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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
Halo 1 (don't remember the sequels as much) is also a fundamentally fascist story. A white-coded "Spartan" single-handedly fights off the aliens intent on destroying the universe at the behest of their superstitious foreign cult. The Flood actually infect the humans like a disease. The xenophobia is celebrated and written into the script, with the Oorah US military as the good guys mercilessly slaughtering thousands of aliens.
I understand the sequels try to add more nuance into the politics of the aliens, but a lot of the sincerity of Halo 1 is the unapologetic roleplaying of a xenophobic warrior-ethos that you won't find in modern games. Wolfenstein of course is an anti-fascist story.
Interestingly the main enemy of Halo 1 is the "Covenant", so it is indeed subversive but subversive in a totally different vector than you see in modern games. Destroy the Covenant to save Civilization from the Aliens looking to destroy it!
Edit: Went a little more into the meaning of the Covenant:
Inb4 "Joo obsessed":
From Wikipedia:
So my revisiting of the symbols in Halo 1 with a more mature perspective was on-point before finding verification of that interpretation.
But yeah, one of the biggest set pieces of Halo 1 is the Covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation in which you infiltrate and kill them all! It was subversive but from the opposite angle of Wolfenstein.
I think the novelty of this was part of why Helldivers II did so well. It's unapologetic, but rides the line on being tongue-in-cheek about it.
Yeah I thought about calling out Helldivers II even though I've never played it. My understanding is it's more of a Starship Troopers phenomenon where the writers were trying to subvert the "xenophobic warrior-ethos" but they accidentally made it too cool so that players unironically like it. So I would call that more of a subversion that backfired, in contrast with the sincerity of Halo 1.
Or maybe, most likely of all, they were trying to cash-in on that pulse while having plausible deniability!
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