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The Culture War thread has been heavy on War and light on Culture of late so I thought I might offer this as something of palette cleanser.
I've been playing through the original Halo trilogy in split-screen co-op mode with my kids and while I hesitate to call one of the most successful franchises in video game history "underrated", I do feel like people sleep on just how tight and well executed the story-telling in it was.
Clint Hocking, whose work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserves its own essay, is credited with coining the term "Ludonarrative Dissonance" to describe a situation where in a video game's narrative elements are contradicted by the game's ludic elements IE the player experience. What Halo has is the opposite of this. A "Ludonarrative Harmony" if you will, where in the experience of playing the game reinforces its narrative themes and vice-a-versa and I don't think I consciously appreciated it until I was looking at it through fresh eyes. So lets talk about those themes...
The Year is 2552 and humanity is at war with an interstellar empire calling itself "The Covenant", a war that humanity is loosing. (Gamers of a certain age, please stand for your national anthem)
Our story begins with a lone starship, the Pillar of Autumn, fleeing a terrible battle and choosing to strike out into deep space rather than risk leading the foe back to Earth. The first lines of dialogue we hear in the entire franchise is our captain asking, "Did we lose them?" only to receive a negative response. In their flight our unwilling Argonauts have come upon the titular Halo, a Bishop Ring with a suspiciously Earth-like environment complete with California Redwoods and 9.81 ms^2 gravity. The ring was built by an extinct race known as "the Forerunners" (names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose") who the Covenant worship as divine beings. Mankind's Science and Intel officers believe that the ring might hold some secret that could change the course of the war and given that this is a war that humanity is not only losing but losing badly anything that might change the course of the war is naturally a top priority. And thus, we are introduced to our player character...
"Spartans" are surgically enhanced super-soldiers who are apparently kept on ice (IE in suspended animation) until needed. A "break glass in case of emergency" type deal. You, the player character, are woken to act as vessel/avatar for the Pillar of Autumn's resident AGI Cortana. Cortana being entirely software, cannot leave the ship or even press a physical button without someone to carry her and act on her behalf, and so she needs your help to investigate the ring, and by extension, hopefully save humanity.
Ultimately, Halo is "a big dumb shooter" in the same way that Gladiator is "a big dumb action movie". That is to say that, yes, it is big, it is dumb, but above all it is fun. and yet there's also a lot more going on under the surface for those inclined to dig which is where I feel the idea of "Ludonarrative Harmony" comes in.
One of fundamental problems that games like Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have is that it's very difficult to provide a narrative justification for why the player, an ostensibly base-model homo sapien, should be able to mow down multiple battalions worth of Nazis without getting mowed down in turn, or why some basic-bitch E-5 is constantly being offered the chance to shoot the cool gun or drive the fancy tank like they're some kind of make-a-wish kid. Halo neatly sidesteps this issue by giving a clear narrative reason for why you, the player, are so much more capable than the NPCs around you. You're a 6.8' hyper-athlete in power armor who has a benevolent super-intelligence riding shotgun in your head. This is sense of capability is further reinforced by how NPCs, both human and alien, react to you. Weaker enemies flee at your approach while friendly NPCs will cheer you on and will freak out if you die. Combine this with Jaime Griesemer's now famous "30 seconds of fun every 3 minutes" principle and what you get is a power fantasy that is not only exceptionally well executed but fully justified within the context of the narrative.
While this power fantasy is what makes Halo work so well as a "big dumb shooter" it exists in tension with the broader text of the narrative. Throughout the game, we are repeatedly reminded that humanity is on the back foot, that the Covenant are both more technologically advanced than humanity and more numerous. We do not know why they seem to be intent on eradicating us, only that they are. The human forces that we encounter during the campaign are almost always outnumbered. Covenant enemies and weapons, especially on higher difficulty settings, are almost always more deadly. Musical queues are either mournful or strident and desperate. There is this subtext to much of the dialogue that the ultimate fate of our intrepid crew will not be a triumphant homecoming. We are Spartans and the ring is to be our Thermopylae (I told you that names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose").
On its face value Halo is remarkably bleak and yet it also has something that I feel is sorely lacking in a lot of modern media. Sincerity.
As I've gotten older, and especially since having kids, I have found that I have less and less patience for deconstructionist takes, and subversion for subversion's sake. I don't want nihilism and moral ambiguity from my fiction. I get enough of that from studying history. What I want from my fiction is something to inspire and/or aspire to. Yes Halo is bleak, but it is also hopeful. And yes, I recognize that this sounds like a contradiction but it's not because what Halo's story is ultimately about is what do you do when faced with frightful odds or a seemingly hopeless situation? It's about what do you when your faith is shattered, and you find out that much of what you thought you knew about how the universe worked is revealed to have been a carefully crafted lie? It's about duty and loyalty. It's about the relationship between created and creator. It's that meme about "the masculine desire to perish in a heroic last stand" in video game form. It is all of these things, and I think that is why fans keep coming back to it.
I also don't think I properly appreciated any of this until I had the opportunity to experience it again through fresh eyes.
PS: As you might imagine I have opinions about the Paramount+ adaptation and subsequent games released after Howard and Griesemer stepped down, but that's material for a follow on post
I hear sometimes gamers talking about how Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were these seminal games and huge steps forward for what was possible in shooters, especially in terms of story. I don't know about that. I never finished either game. I remember trying Half-Life in my teens, finding it boring, and quickly giving up.
But Halo...
Halo was magic. I first played it on a friend's X-Box, and it was captivating. My experience of shooters before that were games like Goldeneye 007 on N64, or Wolfenstein 3D and Doom demos that we installed on all the school PCs, or Aliens vs Predator at home. Halo felt like a step into another world. It felt like it wasn't just awkwardly trying to evoke a setting I knew better from elsewhere. Its gunplay flowed smoothly and its enemies felt capable and intelligent. Its world felt real - there were characters, and there was atmosphere. I eventually badgered my parents into getting me an X-Box and I spent a lot of time playing it.
One of Halo's big innovations, which I'm not sure it gets enough credit for, is having a narrator or perspective character giving you voiced feedback during gameplay. Half-Life gets credit for in-engine cutscenes, but firstly those actually predate Half-Life in shooters, and secondly, even in Half-Life, those were moments where you stopped and watched something happening. Moreover, Gordon Freeeman was a silent protagonist, so it felt like just watching a cutscene only you can move the camera around. Whatever.
The Master Chief is also more-or-less a silent protagonist, but it doesn't matter, because the real first-person-narrator of Halo is Cortana, and it feels like Cortana is constantly talking to you, the player. And she talks during normal gameplay. She usually shuts up during gunfights, but before and after the fight begins, she comments on what just happened, on where you're going next, and on what this mysterious space station might be for. Cortana's feedback lets you know how to emotionally react (she goes "ahh!" at scary things, "wow!" at impressive things, "aww..." at sad things), while also keeping you on mission by constantly reminding you where to go next.
Most shooters felt very lonely, prior to Halo. Explore an environment, kill everything. Halo puts a little buddy in your head, and that created a sense of direction, investment, and storytelling through gameplay. Go somewhere, Cortana sees what you see, she helps you interpret it. Nowadays the mission control character or intercom girl is a cliché, but I think it worked really well in Halo. The missions where you don't have any commentator buddy feel silent and threatening because of it; the missions where you don't have Cortana, but have 343 Guilty Spark instead, feel slightly off. They use the dramatic device for all it's worth.
In shooters before Halo, environments felt artificial, and like just stages for killing things that you wandered around. Halo made every place you go feel purposeful. You are raiding this facility to retrieve a map. You are assaulting this alien spaceship to rescue a prisoner. You are exploring this swamp in search of a missing team of marines. You have objectives.
It felt like an animated world I was actually inhabiting. I give it tremendous credit and think it was a huge, paradigm-shifting step forward for shooters.
And yes, its story, though very basic (and I recommend ignoring people who tell you all about the Halo EU and the Forerunners; it's all so much garbage), was good and effectively appealed to what every teen boy wants to be. Halo is a story about being a soldier-explorer. It is about being this powerful masculine figure, on the front line or even behind enemy lines, resourcefully overcoming obstacles, and standing in between danger and the people you care about. And it does it with total, unapologetic sincerity. Halo does have some comedy in it (oh, grunts, you silly little buggers), but that comedy never comes at the expense of the protagonist. Halo believes in the Master Chief, which is to say, Halo believes in you.
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