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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.
I am in the unusual position that I was working on a commercial FPS when Half-Life came out in November 1998, and it had an immediate and dramatic impact on our game and all the game design that followed. Halo, later, also had some influence (specifically the rise of Halo's shield recharging mechanic for health, a heavier reliance on drivable vehicles with physics breaking up FPS levels, and limited weapon carrying), but the difference in impact between the two, at least on designers, was stark.
So let me lay out some things that Half-Life ushered in. I'm not going to try to convince you to actually like the game, but I think it's worth noting its impact.
So, the organic story telling in first person, with the camera NEVER leaving the protagonists head, was arguably something that was specifically native to games and genuinely felt new. This is actually a feature that has not often been much copied, interestingly - it's can be a really powerful aesthetic choice, but it means throwing out tons of other techniques from film for story telling. (Technically the player does black out part way through the game, and then is hauled somewhere by soldiers, so one could quibble a bit about how uniformly this constraint was followed)
This is tied in with something else HL did. Valve intentionally made the levels smaller than comparable FPS games, they made the loading times shorter, and they strung together the entire experience physically from start to end (well, until teleportation and Xen). So the player almost never loses the ability to connect where they've traveled in their head. Black Mesa ends up being, to a first approximation, one giant long thread running through space. This combines mandatory first person to make a uniquely organic experience. This is also a really severe constraint that was generally not followed by other, later games.
And then, because of these constraints, Valve worked through finding a ton of ways to provide variety in levels within the context that Black Mesa was going to be one seamless whole, instead of globe trotting to various disconnected venues. And so that meant experiential variety in level design was all variations on the various science / nuclear / industrial underground and the parched desert over ground, and the overall experience swung the player through the various environments in a particular way, building both variation and repetition to further foreground the seamless base experience. As before, this wasn't really copied broadly.
The raw game design in Half Life is also more surprising and interesting than people generally note. Parts of the game feel very much like early survival horror, with very low resources and zombies and bull squids and other disgusting aliens, and with a shattered and collapsing and dangerous environment. Parts of the game feel like an early tactical shooter with the soldiers and their aggressive AI, quite famously. But a lot of the game is quiet, and it feels more like the sort of environmental puzzle design of Out of this World or Ico, say. There's a lot more novel and varied non-enemy interaction with the game world than many other shooters of the time or since, and all of the design is organic - the designers expect the player to fiddle with the world, prod it, explore it, and puzzle out what they're supposed to do and how to do it. The lack of an invasive narrator or HUD pre-parsing the world for the player is a huge aspect of the game. The quietness and loneliness was a major part of the experience of feeling like you were having to figure it all out yourself. It has a specific element of play in its design, with finding out what to do being a core part of playing. In this sense, I think Half-Life was much more influenced by Mario 64 (which came out two years before) than most people realize. Anyway, this specific kind of organic interactive level design was very much not picked up by subsequent shooters. And the wide breadth of genres that Half-Life embedded in its levels (which often changed at quite slow scales - many of the various chapters in the game leaned one way or another) was also something that was not copied by most subsequent shooters, which tended to lean more narrowly towards variations within the shooter (tactical or otherwise) formula, and tended towards being much more directive to keep mainstream players from ever being lost or not knowing what they were supposed to be doing.
The way that Half Life treated pacing, especially in the earlier parts of the game where it works best, is, I think, something else that's often gone overlooked. This shows up in all sorts of large transitions over the course of the game, but I think it's most evident in one specific transition that did massively effect other later games, but often without them understanding why it worked. The earlier parts of the game have, as I said, a more survival horror feel, especially the enemies, who honestly don't seem that different from Quake 1 monsters. This establishes a certain pace and rhythm. This means that when soldiers finally show up (in We've Got Hostiles, I think), and they're positioned in special mini-deathmatch maps, and they move so fast and aggressively, and the game provides them with multiple paths and cover in mini-deathmatch maps, essentially, and they have radio chatter to show off that they are thinking and communicating... all of these features came together to provide an incredible experience in late 1998 about what AI could be in the future of FPS games. And in that sense, that experience totally changed how FPS games would be made going forward... so there, Half-Life was massively influential. BUT, at least from my perspective (as someone who worked on technical game design and AI in FPS games specifically), a lot of what made that experience so incredible at the time was actually about stage craft - about pacing, and about contrast, and about player feedback, and about level design that helped heighten the player experience of how shocking and different and aggressive that new kind of AI fighting was. But those styles of design, this stage craft, did not tend to be copied by later games... and indeed, even Half-Life struggled with it later in the game, where chapters like On a Rail or Surface Tension often dropped the pacing and framing work and just put soldiers in halls or other generic environments over and over, to less appealing aesthetic effect.
Half-Life also really stressed something like themed physical areas that were novel specifically because of large scale, singular interactive features. Here I'm thinking about Blast Pit, with its giant blind tentacle boss that just kind of exists in the middle hub of the level, not confined to an end of level or cutscene. It exists organically. Same with the giant boss who exists in Power Up, who you have to eventually electrocute. Same for the pervasive trains in On a Rail. Half-Life had a tendency of trying to foreground these kinds of novel, space-based interactivities and make this part of how they handle pacing. And again, in my experience, this was not a kind of design that was much picked up on, in a general sense (obviously games like Call of Duty have had set pieces, but there's something distinct, at least in my opinion, about the kinds of large scale, long term interactivity that I'm thinking about in Half-Life)
For more things that were heavily influential... the Barney's following you around as NPC buddies, and doing a credible job of being somewhat helpful and building player empathy was novel for the FPS space at the time, especially how it was implemented. So that was obviously influential. But with that said, the thing that made the Barney's appealing (namely, they were allowed to be killed, and the game didn't end just because they had bad luck or were being idiots) was often not copied for quite a while, meaning many later FPS games forced you to babysit an idiot to make sure the game didn't randomly end. So that was an important difference that was often not picked up.
I honestly think, though, that the most far reaching influence of Half-Life, really, was how it ushered in a kind of FPS design that was vastly more linear, with a much, much higher density of one-off scripted events. The kinds of shooters I was working on prior to the release of Half Life were much more influenced by Doom - so levels tended to have keys and buttons and switches, and they would unfold and interconnect over the course of traversing a level. It's a kind of design that's still popular in games like Dark Souls, although in Doom on a level scope. And this kind of design had a bunch of cool features (especially with Doom's insanely fast running speed), but it meant a lot of backtracking and players getting lost or stuck, and it meshed poorly with rich linear story telling. As a practical matter, Half Life actually still had plenty of this kind of design too. But the idea it really hammered home was the idea of levels being more linear (while hiding that linearity through clever visual design) and then keeping players entertained by experiencing scripted events that were singular. It was a style of design that converged towards the experience of hopping on a haunted house ride and then being pulled along to all the exciting string of encounters. This specific aspect of Half-Life absolutely shaped the game I was working on at the time, and all subsequent FPS games I worked on or was proximate to.
As a practical matter, Half-Life reminds me very much of Super Mario Brothers (as an absolutely pivotal side scroller) and Mario 64 (as a pivotal 3d platformer). In each case, the game was monumentally significant, and had a huge influence on a genre that would come to be dominant... but in each case, it was also the case that the developers were asking like 30 different giant, deep, fascinating questions, doing all sorts of weird stuff, and eventually the genres they cast such a long shadow in settled down to much less particular and unusual designs. Most of the interesting things Half-Life was doing were not picked up by the games it influenced.
Great post!
I pretty much agree with everything, though you're describing a few things that were new to me because I've never been a game developer.
I actually played through Half-Life again last year. The 1998 version, not Black Mesa (that game had annoying mouse acceleration issues). It holds up pretty well, and it's still good fun, even when you take the nostalgia glasses off. The variability in the level design surprised me though. It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together, IMO. Maybe they ran out of time for polish before the deadline. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think I heard Xen suffered from that (Black Mesa tried to "fix" this and utterly ruined it by packing way too much content there - I quit after 2+ hours in Xen, likely only a few hours away from the ending, having grown fatigued of that area). It's kinda crazy to think that HL2 came out just 2 years after Quake, the game whose engine it was partially built off of (I believe id gave Valve access to some Quake 2 engine material too). In 24 months, they had to put all of that together, enough levels to fill 15-20 hours. Compare that to the amount of content that games with 5+ year development times have today, when building using far more mature engines and tools, as well as well-established blueprints for game design.
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