Wasted Opportunity

There will come a point in every person’s life when they realise that an asset pertaining to them could have been put to better use, be it time, money or an innate skill. For instance the money I spent on my girlfriend’s whisky habit could have actually gone on buying the gym membership I so desperately need.  When these moments occur there is only one name for them. I submit for your approval…

Wasted Opportunity

Once in a while I will take the opportunity to examine some of the better wasted opportunities that have occurred in video game and media fiction. What characters turned cannon fodder could have benefited the real world with their minds? What fictional technology could have cured diseases or stopped poverty instead of blowing stuff up? You get the idea.

It seems only fitting that with the release of the Half Life Black Mesa Mod that we start with one of the better jokes in the video game industry, Gordon Freeman and his apparently worthless degree.

Gordon Freeman is/was (depending on your understanding of the space-time continuum) a hero of Earth, the squashier of aliens and the object of a man in a fine suit’s affection. Despite all his achievements and the fine company he keeps, Dr Freeman’s mother must be proud of the fact that her son received his PHD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a school where the finest of minds can debate the principles of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on supra-quantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array. For those whose fancy learning book places did not cover this subject matter, it is basically how to get stuff to teleport through other denser stuff.

Gordon Freeman by all accounts is a genius, a man who has no peer. His mind could be used to further the field of theoretical physics more than any other fictional character ever could, his skills with building tools alone could help construct his very own space shuttle. Despite all of this though the only hard work Freeman has ever been seen doing is pushing buttons and moving carts.

Yeah I went to MIT, got a degree in crowbarring*

Poor Gordon has probably spent thousands of dollars and man hours pursuing his dream career and honing a genius mind, only to be set tasks that are could be conducted by a 16 year old in a super market.

So the American government has not best utilised Gordon Freeman’s skills, (a real shocker, a government not knowing what to do). So if the hero of the Vortigaunts were real, how could the human species and the world benefit from his oh so brilliant mind?

1.       Let’s get the G-Freeman to help out with real teleportation. Wishful thinking certainly, but maybe it could happen one day; we’ve put men on the moon, travelled faster than sound, connected the whole world together! Maybe one day we can cut my commute to one second instead of one hour.

2.       Make him do something about the Large Hadron Collider. I don’t know what exactly, but I’m sure he would have it curing cancer with three whacks from his crowbar.

3.       Maybe serve as a more interesting character in the Big Bang Theory, or at the very least shoot Sheldon and bang Penny (sorry but that show annoys me to no end).

So Gordon Freeman’s education was perhaps not his wisest investment, but at the same time he has managed to save the world several times, which is always a plus. Perhaps he should have invested the time and energy in some speech and drama lessons.

For more on Gordon Freeman be sure to check out the Black Mesa mod at http://www.blackmesasource.com/ and keep on reading the Avant-Garde Experience!

Nefarious Ne’er-do-well

Images taken mostly from Google. All credits go to the original hosts.
* Full credit to juniorpewpew on deviantart for that caption - we like your style