas are spatially organised more nuanced. Y'see, the thing about Half-Life’s level design, especially in Black Mesa’s unending subterranean tunnels, is that it tends to sprawl like a sloshed middle-aged football fan on the Saturday night train; there’s no obligation to make rooms fit together snugly, so there’s a lot of negative space behind the walls that we just unconsciously assume is filled with something, be it inaccessible rooms, storage closets, maintenance cavities, or just a load of solid sedimentary rock. If I can be extra pretentious for a second, this negative space exists in a kind of quantum superposition of states; it could be any number of things, but since we can’t actually find out, it remains an amorphous mystery, framing the environments with the vague promise that there is, in some way, more to the facility than what you can see. Most of Half-Life follows this pattern: a linear sequence of areas worming their way through the void, surrounded by hints of a theoretical Black Mesa that’s a lot more structurally logical—or at least, was a lot more structurally logical, before everything went to hell.

Here and there, with the help of some cleverly-structured vents, we get a glimpse of that Black Mesa. Intermediate spaces aren’t just used as a means of transitioning from A to B, but from A back to A; they loop around, showing us the same places in a new light, revealing their subtle interconnectedness. Who can forget taking refuge from the military’s bombardment in an air duct only to peek through a grate below and see the storage bays from earlier in the chapter? Who can forget taking a detour through the cold room’s vents and emerging on the far side of the door that had previously stumped them? The false ceilings of the tacky fifties offices promise acres of hidden cavities, and multiple times you’ll fall through one only to find yourself in a familiar room. “Look,” the game whispers, beckoning tantalisingly. “Everything fits together, like a real building.” It peels back the walls, populates small pockets of the void, and lends the sense that the world beyond the playable space has, in some small way, coalesced into something more defined.

So yes, in spite of them sitting in the core gameplay experience like a lump of soggy tissue paper in a bowl of Weet-Bix, I’m glad that Half-Life has such an unshakeable love for vents. Sure, there are plenty of places where they could be supplanted by more visually interesting and diverse intermediate spaces, but none are as ubiquitous in the world or as flexible as the humble ventilation duct. It’s a workhorse of level design; not especially engaging in itself, but capable of adding layers of depth and authenticity to the environments of a linear, tightly-paced shooter that few of its contemporaries can claim to have achieved. In a perfect world, vents wouldn’t have to be prevalent in a Half-Life game; every area would flow seamlessly into another without breaking the illusion of believable architecture or destroying the level design, and you’d be subtly funnelled through the levels without their linear structure ever standing out. In our imperfect world, full of compromises and patch-jobs and necessary shortcuts, they’re the next best thing.

Use them sparingly though, alright? Please?