i see benrey as kind of a foil of dr coomer. where dr coomer is a character who is fairly grounded in his in-game role as a black mesa scientist and friendly tutorial npc that starts to act erratically as he gains awareness of the world outside the game, i interpret benreys behavior through the series as being a result of having too much meta knowledge and very very little awareness of who he is supposed to be in-game. he knows hes a security guard and even that is like an extremely vague idea. he knows that hes supposed to stick with the player and keep him engaged but has no guidelines for how hes supposed to do that so he just tries whatever and then repeats whatever gets gordon to pay attention to him. he has no sense of discernment for whether that attention is positive or negative.
what he does know about is the artificiality of the world and because of that he lacks any sense of consequence. understanding the game for what it is gives him the ability to break the rules to skew a more favorable outcome. its all play pretend- npcs only get hurt or die because they think theyre real people being hit by real bullets. thats their problem. the only thing that poses any real threat to benreys existence is the possibility that the player will get bored or finish the game and leave, leaving their world in stasis, so while coomer, as gordons friend, is able to snap out of his cosmic-existentialist-horror-driven-rage and trust the player to return to them, benrey takes the more pragmatic approach of trying to keep gordon from reaching the ending. and thats my Game Theory.
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