Health Charger image - Peer Review mod for Half-Life 2

Ironically enough, our health charger was based on a piece of concept art that was done by Michael Tannock many years ago. Mike is probably one of the most prominent self-described Half-Life purists out there.

If you actually look at the original health charger, there are only three distinct features in our version that are different compared to the original: the Blue Star of Life, the rounded corners, and the green health goop vial. Everything else, including the feature placement and general design of the actual screen and keypad, was lifted directly from the original.

With regards to the differing features: the Star of Life was chosen because we don't really want to deal with the messy ramifications of ******* off the ICRC by using the Red Cross symbol; the health charger in Decay had (some) rounded corners; and the health charger in Decay also had a green health goop vial. The only thing ours does not have compared to the Decay version is the stabby needle.

So it would be most accurate to describe our health charger as a happy middle ground between the original HL charger and the Decay charger.

Recently (specifically, within the last decade or so), the International Committee of the Red Cross has tended to take public issue with video games (and, technically, anyone else really) that use the Red Cross symbol to represent the general concept of "medical care". According to them, the symbol of the Red Cross is an internationally-protected symbol under the Geneva Conventions that is intended to specifically mark medical personnel, equipment, and facilities of either the armed forces or an official Red Cross organization, in order to protect them from harm in combat. Its usage as merely a generic "health" symbol is therefore an inappropriate and illegal usage of the symbol, and could therefore technically constitute a war crime since that would dilute its special status in a wartime context. If all generic medical items were labeled with a Red Cross, then the Red Cross would lose its significance on the battlefield since it would no longer be visually clear who or what is actually protected by the Geneva Conventions. I guess it was only recently that the ICRC became aware of the fact that video games tended to use the symbol illegally, and so they've only recently started to crack down on illegal usages of the symbol in games.

So, since getting into a ******* match with the ICRC is generally a terrible idea, most game developers have decided to just sidestep the issue entirely and use other symbols to mean "health". Some developers take the laziest possible route and just use a white cross or a green cross instead of a red cross. In our case, we chose to use the Star of Life on our health items, because pretty much everyone and their mother universally recognizes the Star of Life symbol to mean "emergency medical treatment", second only to the Red Cross itself.