# half life 2's bridge at bridge point an uncanny ambience submitted to and rejected by kill screen hi robert we read through your piece very carefully hashed it out with the other editors but unfortunately the piece is not for us. thank you much for sending it in and feel free to pitch us again. also due to the high volume of requests we can't provide more personalized feedback beyond a "yea" or "nay" thanks again. best of luck with this sincerely ks an uncanny ambience: half life 2's bridge at bridge point // images here merely to consider synthesist brian eno's notion of the ambient is itself often a good way to evoke moods that do not have descriptions - andor which are different for everyone that experiences them. likewise half life 2's bridge at bridge point also evokes odd fleeting spectral emotions or states of mind. for sheer effect its only nearest equivalent is the architecture of painkiller (people can fly 2004) just as a bridge can hover over the void between two foreign violently contested locations so too the player on hl2's railway bridge finds themselves momentarily suspended between thoughts often completely unable to express exactly in common language exactly how they feel about where they are - not that they're exactly sure where 'here' is luckily there's a fleeting sense that the bridge itself provides the symbolic means to express its own suspended meanings; it appears simultaneously as a virtually real structure - what zizek describes as something enabling one "(..) to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself"(1) - and the visual means by which to describe it; a 'visual language' metaphor displaying and evoking what baudrillard calls a 'hallucinatory resemblance to itself'.(2) that is half life 2's bridge point as an uncanny (in the freudian sense(3)) 'reality by proxy' (4) forget about teh garme and its by-now long standard garming conceits for a moment. just stand alone on the bridge for a while. (try not to look down if you're acrophobic.) breathe in it. or become part of it's breathing. it's a quietly beautiful perhaps even lightly terrifyingly-sublime(5) cloud-like (dis)location somehow gently un-anchored within half life's universe. it doesn't just span a river but itself describes a wide range (span) of ambient feelings it's not particularly big as a bridge but rather is atmospherically immense birds fly past underneath its graceful arches. sound not structure - or sound as location - is more important here. the passing of a razor train overhead that shakes the whole bridge. the incidental music that begins when you first alight upon its heavy riveted struts. low slightly off-key note clusters marked in time with the metallic-grating like pace of your mark v hev suit boots. how these primal fragmentary elements all vibrate together harmonically to generate the bridge's unique (suspended) reality and above all the wind. as though you're flying. you don't exactly feel cold or warm however - something about the 'clean flat dry' light in half life 2 similar to the light in other oldskool garme engines - prevents this. instead just some(not)thing more indistinct dreamlike exits while you're there. normal rules like gravity and fear of falling certainly 'exist' - but within a particular universe where logic itself is caught daydreaming secretly wishing to crossing a large concrete trestle style bridge for reasons unknown. stay sharp traveller in the middle are several doorless observation platforms providing temporary respite from the heightened neural dopamine arousal(6) of having to cross it without safely lines barriers or tourist safety guidelines. just strolling way up here on those beams - a mohawk indian ironworker back in the day configuring vast vertical piranesi-like megastructures to your *cough* fearless iron will except this time its a stretched out horizontal mood that enwraps itself around you - perhaps temporarily as you - a purely imaginative space both of and for connoisseurs of a delicious nonspecificity and players of wondrous somehow imaginary garmes example references **+** slavoj zizek the pervert's guide to cinema (documentary by sophie fiennes 2006) **+** jean baudrillard the hyper-realism of simulation (1976) as discussed by ioana cazan-tufescu - "jean baudrillard on hyperrealism" **+** the architectural uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely (anthony vidler mit press 1994) **+** wikipedia - sublime (philosophy) **+** olin nrc: "evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video garme" (pdf) **+** gamasutra - piranesi and boullee: two artist-architects unmined by garme designers // republic of bob