https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-narrative-had-to-be-baked-into-the-corridors-marc-laidlaw-on-writing-half-life
he was a rationalist rather than a populist - oppressing with appeals to reason, not emotion.
(this is not directly important to the story or the game or the article but the sentence itself is amazing)
[Marc] Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. “Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.”
