Watermelons in Halflife2

January 16, 2009 12:47 AM

What's the significance of the watermelons? In the game Half-Life 2 there's an abundance of watermelons in some of the levels. How come?

Playing through Half-Life 2 a second time made me thing about this again. In some of the east-Berlin-inspired levels (as I like to call the ghetto-parts of the game) there's watermelons in the kitchens. I haven't counted them, but they're quite many. They're destroyable, but it does'nt seem to happen anything when you do.

What's the deal? I can't remember seeing any other food-items in the game.

Why watermelons? It it some inside joke? Easter-egg?

posted by Rabarberofficer to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (23 answers total)

I dunno, but World of Warcaft for one has some strange obsession with cheese and mushrooms. Maybe it some sort of gaming injoke.
posted by internet!Hannah at 1:08 AM on January 16, 2009

There are lots of watermelons in Oblivion, too.

You can always just email Gabe Newell: [e-mail].

He reads all the emails he gets. But, he gives his email out in the commentary and online, so, you know.
posted by disillusioned at 1:14 AM on January 16, 2009

Thanks to your question, I found a page that enumerates every known instance of watermelons in videogames.

Here, for further edification, are the entries for air duct, peg leg, and lasagna
posted by zippy at 1:23 AM on January 16, 2009

I could tell you stories about watermelons in game developement, but to answer your question, watermelons:
1. Are large enough to interact with usefully in the game
2. Are iconic - players will not have difficulty recognising what it is supposed to be.
3. Have good geometry for the physics engine gameplay - they're like balls, except:
4. When you drop them or shoot them, they can legitimately explode into awesome chunky goodness.
5. It does all these things (especially the chunky goodness) without being offensive (eg human heads) or outlandish (eg alien egg sacs) or in short supply (eg a stack of soccer balls would seem odd.), but instead is visceral and familiar and intuitive.
6. Are funny. An in-game device that launches soccer balls like a clay shooter would be interesting to make. The same device using watermelons would be hilarious. (Why is that?)

In other words, watermelons are perfect in every way.

You'll notice that Hollywood often uses similarly large fruit too.

That said, watermelons assets don't get made due to a studied consideration of points 1 through 6. It's probably more like
"Hmm, we need some 'phys' balls that blow up in a fun/satisfying way when you shoot them"
"Ooh! Ooh! Watermelons!"
posted by -harlequin- at 1:30 AM on January 16, 2009 [12 favorites]

Oops, the other part of the answer is so obvious I missed it: Games have a finite set of assets with which to populate areas, so pretty much every generic thing on that list is going to be over-used, and the watermelons are no exception.

An area which would contain 1000 different objects in the real world has to be depicted with just 100 distinct objects, thus each object is duplicated and re-used multiple times - giving it far greater frequency than you would see in a real area. In all those kitchens with all those watermelons, there isn't a single scrubbing brush. Whichever items got made will be over-used by necessity, whichever items didn't get made are always entirely absent.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:45 AM on January 16, 2009

Any asset in a game is chosen for the limitations of the game engine. Watermelons are probably cheap resource-wise but show off the high points of the engine when interacted with.

oh and they're "fun" (or turned out to be at least).
posted by Submiqent at 2:03 AM on January 16, 2009

I came in here to say basically what harlequin said.

I might go a little more in depth on the physics engine though: oblongs are an excellent test of a modern physics engine. And, this is big: a programmer can easily create them in code, without having to get the art department to build him a model in Maya and run it through the 3D asset tool chain (that probably doesn't exist yet).

The question they mainly answer is: did we get non-trivial rolling contact correct?

A watermelon (or rugby ball) should roll on any axis given enough initial impulse, but should stabilize to rolling only on the minor axis. Likewise, if given a huge impulse on the major axis, they should leap up into the air as they tumble--they actually break contact. They should also be able to wobble along the major axis while simultaneously rolling on the minor axis. And all of this should be dampened appropriately by rolling physics.

Other shapes just don't test rolling contact as well. A wheel or ball is a trivial problem, unless the mass is non-uniformly distributed. And let me tell you from personal experience, manually working out the inertia tensor for even a simple object of non-uniform density is a major waste of programmer time. Furthermore, a wheel or ball never breaks contact with the ground, even if non-uniformly weighted or given massive impulse.

A box or other flat-sided object is just going to flip over onto the next size, rock back and forth, and stop rolling at all. You could go with an irregular object (like a lumpy rock), but then it gets much harder to predict what it should do when rolled.
posted by Netzapper at 2:54 AM on January 16, 2009 [3 favorites]

...Okay, I know nothing about gaming, but watermelons had a similarly-unexplained cameo in the movie Buckaroo Banzaii. During a similarly tense moment, one characters spots a watermelon hooked up to a monitor and asks another character about it, and the second character just says "I'll tell you later." And we never find out.

This COULD be related?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:35 AM on January 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

"Perhaps the most shameful death anyone can experience in HL2DM [Half-Life 2 Deathmatch] is death by melon."
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:13 AM on January 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Watermelons are used as an analog of humans. We're mostly water contained within a skin, and so are watermelons. It's just the bones that are missing. R Lee Ermey has 'killed' hundreds if not thousands on his show Mail Call while demonstrating various weapons. So the idea of using them for target practice has been out there for awhile and was probably picked up for video games, which has been successful because of all the technology reasons referenced above.
posted by jwells at 5:39 AM on January 16, 2009

Cf Buckeroo Banzai?
New Jersey: "What's that watermelon doing there?" Reno: "I'll tell you later."
posted by cobaltnine at 5:48 AM on January 16, 2009

I too believe this to be an allusion to Buckaroo Bonzai (in which the watermelon was there to annoy the producer).
posted by fidelity at 6:46 AM on January 16, 2009

Watermelons are pretty cool to shoot at when you have a good physics engine.

The movies Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix may have influenced it's popularity.
posted by robofunk at 7:59 AM on January 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Is it an in-joke? Im not sure. I dont remember any watermelons in HL2 but then again I played it when it came out years ago. I feel like all 3D games have four or five token "set decoration" items like the same chair, the same table, the same piece of space garbage, and the same random thing like a watermelon or a crutch or a broken doll. Im guessing the guy who does a lot of the interior decoration isnt a high priority, so he just makes the required objects and a few decorative objects and calls it a day. No game reviewer is going to complain about a big empty room, as long as you can shoot zombies in it. Too much decoration probably gets in the way of shooting things, not to mention many games have horrible edge detection (fallout3 im looking at you). You dont want to piss off players by having their well-placed headshots blocked by chandeliers and chairs.

As much as I would love to see games with more realistic interiors and objects, Im guessing the laws of economics means we can have these excellent spaces but only with a much smaller game world. 3D action games fit it well in the 'mostly-empty world' concept as opposed to the over-detailed small world. Watermelons are probably a good way to make the world as little less empty and theyre fun to shoot and smash.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:33 AM on January 16, 2009

Best answer: There's a post-it note somewhere in Dr. Kleiner's laboratory in Black Mesa East that says to pick up more watermelons for Lamarr, his pet headcrab. So if you wanted a logical reason for them to exist in the game, that's it: headcrabs like watermelons.
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:58 AM on January 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Oh wait, no. Not Black Mesa East, just the plain old lab in the city with the teleport platform. It's in the half with the orange glowy tanks.
posted by cowbellemoo at 9:00 AM on January 16, 2009

Beside red or orange barrels (that you know will explode) or tv sets, water-melons are always an object you can't resist shooting or knifing when you see them. They are pretty abundant in Call of Duty 4.
posted by Frasermoo at 9:33 AM on January 16, 2009

The Banzai Institute on the watermelon:

"Why is a watermelon trapped between those monstrous pressure plates deep within the Institute's Critical Stress Laboratory?" Team Banzai botanical agronomists have been for years hard at work on the problem of hunger in Third World countries under constant revolutionary turmoil. A nonpolitical, humanitarian effort, their goal has been to find ways to feed starving peoples in remote areas where traditional food delivery systems prove woefully inadequate. Often, the only way to get the nourishment into the bellies of the needy is to hit and run, avoiding all petty ideological side-taking. What you see in the Critical Stress Lab is a revolutionary watermelon capable of withstanding impact pressures of 300,000 pounds per square inch! Sweet, juicy and vitamin-packed, this remarkable fruit can be dropped from the bomb bays of low-flying aircraft into the backyards of disenfranchised villagers in the remotest backwaters of this angry planet. Just another Team Banzai effort to cut through all the unnecessary crap around us and help people help themselves. Look for high-impact, low cholesterol eggs next... and sooner than you think, shatter-proof whole-wheat taco shells.
posted by zippy at 9:39 AM on January 16, 2009

[tangential but perhaps relevant]

In the Buckaroo Banzai commentary, the director says the watermelon was put there to see if the studio was still diligently reviewing the dailies -- if the dailies came back and some studio flack said "WTF is up with that watermelon thing? Cut it!"... then they would have to proceed with some semblance of restraint.

The watermelon passed through the studio review process without incident, at which point they realized that the studio had given up on them entirely, giving them free reign to just do whatever struck their fancy.

And thus was born the Greatest Movie of All Time.
posted by Shepherd at 9:39 AM on January 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Shepherd: Thank you! In gratitude -- and to carry the tangent one step further before veering back -- I have a quick story; I actually met Jeff Goldblum once, when I was stage managing a show. Our show was rehearsing in the basement of a theater space, and he was in a show performing on the main floor -- but his theater's dressing rooms were in the basement as well. He wandered into our rehearsal hall by accident while trying to find his way out to the street, and asked me to show him where the proper stairs to the street were. I escorted him there (it was the kind of layout where it's easier to point rather than describe how to get there), and sent him on his way.

To this day, I don't know whether I should proud of my restraint or whether I should be kicking myself over the fact that I did NOT stop him as he was leaving and ask, "Incidentally, Mr. Goldblum, what was that watermelon doing there?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:36 AM on January 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Ohh, I see. While I still have problems with wrapping my head around the concept of watermelons beeing a metaphor for people (as jwells suggests), I now understand that watermelons have a proud place in american pop-culture.

The connection with Buckaroo Banzaii is interesting, I'm slightly ashamed about not having seen that movie. I'll correct my erring way.

The notion that spheres are an challenge for programmers of real-physics-games is intriguing. I have to look into that.

Cowbellemoo - I just have to play it again and look for that note. Thank you!
posted by Rabarberofficer at 3:21 AM on January 17, 2009

The notion that spheres are an challenge for programmers of real-physics-games is intriguing. I have to look into that.

Not spheres. Spheres are really, really easy. You just maintain the center at radius distance from the ground, dampen any motion perpendicular to the ground normal, and dampen any angular velocity. A sphere rolls for a while, then stops. It may bounce off obstacles, but it never wobbles or has eccentric motion.

Oblongs and irregulars aren't especially challenging to a programmer of realtime physics doing rolling physics, either--assuming that's what he does, and he knows what he's doing. It's just that they require the "general case" code as opposed to a simplified model that works only for a sphere. The sphere would be the "trivial case" (along with the wheel, as long as you don't want the wheel to fall over at some point).

The point is that the oblong tests the general rolling code while being easy to generate mathematically. It's an issue of, "Dude, I need something to test my code, but I don't want to bug the modelers 'cause god knows they have enough work already without making me a lunpy rock." It's a simple parametric equation to generate one. About fifteen lines of code (including putting it in the appropriate datatype).

They make it into the final game for the same reasons that -harlequin- mentions.

While I still have problems with wrapping my head around the concept of watermelons beeing a metaphor for people (as jwells suggests),

They're not a metaphor. They're a stand-in.

For instance, I like using watermelons to test new ammunition for my guns in real life. It gives me a good idea how that ammo might perform if I were forced to shoot somebody. I don't think they're an especially good simulation of people, though. While the filling's about right for brains, but the rind is nothing like the skull. And as a whole, they're nothing like a chest shot.

But, they blow up spectacularly, and give me an obvious visual as to how much energy is being transferred to the target by the bullet. A bullet that puts a neat hole through a watermelon is, for self defense purposes, significantly less useful than a bullet that expands and blows the back half off the melon while also removing most of its filling.

In a video game, you can blow them up the same way. They're something fun for the player to shoot that has a legitimate reason to blow up in chunky goodness. Yes, I know, the badguys do that too. But, sometimes it's fun to shoot things that don't shoot back (and aren't civilians). And, it lets the programmers (who probably aren't the physics guys) test out the chunking-spattering-damage system without having to track down the modelers.

You're looking for "artistic" reasons that they're in games. I think there are very few of those, although perhaps in-jokes count. Likewise, the fact that they're in other games probably counts--but not as an homage or allusion, just as "well, you gotta have watermelons". I think the reasons are mostly technical and practical.
posted by Netzapper at 12:10 AM on January 18, 2009

Here's a screenshot of the post-it, if anyone's curious.
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:43 PM on January 21, 2009