The Loneliness of Source

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the aperture science no wait wait wait no this is youtube sorry about that was a little too focused on the portal footage you just saw but i want you to think about for a second did you feel anything while watching it i mean it was pretty desolate i would consider it feeling pretty lonely and that's what i would like to talk about for the topic of this video the loneliness of source now how would i define lowliness and source well i think that question deserves a simple enough answer have you ever jumped into a random single player server or an empty multiplayer one feeling completely alone due to the lack of players maybe the feeling that something could be possibly watching you i'm sure this has happened numerous times to a lot of us and to each they have their own reasons as to why but i believe there is a general consensus and there's actually a definition for it too as i briefly touched on in my rp downtown history video you can check out here the word is canopia ever heard of it it's a phrase coined by the dictionary of obscure sorrows which goes on to explain that canopsia is the eerie forlorn atmosphere of a place that's usually bustling of people but now is abandoned and quiet and for valve's games i think this definition fits perfectly let's take a look into half-life 2 by itself a very lonely depressing and oppressive atmosphere everything feels extremely unkempt and run down and even with people around you don't really feel like yourself maybe it's because you can't in a world where the combine run its regime it's hard to feel a sense of you anymore i would assume everywhere you go level to level you're experiencing the effects of a torn up planet to an extent even in half-life 1 you'd feel calmer as the entire game is littered with scientists and enemy soldiers they give the impression that at least earth is still earth source has the amazing ability to storytell while still keeping us unaware of the end goal from half-life 2 now jump to portal starting off you can immediately tell something's wrong even if you've never played this game before take a look around you quiet fluorescent humming empty observation chambers and a broken monotone ai speaking to you hello without giving much away at all valve and the source engine has totally immersed us into this game giving us subtle clues as to what's going on but still at the same time nothing at all we normalize the creepiness of these games inside our minds as our brain would like us to think that there is some possibility of humans being around here as we live everyday life we subconsciously keep information we see in the back of our heads which makes us good at analyzing certain cues [Music] the light still humming here means electricity is still stable which means someone is keeping it running the evidence of observation chambers and cameras prove that we are being watched and someone has been here to our brain this is all cues that there must be some sort of human activity which is occurring but when we find nothing traveling throughout the game we start to doubt what we've really overall analyzed and i think this example is perfect for what canopsia really is there's every single clue that humans should be here but for some reason they're not join an empty tf2 server for example a game that prides itself on players fighting now just walk around alone for a second it doesn't feel quite right you can get the same feeling from walking around on a map like big city while hearing the ambience of cars and helicopters in the background as if the map is somehow alive but when it comes down to what's really happening it's just you it always has been besides the function of our brains the way the games are composed also work to intentionally creep us out to show a great example of this i'm going to show this map by suspiciously awesome the map creator of gm layer and many other classics on the workshop that i recently had a conversation with in my video titled the history of gmod's most popular maps i'm going to start off with the same question for everything i bring up on screen to start off with this picture do you really feel scared the general consensus here is probably no we recognize this as safe because of the bright white and easily distinguishable colors we don't see a threat here and it actually feels rather pleasing to the eye with the architecture and composition of this city in contrast let's look over a screenshot that shows the overview of a street inside half-life 2's city 17. the walls here show a very unkempt industrial area there's obvious rusting and dirt on the residential areas as opposed to the bright blue sky instead we get a very musty yellow grayish sky the trees here are almost dead looking with no green leaves in sight and a very apocalyptic feeling how this relates to why we might find maps like downtown creepy and big city is because everything in those maps use the base textures for the game and by base textures i mean only the things that are used in half-life 2. downtown has an exception as 40 of the map uses textures from counter-strike source yet regardless of that counter-strike source also has based its texturing on half-life 2 anyway when our brains are contrasted between dirty and clean we will obviously prefer one over the other and in this situation we will obviously feel more comfortable with the latter another reason i propose for why we feel creeped out relates back to the feeling of not having other people around us to keep us company in a way i want to address this feeling as the god feeling or creator feeling funny enough for how desolate half-life 2 is you at least have companions and civilians who guide you in a game like gary's mod where it is independently single-player and the actions you can cause are limitless you will inevitably though begin to feel lonely the god feeling sas creator feeling stems the people when they ultimately have control over everything in one certain area and any road to work for it becomes meaningless and so we get bored of this power and eventually think about it in retrospect which causes a chain reaction of other feelings imagine if you were given unlimited money for example it would be fun and then it would get boring and depending on your environment maybe you would even feel depressing no matter the circumstance our brains will always find unlimited satisfaction for having to work for something when you get bored of spending unlimited money you won't really know what to do imagine being able to do anything with a power like that it is just in nature to question it we can have friends but how do we know if they're really your friends if you can just create friends such companions out of thin air like you can do with spawning npcs in gary's mod is there really any connection being our own god and gary's mod creates uncertainty over why we have that power and who can experience that with us there's a reason why we feel safe for friends and have more fun with them rather than a single player experience the reality is that being a creator is lonely now funny enough i've gotten so many comments on my downtown video just talking about oh yeah i spawn in npcs to not feel lonely when i play this game or when i'm on a map um and there's even an add-on on the workshop that fills uh the maps you play with npcs [Music] when you have the power to create anything i believe eventually you start to think about if anything is actually important some may think about this in a more positive light but i generally see it being some sort of central creator in a pretty dark way and maybe that's nihilistic though i think it's just a conclusion as humans we all come to if given we really think about it when your friend plays with you you at least know they're real and you share the same ability so with them you're not actually alone but put yourself here alone in a world that offers endless possibilities to what we can do i believe it is by nature our mind starts to wander creeping ourselves out on the process if we are here can something else be here and why would something else be here so really whose fault is it that we have this reaction let's split half and half between source and us source does a good job of depicting reality in the games it produces but still not enough to be totally realistic even with a game like tf2 where everything is cartoony the character somehow fell into the perspective of semi-realistic even with outlandish proportions besides the material as i mentioned earlier with the whole clean versus dirty thing there's also the aspect of how time has age source and the atmosphere source when i say time is age source what i mean is when playing a source game you're living in a time that doesn't necessarily exist anymore for context most of these games were made in the 2000s now approaching 2021 there's not a lot of games similar to what valve has done in the past but when you play a valve game you're still reliving what other people before you have relived you're still playing this game that somehow is still kicking there's a game that essentially is a horror game of you joining a single player server or a multiplayer server all by yourself personally i first heard about this game from mudahar but the game's called no players online very interesting game very similar to the feeling we get when we join a single player gary's mod server very interesting i'll leave a page for it on screen that you can check out um i would definitely consider playing it and looking at some footage for it i believe the way this game is crafted beautifully represents just how we feel when we are in gary's mod or some type of source game and get this feeling of just uneasiness [Music] i think that the same feeling of joining a sandbox game alone by yourself and the feeling of joining a dead game with no players online is pretty keen to simulating how we feel when we join a a server by ourselves another thing that source adds as i said of the atmosphere earlier is how the soundscapes are beautifully crafted not beautiful in a music sensor composition but they're designed to fit in the areas they were designed for very well take a look at some of the soundscapes for raymond home the sewers in city 17. [Music] they all have a sense of death that i really don't think has been seen anywhere else it's crazy to me how valve essentially put together and designed one of the most popular games and is still living on to this day with modern versions of their creations like gary's mod and team fortress and to an extent counter-strike seeing all those games were initially mods of half-life 1 and 2. forever embedded in our minds will be instinct and the engine plays very well off of it anyway i hope you liked this quick analysis video on my thoughts for this phenomenon i've seen it happen and i've seen people talking about it but really no good in-depth research but hopefully you'll learn something new from this video and i appreciate you all for watching so peace out like it if you like it dislike if you dislike it and uh have a safe day [Music]

Channel: stellarr 1

Views: 65,120

Rating: 4.9492917 out of 5

Keywords: Garry's Mod, Source, History, Valve

Id: hgeLqpg-l-U

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021