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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. 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 in suspended animation until they are 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 cues 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
World of Warcraft as the Model for the Second American Civil War
On a play through of my childhood gaming favorite, I was thinking about the plot of World of Warcraft. I’ll note to start that I am commenting purely on World of Warcraft vanilla and The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, I never played anything after WotLK until TBC Classic the past two weeks or so.
The setting is post-apocalyptic, though it’s rarely presented as such, instead viewed as a standard fantasy setting. The original Warcraft set up an invasion of an otherwise organized fantasy Azeroth by demon fueled Orcs from another planet. Over succeeding games, the Orcs are defeated and enslaved by the humans, but then coming off that demonic alien invasion, they face a zombie plague which destroys the entire northern human kingdoms of both humans and elves, a slave revolt from the orcs, and a fresh demonic invasion leading to a tentative peace between the humans and orcs and a series of ententes signed between different races, the Horde and the Alliance.
Which brings us to World of Warcraft; The Burning Crusade, and its parallels to America. The Alliance is the red tribe coded grouping, the traditional fantasy heroes: religious normies (Humans), extractive industrialist miners and metalworkers (Dwarves), tech bro engineers (Gnomes), traditional ruralists (Night Elves), and a handful of weird fanatics from abroad (Dranei). The Horde is the blue tribe coded grouping, persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, the traditional fantasy villains reformed: liberated racialized slaves trying to regain some kind of culture after decades of subjugation (Orcs), Caribbean refugees (Trolls), the indigenous (Tauren), downtrodden burnout former criminals (the Forsaken), and metrosexual drug addicted faggy nu-males (Blood Elves). Notably, just like the Democratic Party, the Horde understands itself as symbolically lead by the liberated slaves, but its manpower largely comes from the faggy nu-males; while the Alliance understands itself as lead by the Humans, and the Humans make up the bulk of its manpower. An Orcish Ta Nehisi Coates or Ibram X Kendi would call the Horde the subaltern and the Alliance fascists and falangists; an Azerothian Dread Jim would call the Horde the bioleninist coalition.
((So narratively, we’re going to assume that “level” is largely if not entirely a gameplay concept divorced from storytelling. Else the entire narrative concept collapses: the first twenty levels of the human game are spent oriented around the Defias Brotherhood, their headquarters is the first big group dungeon of the game for Alliance players, by level 50 you could solo it in a few minutes, and it’s a two minute jog from the major human city of Stormwind, so why don’t they just deal with it once and for all in an afternoon and protect two major provinces along the way? It’s an inherent flaw in the RPG story telling method, which can’t be fixed easily or completely, but can safely be dismissed as “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” for our purposes, as otherwise there is no story to examine, and there very clearly is a story being told.))
From the moment the story starts, regardless of faction or race chosen, you begin in a world at war(craft). The safe zones you begin for the first five levels all feature some level of dangerous threat from demon worshippers, rebellious criminals, or monstrous chthonic races. After level 5, it only increases, by level 20 you’re in zones where the vast majority of the land in any area is not controlled by Horde or Alliance forces, instead by any of dozens of other groups. The war between the Horde and Alliance is in theory a bitter struggle for control of Azeroth, in game it is mostly a footnote, PVP is relatively unimportant to gameplay and more of a sideshow from a design perspective. But more than that, both the Horde and Alliance face bigger problems, even in their putative homelands they lack a legitimate monopoly on violence, and instead face rebellion and subversion and invasion across two continents. The Horde and the Alliance do not make up a majority of the forces in Azeroth, not combined and certainly neither individually.
Rather what distinguishes the Horde and Alliance from all the other factions is that they are trying to be a legitimate government of all of Azeroth. Most of the other factions are either regional criminal players or omnicidal maniacs, but both the Horde and the Alliance want to achieve something like normalcy. The conflict between the Horde and the Alliance mostly, after a while, just seems kind of stupid. Why are we even doing this when there are demon worshipping omnicidal religious cults around every corner? And there’s not really a good answer to that question that isn’t, well there’s a long history of racial hatred we’re dealing with here, somebody killed somebody’s grandfather, etc. Sins of the past, lack of forgiveness. Fighting a war that has long become irrelevant in a world we’ve lost control of.
The handful of NGO factions that are neutral, the Argent Dawn and the Cenarion Circle or the Capitalist Goblins, would clearly be able to lead a better world, but no one wants to put them in charge, least of all those factions themselves.
And I think that’s what a second American civil war will look like. Not true balkanization with Texas and New England and California and Appalachia as countries, there are too many blue tribers in red states and too many red tribers in blue states. Rather, a patchwork of war from coast to coast, with every state having bases of both sides and a million small regional violent interests to worry about on top of it all. A world of war.
This undersells the case against the Horde. They’re bulk-importing a new voter base from shitholes beyond the Portal. Sylvanas wants to convert our kids, down to the live-naming rhetoric. Every raid must have an at least population-proportionate share of undergeared Orcs who pull mobs at random. And don’t get me started on the Apothecaries’ response to the shit that came out from the Plaguelands six years ago (leaving aside the question whether it came from the cauldrons or plaguebat meat).
Stormwind doesn't need to be the world police! I'm tired of this administration wasting our gold on fighting in places no one has ever heard of. Who cares about the Warsong Gulch? Why is it that I can't walk between two farms in Goldshire without getting robbed by the Defias Brotherhood, but we're sending our best soldiers overseas to fight in Kalimdor? Have you seen how much grinding it takes to make a Westfall stew today? Our great cities like Gnomeragen are becoming unlivable and the regime wants to blame all our problems on the Horde. I'm tired of talking about the Greenskins! They left, let them live over in Kalimdor if they can, we need to rebuild at home. I don't care if they blockade Ratchet, let the Goblins get the straits open again. Make Stormwind great again.
I don't want to see a single silver sent overseas to fight imagined foreign boogeymen until the government control all of Lakeshire. Support our troops, bring them home!
The conflict between the Horde and the Alliance is real enough, and justified enough, but it makes little sense that the Alliance has a presence in every zone in Azeroth, when they don't exercise a monopoly on violence in any of the zones. If they refocused, they might actually be able to win! But they can't do that, it would undermine the entire project, they exist to fight the Horde, to struggle for control of all Azeroth. Regionalism has no appeal.
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