Remowned

PapaBoo, a non-gamer playing through the seminal first-person shooter Half-Life, soldiers on. Now his exploits are being documented at the dedicated web domain howdoiplaygame.com, which anyone who is familiar with hardcore games should be sure to read right away. He is now supplementing his descriptions of in-game progress with screenshots.

If you are unfamiliar with PapaBoo’s Black Mesa journey, start from the beginning. What is most fascinating is how he is beginning to think in the context of what the game demands, having started his play session with absolutely no existent framework for FPS games. Coincidentally, just today I was thinking about when I first played Half-Life way back in 1998. It was a borderline revelatory experience, unlike any shooter I had played. Many of its demands were uncommon for the genre. Still, though, I had a familiarity with shooters in general, and my experience with adventure games and other types of video games gave me a baseline for video game logic, which is somewhat tangential to real world logic.

PapaBoo, of course, does not have that foundation. His experiences are priceless, because they are so uncommon–I doubt many non-gamers take their first voyage into the world of full 3D interactive worlds by way of something like Half-Life. (more…)