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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
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.
Maybe this is just tedious nitpicking, but... was that actually new? Did it feel new?
I cannot recall ever leaving the protagonist's head in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D or Marathon. I don't seem to recall that happening in Descent much (I guess short cutscenes of your spaceship escaping?), or in System Shock. Quake doesn't take you out of the marine's head, and Dark Forces never breaks up its gameplay. All its in-level storytelling is environmental. I don't think you leave Bond's head much in Goldeneye. Maybe I'm crazy here, but seeing the entire game from the first person perspective seems to me like it was industry standard in 1998. Games after Half-Life seem to have been the same, to me? 1999's Aliens versus Predator does the same thing; it's not until 2001's AVP2 that they introduced story cutscenes. If anything, I feel like it's leaving the player character's head for a cutscene that was the innovation!
Are you counting a text screen introducing the mission before it starts as 'the camera leaving the protagonist's head'? Because thinking back to the time, I don't remember feeling like Half-Life did anything new with the camera, and looking back today... I'm sorry, I just don't see it.
I am trying my best not to be biased. I admit that I don't like Half-Life and, no insult to you intended, I find the praise profusely heaped upon it somewhat irritating. Of course, whether or not I like Half-Life is a completely different question to whether it was an influential game, and I am probably subconsciously motivated by just not wanting a game that I didn't enjoy to be important.
Even so, it is nonetheless true that even doing my best to set all bias aside, when I think about the shooters that were popular in the years immediately before Half-Life, and I think about the shooters that were popular immediately afterwards, I don't feel a big difference.
I do see a difference between what I think of as the early shooters, through the 90s, and then the post-2000 modern shooters. I can see the difference between, say, Quake II (1997) and Doom III (2004). Something changed in shooters around the turn of the millennium, and the two most famously influential games in that transitional period are Half-Life (1998) and Halo (2001). I suppose I'm just, in the end, not sure that Half-Life was the cause of this transition or of it was one among a number of games experimenting with the genre (because, let's be honest, the shooter genre had gotten pretty stale by 1997), and it was the most famous in hindsight.
Subjectively from my end, the key thing, I guess, is that I remember playing Half-Life in the 90s, getting bored after a level or two, and thinking, "meh, that was whatever". It felt to me at the time as just another one of the interchangeable shooters in a genre that seemed increasingly out of ideas. But then playing Halo in 2001 felt like playing something from the future. It seemed revolutionary to me. Now, maybe that's just because of the X-Box, or because something had changed in me in the years 1998-2001 which made me receive it differently, or some other alchemy of chance and circumstance. But for better or for worse, that is what I remember.
The innovation is that in Half-Life, cutscenes are happening around you while you remain in first-person, and they don't all involve fighting, and they're all animated (instead of being "switches", text or terminals). The entire train ride at the start was so impressive, it showed you how the game engine was capable of doing much more than shooting and flipping switches. NPCs in shooters before were just linked to rudimentary routines that would dictate their actions all of the time, but in Half-Life their actions could be scripted and they could be animated to do all sort of movements that were not in their routines, which means at any moment you could be surprised by turning a corner and seeing one do something you've never seen them do.
The enemy AI was interesting in that the routines felt more organic than anything else before. The smarter enemies had rudimentary concepts of team tactics, and seemed to have an understanding of using cover. Halo would develop that much further. But outside of those moments, of that trick of showing the cutscenes in first person, and those carefully prepared moments where you fought the military in a space they could use to showcase their tactics. I'll grant you the gameplay wasn't too special. Guns didn't feel great to me, and the map was just a long corridor disguised to not look like one when everything's said and done. But those two tricks were extremely impressive in 1998.
I remember one of the things that really struck me about Halo in its day was that it didn't have bosses. It had a small selection of enemies, and it then remixed them over and over in different scenarios, but unlike most earlier shooters, it did not have boss monsters, or specific boss scenarios.
Halo also, to its credit, mostly dispensed with exploration or keycard-hunting as a core mechanic. If I think about classic 90s shooters, the Dooms and Quakes, the combat in them was often repetitive, or just an obstacle while the core gameplay was exploring a maze of near-identical corridors and getting keys for doors. In Halo you always know where you are going (and you usually have an NPC voice, Cortana or Guilty Spark, ready to remind you). The challenge is getting from Point A to Point B in the face of determined opposition.
It's not unique in this - I suppose you're right and Half-Life had an earlier form of this, and then I guess F. E. A. R. did it even better - but it was done quite well for the time. The infamous 'four seconds of fun' idea paid off. If the basics of gunplay against the standard enemies are fun, you can re-use and remix those gameplay elements over and over to create consistently compelling scenarios.
I guess it depends on what you call a boss. I've been playing Halo CE recently (a coincidence, I started a bit before the conversation here about Halo came up), and the first time they bring up hunters (in the Truth and Reconcilliation mission) sure feels like a boss fight: you fight a bunch of Covenant on the way to the ship, you take high ground (with Covenenant turrets to use) around the lift to the ship. You keep mowing down the troops that keep coming down until instead of bringing down a normal squad (one elite with a bunch of grunts and jackals) they bring down two bigger aliens that the turrets are not able to take down, so you have to get down from the advantageous position and engage them from close range. It wasn't hard for me because by now, from having played a bunch of Halo before, exactly how to dance with the Hunters, but to a new Halo player, they might have felt like a boss fight.
From my recollection, they keep using Hunters more or less like that through the game and the series, as sort of a capstone to escalating fights.
Hunters are a tougher enemy, certainly, but the hunters you fight in Halo are all the standard model. There's no Halo equivalent of, say, the Makron in Quake II, or Mohc in Dark Forces, or the titular character in Kingpin.
Later Halo games have named bosses - Tartarus in Halo 2, Guilty Spark in Halo 3, and so on - but the first one always avoided that. Wiki does not list any bosses for the first game, if that counts for anything.
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Arguably hunters are mini-bosses, especially on the higher difficulties. And there was the unique elite with gold armor and the plasma sword—I think in “Silent Cartographer”—but he was easily dispatched with a single plasma grenade so it’s hard to call him a true boss.
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Hrm! I'm curious as to what games have your favorite guns?
From roughly that era: Doom, Dark Forces, Quake and Soldier of Fortune.
Doom: the shotguns, chaingun and rocket launcher
Quake: double barelled shotgun and the grenade launcher
Dark Forces: the stormtrooper rifle
Soldier of Fortune: about everything
To me, gunfeel in games is half in the gun's sound and animation, and half in the targets' reaction to being shot. Half-Life's guns to me feel like they all miss one or both of those aspects. I know people love headshotting the headcrabs with the shotgun, but to me the hit felt spongy, like it never connects quite right. Maybe it's a limitation of the engine, you couldn't quite draw the kind of gore explosion of Doom's 2D sprites in a 3D FPS until the improvements in Soldier of Fortune, and polygonal gibs like in Quake were a bit goofy for a game that otherwise tried to look realistic.
Man, I did love the stormtrooper rifle in Dark Forces, though I don't know how much of that is because it perfectly captures the feel of the rifle in the films. I can't imagine that hurt, at least.
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We agree on what gunfeel consists of, but I think HL has some very good ones. Blasting aliens with the shotgun feels excellent. The huge revolver too. I struggle to think of any examples of downright bad gunplay in HL. I think it's generally quite spot on. Maybe not quite on the level of SoF, which was pretty epic.
Edit: typo.
Half Life 2 is one the few games that capture how “ugly” assault rifles and grenades feel in real life. It’s like the video game equivalent of Heat
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In a number of cases, that was a good thing.
The combination of puzzles and highly-costly information is unfun. A number of the puzzles require you to commit suicide in order to gain the necessary intel. The one where you have to lure an alien into a Tesla coil, for instance - AFAIK, the only way to figure out that the Tesla coil is there is to run past the alien, get cornered in the Tesla coil, and die like a bitch, hopefully not before you figured out what the bad-graphics thing you're looking at actually was.
Puzzles plus permanently-missable information are also not nice. The part where you have to fire the rocket into the alien, for instance, has the main clue come from a Barney, who is hard to hear and AFAIK only gives it once - and you can easily save after that, without a way to progress.
And I mean, it's not like there weren't puzzle games already! LucasArts had been doing them forever, and Zork Nemesis was a 3D puzzle game in '96. Half-Life was only an innovation in trying to be both an FPS and a puzzle game at the same time, and frankly it's an object lesson in why they often don't play nice together.
(I will say, a lot of the problems it has were obviously fixable, just not with the technology - particularly the graphics - of the time. In-game maps - even literal floor diagrams, like the ones present in buildings IRL for evacuation purposes - would have helped so much.)
On the other hand, I will note one thing about HL, and particularly to @OliveTapenade - Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod.
Okay, that's absolutely a fair point. Counter-Strike was the Defense of the Ancients before Defense of the Ancients, and that was incredibly influential in creating PC multiplayer shooters as we know them today.
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As someone who was a teenager gamer when these games came out, I'll add on to agreement with this. Halo was certainly a great, innovative accomplishment in singleplayer fps design, but it doesn't really compare to Half Life in that respect. It'd be like comparing Half Life to Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.
I will say, though, that HL2's ushering in of the era of rollercoaster singleplayer FPSs was an utter travesty. Even as a teenager, I could recognize how vastly inferior HL2 was to 1 in level design, making everything feel completely artificial in how it felt like Valve was sitting over my shoulder and ordering me to "Go there, not there, only here, etc." instead of shoving me into an immersive setting where I have to use my wits and tools to map out the terrain and navigate it successfully. Unsurprisingly, Ravenholm was by far my favorite part of HL2 (and I have very little love for horror games or horror tropes), and I still consider HL2E2 as the best singleplayer FPS I've played, with only maybe Metroid Prime being in the conversation as a competitor.
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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)_/¯
TV Tropes has a YMMV trope called "Disappointing Last Level" for when the end of the game doesn't live up to the same standard as previous sections. The ending of Half-Life where Gordon travels to an alien planet called Xen is such a notorious letdown that this trope used to be called "Xen Syndrome".
IMO it wasn't just Xen. There's some odd sections before that, like when you're going through the hydraulic stamping machines and when you're calling in artillery fire outdoors. Those were some that stood out to me.
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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(correction: HL) 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.HL2? You mean, HL (1998) came out two years after Quake (1996). I heard the same thing; HL was built on a mix of Q and Q2 engines.
Too many cooks in the kitchen these days, maybe. It's a little odd how much more time everything is taking. Implementing a set of ideas shouldn't take 3x longer just because you need more advanced graphics. More hires should be able to get that task done in a set amount of time, and they do hire tons of people these days.
Similarly to how more women should be able to birth a child in a set amount of time.
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I do legitimately think Half-Life is a groundbreaking shooter, and fun and engaging enough to be worth playing through to the end. I loved Half-Life 2 on release, but a lot of that came down to novelty: it was the first successful video game with an even passably realistic physics engine, and the facial animation was (if you'll pardon the pun) jaw-droppingly impressive – it still looks better than plenty of games released 10 or 20 years later. But the way the game introduces a whole new mechanics set every two hours is a bit gimmicky. I rather think it peaks early on in the fourth mission on the riverboat.
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Excellent comment, but I'd like to push back a little regarding the EU material. Eric Nylund's tie-in novels are some legitimately good Mil-SF in their own right and I feel like this live-action promo for Halo: ODST and the Foward Unto Dawn web serial are likely the closest thing to a sincere and earnest adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers that we are going to get.
My recollection is that most of the Halo novels are what Warhammer fans refer to as 'bolter porn'. I remember liking The Fall of Reach, which was a perfectly adequate and entertaining page-turner, but then looking at The Flood, Contact Harvest, Ghosts of Onyx, and so on, the quality decreased quickly. Greg Bear's Forerunner trilogy is by reputation decent, but it also has pretty much nothing to do with Halo.
I think it would be fair to say that the Halo series is about gameplay, first and foremost, and its extended 'lore' is pretty forgettable. I know they try to do something interesting with the UNSC being evil, but as far as the games are concerned (or at least the original trilogy), "humans good, aliens bad" is all you need to know.
(The UNSC does have to be pretty sketchy if they were the kind of people who kidnapped children in order to make brainwashed surgically-enhanced super-soldiers to put down a colonial rebellion, even prior to contact with the Covenant. In the original game manual, it is not clear whether SPARTAN-IIs predate contact with the Covenant or not, and you can read them as being a desperation project in the face of repeated defeats at alien hands. But the novels put paid to that. I bring this up because the top-level post praises Halo's moral clarity and lack of ambiguity, but in terms of the EU, it didn't even make it through a single novel - technically released prior to the original game! - before telling us "actually the human government is evil too".)
There was a reason I called out Eric Nylund's novels specifically. He is to Halo fiction what Dan Abnett and Rob Rath are to 40K, they understand what makes the games and the setting appealing and they elevate it.
And yes the UNSC is shady and corrupt, but the important thing is that our heroes are not. "I am going to do the right thing, orders be damned" is a recurring motif in both the games and novels. and for my part at least, that is a major reason why I find certain choices made in the later games and media so problematic. Like I said, I don't want nihilism and moral ambiguity from my fiction. I get enough of that from studying history. What I want is something to inspire and/or aspire to.
Insofar as we're still talking culture war, I would argue that part of the experience of growing up in the 2000s in the West has been that of being disenchanted by institutions. The story of the past couple of decades is that of a Western population gradually learning that all the authoritative bodies of our society are at best fallible and at worst corrupted or depraved - state, church, media, academia, all seem to have left their missions behind. That's a fertile environment for stories about people created by or serving corrupt systems who nonetheless have to defy those systems to stand for what's right.
The untrustworthiness of the UNSC and especially ONI is part of that, but you see the same trend more widely. Captain America gets betrayed by America. Heroes must struggle against their own institutions. Not that rebellion was never valorised in the past, obviously, but I remember commenting that even in Star Wars, in the 70s/80s Rebel leadership was portrayed as consistently trustworthy and capable, which would be less likely now. Outside the realm of fiction, the impulse obviously runs through both left-populism and right-populism, through both Occupy and MAGA, and given free rein turns into conspiracy theories like QAnon. That omnipresent feeling that you cannot trust authorities or institutions is a feature of our day.
Halo is quite an early example, but this would be consistent with Nylund/Bungie establishing early on that no large-scale authorities are to be wholly trusted. Halo 2 goes even stronger on the idea with the Arbiter's story - it's as if they're saying that, even if you fight for the bad guys, if you behave in a consistently honourable, truth-seeking way, that will inevitably lead you into conflict with institutions.
Maybe it his is one of those cultural gaps but I feel like in order to become disenchanted one must have first been enchanted and that was just never my my experience. Where I'm from it was simply taken as a given that the authorities fallible fallible and more often than not corrupt. From Short Circuit to Aliens and Die Hard I grew up watching movies where "the government" or "the company" were the bad guys.
I feel like a big difference between you and I is that unlike you I grew up sincerely believing that if I behaved with honor and integrity I would inevitably come into conflict with the powers that be.
I don't know how much you know about me or even recognise my name, but I think in my case there's a bit more complexity to it than that?
On the one hand, I grew up as a high-achieving upper-middle class posh white boy, so if I think about all my schooling, it came with the implicit message that if I do well, conform, act politely, etc., I will be rewarded. Even religiously, as much as I had the resources to understand that friendship with the world is enmity with God, that we must not conform ourselves to the world, and so on, the emphasis of most of my education was that nonetheless sacred institutions are basically good and trustworthy. (Typically the way it went was that we, institutionally, are not conforming ourselves to the world, by being good activist left-wingers whereas 'the world' is all that nasty stupid stuff the Bush administration is doing.)
On the other hand, those religious resources did exist, and I can also think of plenty of stories, even very lowbrow ones, that I internalised and which were about the failure of authorities to recognise virtue. As Sturm Brightblade teaches us (I was a D&D and Dragonlance fan, alas), the good are not recognised in their own time, and even the order may lose its way. As I grew older I became more aware of the ways in which the wider humanist tradition recognises this fact. I've been fond, on the Motte, of Tanner Greer's essay - "the world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living".
I think there has always been a tension here, and as I have grown older, I have shifted more towards the failures of the world. The idea that you can behave well and be rewarded by the respect of others and worldly success seems increasingly farcical to me. Still, overall this is not so much an overturning of my younger self's worldview as, I hope, a refinement of it. There is no perfect authority to pledge myself to. The orders of the world can only, at best, imperfectly reflect the good, and even that is usually too much to ask. The challenge is to seek the good, and to do good, even knowing that the systems we inhabit are irremediably broken.
To stick with the culture war element, this struck me forcibly reading Rod Dreher on Orban's defeat. For all that Dreher was the man who preached the Benedict Option, who warned that secular power was an unworthy lure and that people should not put their faith in princes or in presidents, you can see that at his core he is a man who craves a righteous authority. Once it was the Catholic Church, then that failed him. More recently it's been Orban and conservative nationalism. Now that Orban's failed, he's coming apart again. He cannot reconcile himself to the idea that the authority is broken, that the authority will always be broken, and that the task of the individual is to stand for wholeness regardless.
In short, this:
is correct.
If you try to be the one straight thing in a bent world, you will always come into conflict with those who would bend you. The tides of worldly power flow and reverse and anybody who finds themselves always moving with the tide is either an opportunist or a coward. A life of principle always leads one into conflict with power.
First off, I don't know much about you but I do recognize your name.
...and funnily enough the Dragonlance Chronicles were very much a part my formative years. Specifically the Doom Brigade and the Time of the Twins trilogy. From my perspective the idea that "the world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living" ties in neatly with what I have said previously about how " the post-modern liberal ethos of emancipation, self actualization, and the maximization of one's earthly/material material conditions and status is simply incompatible with forming healthy relationships and families."
As for the the bit about how...
...on this much we are in complete agreement.
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At some point "sincerity" was rebranded "cringe" and caring about anything became a shameful public display. Or at least, certain demographics are condemned for caring about anything. Others get to have public meltdowns over trivial matters and are lauded.
But you and I, when we care about things it's "cringe". Even existential things like "Will my children inherit my nation, or be dispossessed?"
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The whole series (up until that one sequel. You know which one) is a perfect example of building on success after success, improving your product whilst maintaining the core of its appeal. This is something most series (including TV and movies, not just games) of the last, I dunno, 15 years have really failed to achieve.
And the Apotheosis is in Halo: Reach, in my genuine opinion, the one that you went into knowing you were gonna end up losing, but the whole endgame was to get the Pillar of Autumn off-planet to kick off the series of events that led to ultimate victory. So its not just perishing in a heroic last stand, you get to perish in a last stand while, as the player, knowing that the sacrifice achieves something very meaningful.
ODST is my personal favorite because it breaks the power fantasy a bit and puts you in a position where you're actually NOT an unadulterated force of nature, your arrival on the battlefield would not singlehandedly shift the tides, and indeed you're kind of in survival mode most of the time because some of the enemies are a major threat to you. Lets you appreciate how dangerous the Spartans are, and also fills in the lore to remind you that there's a whole-ass military involved in this war beyond the special forces. I, personally am a sucker for video games that put you on the ground level and have you experience major events up close even while you, personally, are not the catalyst of said events. ODST scratched a lot of itches for me.
You also didn't mention one of the more iconic and important parts of the game: The Flood.
Their introduction is like the perfect "and then things got worse" late-game plot device to amp the difficulty, and of course a perfect answer/resolution to the existence of the Halo rings themselves.
I was consciously trying to avoid spoilers and specific plot/character-beats to focus on broader themes, and as I said I have opinions on how the franchise has been handled since Howard and Griesemer (the original project leads) stepped down.
That said, I agree with everything you've said. I almost feel like Halo: Reach was an attempt to go back and say, if we were were setting out to make the original Halo today with all the knowledge, skills, and resources we've accumulated over the last decade what would that game look like?
...and as you say, it is "the Apotheosis", the core appeal and themes of the entire franchise distilled down into their purest form.
The great thing about Reach is that it ends with the beginning of Halo 1, so it forms an infinite loop. The correct game to play after Reach is Halo 1 again, and we can go on pretending no other game in the series exists.
You could adopt the same approach with the Star Wars OT and Rogue One.
Very nearly so! Except -- Rogue One was made under Disney (and also came out after The Force Awakens), so it's a bit gerrymandering to compare it to Halo. Still, like most conventional star wars fans I actually enjoyed Rogue One.
Also I am obligated to say how much I like both Rogue One and Reach, and the fact that their stories are so similar. Nerds on the internet talk a lot about this.
I think there's something intrinsically appealing about the plucky underdogs pulling off a long-odds victory amidst a larger defeat... and of course getting a heroic last stand/death.
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I love pedantry and homonyms, and this is a meagre response to a good post. With that out of the way.
Musical cues, like signs or signals to act, not lines to wait in. Wait for your cue, not to be confused with waiting in a queue.
correction made, I am glad that you enjoyed the post.
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As an early Wolf3d, Doom and Quake FPS PC gamer I always kind of sneered at Halo as one of those console gamer things that were beneath a man of culture like myself.
Sounds like I missed out.
Eh. In many ways I think Halo is overrated, and The LIbrary might be one of the worst FPS levels I have ever played in my entire life. That said, I think JeSuisCharlie accurately characterizes it's strengths. I actually haven't played a Halo game since I couch cooped Halo 3 when it came out. I meant to replay them recently, and then my XBox 360 died as soon as I took it out of storage. Alas.
I could probably spring for the Master Chief Collection on Steam whenever it's on one of it's frequent sales.
Halo had little competition in the "horror game" genre, and the flood is a great horror game enemy. However I believe it was a bad FPS enemy.
I personally hated the flood as an enemy in the halo games. The game basically conditions you to fight the covenant and then does a switcheroo where all the standard tactics and tools backfire when used against the flood.
Covenant weapons that are stronger against energy shields and weaker against flesh. The hardest enemies had energy shields.
The radar was suddenly useless because it was flooded with signals.
Most enemies would engage at distance and if you had worse ranged weapons you needed to close the distance and flank them. The flood just bum rushed you, the right move was always to just immediately start beck peddling.
The flood would resurrect dead bodies. Which works as a jump scare the first few times and then just requires you to bash bodies laying around so you don't get ambushed from behind while backpedaling.
The covenant enemies in the game were perfection though. They'd support each other with covering fire, engage you at their optimal distances. The elites would use cover to regenerate their energy shields forcing you to get close to break their cover or use well timed grenades to finish them off. If you didn't kill off their support units first they'd tear you apart while the elites recovered.
Ammo for any given weapon was often limited enough that long engagements would force you to switch weapons. You start the engagement with a good long range weapon, and then close distance and use a secondary short range weapon and melee attacks to cleanup.
Most covenant weapons were not hit scan, so there was some ability to dodge. But the needler would send a horrifying swarm of tracking needles after you that made finding cover very urgent.
Wasn't that the point, though? To differentiate them, and force the player to go through a bit of panic when what they've been trained to do the entire game suddenly doesn't work? Seems in line with how that situation should feel in the moment from an in-game perspective.
It works to scare you and make you feel weak in the moment. Which is great horror game gameplay. And I don't dispute that they were good at having that freakout moment. But as an FPS enemy they were shit.
Once you know the flood though ... they suck. Nearly every flood fight is exactly the game. Explosives to soften them up, they won't even dodge them. Backpedal the whole time. Use human ammo/weapons.
Whereas every covenant fight felt like a unique fight. Even replaying the same level and varying the starting conditions a little can make a fight feel totally different. It might turn into a close up slugfest. You might go melee if the opportunity presents itself. Or you are hanging back and exchanging precise fire to whittle them down. Or the vehicle fights! Whole new dimension of combat with the covenant, but the winning strategy with the flood is the same as ever, backpedal and blast away.
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Yeah, that was another thing that annoyed me about Halo, is the enemy AI went the wrong direction.
Since it keeps getting compared to Half-Life, I'll keep going. Half-Life introduces fairly dumb enemies, and then introduces smarter ones. You get to warm up on relatively dumb xeno-fauna, and then they throw marines at you, which talk, coordinate, dodge grenades, flush you out, flank you, etc. Now I know people have dissected how that worked and a lot of it was scripted to create the illusion of intelligent enemies. But it was still a really good illusion.
By contrast, Halo starts you off with really good enemy AI in the form of elites, and then halfway through the game swaps them out for retards that bum rush right at you. A sin doubly compounded by the fact that the game checkpoint saves, and you are consistently stuck in really annoying locked arenas fighting off boring hoards of flood. I positively loathed it.
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood. Maybe the encounters were designed smarter, or at least less annoyingly. Maybe they changed the game mechanics to make it less annoying somehow. I think I remember Halo's health mechanic got dropped between games replaced almost entirely by shields? Whatever the reasons, after the flood appear in Halo 1, it's a far worse game for it.
I have a similar impression, and I think it's probably just that god-awful library level in Halo 1, which Bungie learned enough from not to repeat.
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Halo 2 and 3 had levels that seemed to either be entirely flood or entirely covenant, and I just avoided playing the flood levels for the most part. So my annoyance was greatly lessened, but I still felt the completionist urge to beat them all on legendary difficulty.
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The Flood are indeed the weakest part of Halo, and it's a shame because what they suggest to me is that Bungie didn't realise what made Halo good. The Covenant are the best part of Halo, because they constitute a small range of interesting enemy units, with good AI, that can be remixed together to create combat challenges. They use basic tactics and feel fun to fight.
Swapping from them to the Flood, which only have three types of unit, all of which do nothing other than run directly at you and attack, is crushingly disappointing. The first mission where you meet them is a great little Aliens spoof, but... ugh, the Library. They get old very quickly.
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I would counter by observing that the things you hate about the Flood is a large part of what makes them work narratively and thematically. Again, the experience of playing the game reinforces its narrative themes and vice-a-versa.
I totally agree with your point about it being a great game and a great narrative.
My dislike of the flood is a personal preference. I just don't like horror games.
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If you like Halo even only a little bit, it's a shockingly good deal considering how much game you get for (often much) less than the price of one.
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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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Love this thank you for writing it. If you ever want to play some WoW let me know.
Which version do you play? Right now I'm just playing TBC Anniversary, but I think my old main WoW characters should still be there, albeit back at 80.
Lately I’m playing on turtle wow but I’m thinking of hoping on the whitemane cataclysm server when it opens hah.
I prefer private servers because, well, free, and they have boosted xp and convenience stuff. Plus blizzard banned my account from back when I was a teen for no reason I can discern and I haven’t been able to get it back, so fuckkem.
I have to confess my ignorance and say I have no idea how a private server works.
Basically you download their launcher, make an account and go. It’s quite easy!
You left out the part where over a period of time the private server is highly likely to devolve as the politics between the mods unfolds and evolves. Alas. :(
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Very interesting. And notably the "faggy nu-males" happen to have many hot chicks as their coevals. If one notices that sort of thing.
To shift fictions for a second, Stephen King's excellent short story Nona from the collection Skeleton Crew is essentially an allegory of the 60s dynamic of guys being drawn into the world of leftist radical violence by hot women.
I felt like I had read that book but I'm probably thinking of Night Shift. Anyway now will read.
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People often forget that video games as an avenue for storytelling is a fairly recent thing in the full analysis of its history. John Carmack (one of the co-creators of the original Doom) once said: “… story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. You assume it’s there somewhere in the background but it’s not primarily why you watch it…”
I never thought Halo had a great story - I thought it was boring at best; but it was most definitely fun playing when it originally came out. And when it spawned off Rooster Teeth and the creation of Red vs. Blue, its capacity for storytelling expanded into other areas.
Childhood favorites of mine like MK2 on the Sega Genesis were iconic for the blood and violence every physically energetic young boy could exact on his opponent. Steve Ritchie had one of the greatest in-game voices ever performed for a video game. He was actually a legend in the pinball scene who once said he regretted playing the voice of Shao Kahn; because he would go to pinball events and conferences and nobody in the Q&A ever wanted to ask him about pinball stuff; fans of his came because they always wanted to ask him about the voice of Shao Kahn. I think overtime he came to accept it with a smile and just go with the flow.
Oh, great. We're now at the age where we have to explain who John Carmack is.
I had to explain to a programmer coworker recently who John Carmack is. Made me feel so fucking old.
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As a zoomer, I'm more familiar with him via this quote than I am with his games. Though I have played a little bit of DOOM.
How does a zoomer choose a Star Control reference for a username?
It's a classic video game that is still very playable today vis-a-vis graphics and can be obtained for free from Steam as Ur-Quan Masters, I don't find it particularly surprising.
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There's a neat old blogpost that gets at how the porn movie grade story still has a hurdle to clear.
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How did I only just now realize that the Mortal Kombat voice is also the Black Knight voice.
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Well put, and refreshing as intended. Truly great games, and I agree with the sincerity and simplicity. I was recently thinking about this quote from the author of Redwall on how he approaches his good guys and villains:
I think this is the key area where modern narratives have lost the plot. Without a backdrop if simple black and white narrative, deconstructive takes just become overly meta BS. It was interesting at first, now it has devoured the platform it stood on.
Also, from a gameplay standpoint, the Forge mode and custom maps on Halo 3 was genius. In general, like with Warcraft 3 or Skyrim, when a game allows for custom maps it often goes incredibly well, and a ton of genius works get produced. I had a blast on those custom maps back in the day.
Its funny you should mention that because ironically I feel like the original Halo trilogy has one of the better executed "are the baddies really the baddies?" twists in recent memory.
Spoilers for a 20-year-old game & tie-in novel, but you spend a decent portion of Halo 2 playing from the Covenant's perspective, and it was a complete blindside. That said, the reveal that that the two sides have been manipulated into fighting each other by malicious (some might say daemonic) forces allows the real "baddies" to be be "the baddies", and the individual characters who valued life and fought with honor to still be "the goodies" of a sort even if circumstances had placed them on opposing teams.
I think Halo has a genuine love for people who, out of a sense of principle, heroically place themselves in the way of danger for the sake of their people. The potential for sympathetic Elites, therefore, was there from the very first game. Elites are pretty obviously to the Covenant what you are to the humans, so even if they are on the opposite side, they are displaying the virtues that this game esteems - courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, honour. Once the lies were exposed, of course they became co-heroes.
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Fair I totally forgot most of the plot I have to admit. But still, Halo FEELS like one of those stories at least.
I agree that it FEELS like one of those stories and because our heroes, the Master Chief, Sgt Johnson, the Arbiter, Et Al are all unambiguously heroic.
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And then he wrote Folgrim the Otter, Veil the Ferret, and perpetual fan-favorite Romsca.
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Oh wow, I remember playing Halo with my young nephew lo, these many years ago.
We didn't manage to finish the game since he had to go back home with his parents but it was fun.
And I still think Pillar of Autumn is a very beautiful name for a ship, when the tendency (both then and now) was to go for the likes of Terran Defence Force Starship GrimDark or HumansHellYeah!
I can't forgive Microsoft for making its first stab at virtual assistant so annoying and usurping the name of Cortana to do so.
Bungie is a master at epic sounding names.
Treads Upon Stars
One Thousand Voices
Patron of Lost Causes
Thistle and Yew
Extraordinary Rendition
You left out one of my favorites. Forward Unto Dawn
Something like the Culture names, which again are like those from M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device.
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Not Microsoft's first offence on this point. Remember when Clippy wasn't a misaligned AI. (I suppose the OG Microsoft Clippy was misaligned and artificial, but it definitely wasn't intelligent)
It was amazing how they got Clippy so wrong. It should have been a helpful tool but instead it was annoying, useless, and misleading.
Foreshadowing what was to come, I suppose. Does anyone in fact use Copilot?
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There's also a more esoteric level in what's going on. I recommend Mandalore gaming's Marathon Review/Bungie Rabbithole series on youtube, though it does review just about everything except Halo. Bungie were very into the heroic myth, the archetype that Masterchief plays into. His name, John 117, is a reference to the book of revelations (written by John) 1:17. The verse reads, "I am the first and the last" and sure enough he is the last Spartan II...
Bungie comes by it honestly, given how they cut thier teeth on such luminaries as 'Pathways to Darkness' and later on 'Marathon', which the first teasers for Halo hinted directly at. And both of those games are quite the rabbit hole in and of themselves...
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I am familiar with Mandalore's work and I am a fan.
I thought so but I didn't spy any links to it in the post so I thought it was worth bringing up.
I had a bunch of additional stuff that I would have liked to have mentioned, but I also wanted to get the post done in a reasonable amount of time.
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For years, my favourite video game ever was the game Bungie released immediately prior to this one, Oni, a Western spiritual adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I believe Oni and Halo were developed concurrently, to the point that many art assets, sound effects and musical cues are used in both. Other overlaps in storytelling (e.g. AIs who have rebelled against their owners are said to have gone "rampant") imply that the two games are set in the same universe, to the point that Oni may be a stealth prequel to Halo.
Oni's art design, soundtrack and storytelling still hold up. Alas, I can't say the same about the gameplay. Double-tap the W key to run? What were they thinking?
Rampancy shows up in Marathon, too; it's kinda a general theme for that era of Bungie. Would make things interesting as a fan theory, though.
Oni's weird control scheme comes downstream from the melee and grappling combat, and how they borrowed from 2d beat-em-ups like River City Ransom. If you played the game like that, it worked reasonably well, if a bit repetitive toward the last missions. It's still nearly twenty years out of date compared to z-targeting from Legend of Zelda or the intentionality and diverolls from Souls-likes, but a melee-only run doesn't feel awful. It's the combination of gun combat and too-big rooms that push you to playstyles where it's incredibly annoying.
The story was fantastic, though. The Doadan is a great metaphor and plot device, and it's one of the few games to make a decision like Griffin feel genuinely right one way or the other.
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The single-player/co-op experience was pretty masterful, although I'm with the people who got too bogged down by the downer Flood levels to look forward to replaying it very much. I can't remember the specifics, but for the first playthrough and story-wise, the Flood were definitely a cool part though.
But in-person multiplayer Halo was crazy, just for how many more people it brought into gaming. I was loving broodwar and unreal tournament, and didn't fully get the appeal of PvP Halo 1 (other than the sticky grenades which were peak). But it was pretty awesome how galvanized people were to link up like 15 xboxes between a whole floor of college dorm rooms for it. Or working at a movie theater in the summer, having most of the employees show up at 1am to set up 3 xboxes and projectors to play on the giant screen. This kind of normie / less-smelly console version of LAN parties, where many girls actually found it cool, was a strange brief time (right before xbox live & online console gaming took off).
POV: we have master chief at home (CoD)
Wonder if it was due to achieving relatively strong balance for the weapons selection.
You had interesting and unique weapons for any given playstyle you prefer. Snipers at distance, middle-distance/jack of all trades assault rifles, shotgun for close range, and a decent variety of pistols that were actually impactful on their own and not just backup weapons. Sticky grenades, as mentioned.
And of course, the Gravity Hammer and Energy Sword.
And fun vehicular combat.
This was before online multiplayer games were dominated by "THE META" such that certain weapons just get binned as nonviable if everyone else is playing 'optimally.'
If you wanted to run around like a madman crushing skulls with a hammer, you went for it.
Yeah I think the strength was being quite well polished and minimal/tight, from long range all the way down to melee rifle-butt/pistol-whip. My main memory is how slick it felt jumping in to drive/ride the warthog around with the animations, 3rd-person camera transition, and acceleration physics (which is basically how it looks to this day in modern call of duty I think).
But around ~2002-2004, there was also just some level of mainstream social proof / accessibility / network-effect that had Halo punching way above its weight for how fun it actually was. The bros at parties would be playing it, similar to how poker next popped off and became huge from being on ESPN in 03-04. But when I'm back at home, I'm not firing up the xbox, I have way better stuff to play on the internet. Maybe if not UT or starcraft, I'm jumping back onto Tribes 2 with base-vs-base strategic capture-the-flag mode, with better variety maps, vehicles, weapons & class load-outs, and super skill-expression 'skiing' movement and spinfusor/mortar projectile shots. Ultimately the 'console peasant' snobbery wasn't wrong for quite some time.
Oh man, the warthog was such fun. Me and nephew managed to crash into everything, fall over every cliff, etc. until we figured out the optimum controls but it was so great that we didn't mind 😁
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I don't know if this is true across modern media, but modern Hollywood is definitely poisoned by irony. If you won't take your movie seriously, why should I?
From Lays of Ancient Rome:
Sadly, I was never able to play Halo (or other critically acclaimed FPSs like Bioshock) due to an unusually high sensitivity to motion sickness; I wanted to throw up after 30 minutes.
I really wanted to work Macaulay's poem into the post somewhere but in the end I elected to call it and just ship what I had in the interests of getting something out.
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I am not super prone to motion sickness in general, but I have historically dealt with it in first-person video games. Modern, high-FPS (120+ frames per second) gaming monitors really do help.
Edit: Also, adaptive synchronization, where a game doesn't drop to a de facto 30 FPS as soon as it falls below 60, is a big part of that.
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On TV Tropes they call this "gameplay and story integration" as opposed to "segregation".
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While it’s on a completely different plane (although both are notably enjoyed by stoners) I think sincerity is also the key to the durable appeal of SpongeBob.
SpongeBob came of era in the shadow of peak Simpsons and was really the opposite — a totally straight and earnest vibe.
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Ludonarrative dissonance is, as far as i can tell, fully accepted terminology at this point. Clint saw a phenomena that we all felt and put a (kinda nerdy) name to it. Culture was formed when he decided he wanted to talk about why we kill everyone who looks at us funny in games yet we are the protagonist.
Anyway, Halo 3 was the only one i played a bunch of, and it must have been 20 years ago now, jesus. The stand out feature for my young mind was the online service, xbox live. Original xbox live chat was so far removed from any modern version of internet culture that it would baffle the sensitive minds of todays youth. Taking offense to something was a sign of weakness (as it ultimately is) and talking shit was just part of the game (rip).
blah blah blah i wish i could still call people retarded yada yada im old and lame.
I brought up Ludonarrative Dissonance specifically for the purpose of positing an opposite "Ludonarrative Harmony" which is an idea that as far as I tell is far less accepted but the phenomena is no less real.
ok and i talked about videogames. are we mad at eachother?
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God Xbox live. Great time to be a teenager. I remember the tea bagging after killing or getting killed.
There was about a 1.5 year period when I was had a passionate love affair with Halo 3 on 360, the last time I devoted any amount of time into an online competitive shooter. I've heard that they've become a lot more sanitized since then, and it's a bit sad that kids these days don't get to have that only weakly-filtered experience of calling and being called "nigger," "faggot," and the occasional "kyke" regularly in a light-hearted competitive environment. The world would likely be a much better place if that were a much more common experience.
Never forget what they took from us
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Halo CE is one of the tightest storytelling experiences I've ever experienced in an FPS. That's not a monumental bar, and some jerkoff will yell at me about the Half-Life games, but Halo CE has incredible, finger-tight macro and micro context for everything you are doing in the game. You know exactly what you are doing, and why you are doing it, at all times.
2 and 3 are... well, 2 is more ambitious but worse, and 3 is better gameplay-wise. That's all the good I can say about Halo game campaigns since.
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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 would argue that Halo (the first game) is only "Fascist" and "White-coded" insofar as those who have succumbed to the woke mind-virus will label anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders "a Fascist" and anything resembling traditional western virtues as "Whiteness". The Master Chief may not be a silent protagonist, but he is very explicitly a faceless one. Fact is that we don't know anything about his race beyond that he is human, and I feel like that is intentional. I also do not believe that historical Fascists would have been very comfortable with the positions that Halo seems to take on questions of agency and free-will. Their whole thing was about the state being the ultimate sovereign and Halo basically says "Fuck That. We don't follow orders we do what is right!". It would seem to me that Halo is more "Stoic" or "Early-Christian" coded than anything else.
As I have argued before, if your model of "Fascism" ends up lumping men like Truman and Churchill in with Hitler and Mussolini your model is not fit for purpose and if you think that Clarence Thomas is "white" I think we need to take a step back and discuss WTF we are even talking about.
Furthermore I do not believe that xenophobia factors into the game's appeal as much as you seem to think it does. The Humans in Halo are not at war with The Covenant because they wanted to "Purge The Xenos!" they are at war because the The Covenant attacked them first. Now if you were talking about the Helldivers or Space Marine franchises you might have a point but the original Halo trilogy is a different beast.
A true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, he fights because he loves what is behind.
It's common across all scifi-mediums for symbolic representation of racial struggle to be depicted as relations between alien species rather than tension among the actual human races of the actors within-species. This was true for Star Trek as well.
Halo is fascist because it depicts racial struggle, an actual race war, and celebrates the heroism of the warrior who saves the world. It pits the pagan-coded Spartan against the Abrahamic-coded Covenant.
They are at war because the Covenant is a coalition of aliens fighting a Holy Race War against humans! And they apparently name their capital ships after racial justice courts!
Well one thing is fascists tend to love their race, which would be represented by Master Chief: racial self-defense against alien hostility. Halo pulls off the "fight for your race" vibe which people just love naturally as much as they will deny it.
Halo does NOT depict a racial struggle at all, it is portrays a religious struggle. The Covenant are very notably not only a multi-racial but a multi-species empire. They are multiple species/tribes united by a shared belief, a shared covenant, that is why they are called "The Covenant". (Again, I told you that names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose"). Frankly, you should know this given that you brough up the definition of Covenant in your OP.
Furthermore our hero, the Master Chief, is neither pagan-coded (see @RandomRanger's comment below), nor does he "save the world". He destroys the Ring, and while he does manage to save mankind from extinction, he doesn't do so through force of arms but rather by exposing the malicious forces acting behind the scenes and convincing his counterpart on the opposing side that he is amongst the righteous.
Straight question, have you even played the campaign?
Yes, you might as well say that Stargate is fascist and about racial struggle.
In fact, both stories aren't really a religious struggle but a struggle of science against blind superstition and plain lies. The stories don't really grant respect to the opposing side as theories or moral systems.
The Covenant are just provably wrong because they've sacralized what are scientific instruments and their credulity has led them to not only kill their own gods but get used as tools by the Prophets (who know some of the doctrine is false but refuse to collapse the business model).
The Jaffa/servants of all of the Goa'uld in Stargate are also just wrong (and terrorized into submission): their gods are not only technologically advanced aliens masquerading as such, they're not even the original inventors of their technology! The actual inventors are, while effete, durably in the scientist-humanist camp.
(Stargate did have to wrestle with the inevitable power creep taking them to a place where their enemies could make a good case for being gods and their religion was at least somewhat efficacious though)
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I mean by such standards, just about any science fiction series ever written (and probably fantasy fiction as well) is fascist. It seems a bit odd to suggest that any time an action adventure genre piece depicts a war between factions it’s fascism. The negative version isn’t even possible.
I'm getting to the point where I interpret SecureSignals as "Everything is Fascism, and Fascism is awesome because Da Joooos!"
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I'm not surprised that someone who is Jew-obsessed sees Jews in every piece of media, but I'm really curious as to what you think "truth and reconciliation" means.
Wikipedia:
Argument by Google/Wikipedia is obnoxious and low effort. "What do you think that means?" is generally not a request for a literal definition and you know that.
I thought it was a request for a literal definition. I personally had never heard of these "racial-justice courts" before, and had to look them up myself.
My point was that SS thought they were "kangaroo courts", which was ironic (and displayed his ignorance on the subject) because they convicted no one.
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Speak plainly, What are you saying?
I was just relaying the results of a simple Google search before SecureSignals himself responded.
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I correctly inferred the symbolic meaning of the word "Covenant" not that it's cleverly coded or anything. Wikipedia verifies the interpretation for what that's worth.
The "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" was essentially the post-apartheid kangaroo courts. Pretty interesting for Halo to symbolically associate that with the Covenant.
How many people were convicted by these "kangaroo courts"?
TBF I didn't know the exact definition of "kangaroo court" when I made that comment, my sense was that the term referred to the appropriation of the pomp and circumstance of law courts to enforce social narratives. But after reviewing the definition of the term I think I got it basically correct.
Apartheid was a racial conflict. Truth and Reconciliation was the codification of a particular social perspective of that racial conflict, and one which was in my view fundamentally hostile to white people and false and highly damaging. Much like it is in Canada today where they also call those initiatives Truth and Reconciliation.
It's interesting we look at history and the absurdity of Stalinist propaganda and think- "we would never fall for that! They call their blatant lies Truth, but that wouldn't work on us!" and unfortunately it does.
I do think unequivocally the association of Truth and Reconciliation with the Halo Covenant is a social critique of that racial conflict from a right-wing perspective. There's not really a coherent alternative explanation, there's a reason the writer associated the Covenant with Truth and Reconciliation, particularly in the context of an alliance of Aliens fighting a race war against Humans. And Truth and Reconciliation destroyed the Human colony at Reach, didn't they...
My point is that the Truth and Reconciliation commission in South Africa cannot have been a kangaroo court in any definition because they convicted zero people. That was very fundamentally not their concept or purpose.
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Namely, the social perspective that racial conflict is a Bad Thing, and that it would behoove us to try to learn to live together, that we not all die alone.
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This is the comment that makes me think you have been a troll all along. Because if you're serious, friend and brother you need to take a long rest and maybe get some professional help. Fascism everywhere, the Joos everywhere, even in a game franchise from decades back. The aliens are the Jews, see, because (and then you pull religious stuff out of your backside). If there is any religious element there, I imagine it's nothing more than "college liberals with STEM degrees made this game and Judaeo-Christian themes are easy stock bad guys".
I do think Covenant being Jew-coded is a red herring. Even as a child I noticed the names are spiritual in general, and not belonging to specific religion. This is why the vehicles have names like Banshee, Ghost, and Wraith. So it never would have occurred to me that it was a hitpiece on actual religions.
In fact, since the religious lore features as part of the plot, I would say they just wanted their aliens to have an interesting motive, not just a boring "we want your resources" like in, Independence Day (1996) or something.
...and then the TV series ditched the religious aspects to make the conflict about political parties and space-oil because they wanted to make something that would be "pertinent to modern audiences" and in so doing they lost the plot.
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The interesting thing about Halo and the TV show 24 is how they were both thematically and tonally a perfect fit for the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, even though they were both written before it happened.
The movie Starship Troopers is really on the nose criticism of the War on Terror. Even more impressive since it came out in 1997.
As much as I adore the '97 movie, I really wish someone would do a proper adaption. Yes I'm aware that Roughnecks exists, but what I want is a serious character piece that grapples with the emotional and philosophical themes of Heinlein's novel.
To the everlasting glory of the infantry...
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Because the Cold War was a planet-scale existential conflict lasting almost half a century, it provides examples of most of the tropes human conflict can generate. Because nukes made a direct heroic battlefield victory obviously impossible and, with hindsight, the goodies won almost entirely by soft power, most of the lessons of the examples come out in the "war bad" direction.
The basic argument against waging Albigensian Crusades is timeless. I suspect it was already old when Croesus crossed the river and destroyed a great empire.
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Inbred socioreligious elites using ethnic replacement to displace their former warrior caste is a funny thing to dwell upon now, but back then, it was just another thing that made you sympathize with the Arbiter more. This is the kind of 4chan joke that gives you a sensible chuckle.
Truth and Reconciliation being the name of the Covenant ship you attack in Halo 1 is pretty on the nose though looking back and actually making a criticism of socio-religious cults destroying social fabric. The Truth and Reconciliation was present at the fall of the Reach! That would have been written just a few years after the real TRC even though as kids that certainly didn't come to the mind of me or any of my friends.
So the Sekrit Messaging didn't work all that well, did it?
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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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This one I never understood. I know about the South African and the one American Truth and Reconciliation commissions. But why do genocidal aliens name their ship Truth and Reconciliation? Irony on the part of the game devs? Skimming Halo wikis doesn't reveal the point.
Halo 1 isn't white. The marines come in all colors. They are 100% space Americans as though modern Marines are somehow battling aliens hundreds of years in the future. I know the marine character models include Hispanics and black people. I recall the drop ship pilot being a black woman, but I'm not sure. They may be space fascists, but they are American space fascists with typical American racial diversity.
Because it sounds badass and vaguely religious. That's really all there is to it.
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I don't really see the irony, Truth and Reconciliation was instituted by Nelson Mandela and supporting Archbishops. It was a multi-racial covenant that tore apart the fabric of society and was motivated by a racial hostility that was called Truth and Reconciliation. In both cases not irony but the warcry of racially hostile fanatics intent on destroying civilization.
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The only problem here is focusing too hard on the Covenant = Jews [in particular] angle. You admit there's also Christian and (was?) Muslim imagery too.
The Covenant were not driven from their homeland, there is no diaspora, and I think its a stretch to compare the Forerunner heresy to that white nationalist idea that actually Whites are God's chosen people (which I assume you were gesturing towards).
Otherwise, I think your sincerity analysis is right: it is like a Xenophobic US Military versus weird foreign religious nuts. You are right of course, for the simple fact that Halo could not get made in Woke era. I could imagine an academic whitepaper calling Halo problematic. It would fit perfectly with a Last Jedi-esque subversive TV show that angers manchildren or whatever. That paper would indeed call the UNSC white-coded [pejorative]. Even if the most famous Marine, Sgt Johnson, is black!
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The division of societal surplus in the gerontocracy
One oft-repeated epithet on the left is that we ought to be working 10-20 hours a week due to productivity increases. I always found that this is kind of funny or misguided, as we have kind of done just that - we just decided to give the surplus of productivity to the old (30+ year boomer retirements with eye-watering healthcare costs and redistributive transfers) and the young (10+ years of schooling and an adolescence that now almost lasts until you are 30).
I often think about how societal surplus is spent. If you look at the fastest growing sectors in most western countries, it's almost always healthcare and related professions. This is probably due to a whole host of factors but a big one is something akin to the median voter theorem; the median voter is most western countries is now very old and wants a lot of money spent on healthcare. Hence you get 10% to almost 20% of GDP (in the US!) going to that. As someone in their late 20s who hasn't seen a healthcare professional in more than a decade, that's wild. Healthcare has a low fiscal multiplier and is often purely a consumptive good, but people rarely think we spend too much on it per se - critiques are often made at nebulous administrative bloat (which when examined is often less of a good narrative than people think it is).
Another thing is immigration. Looking at it at face value, all western democracies are addicted to it. Even though right-wing culture warriors often single out Japan or SK, even these places have seen significant immigration (and concomitant pushback) in the past decade. Even places like Russia or Belarus do it. Again very often in service of aging populations - in order to stem inflation, keep asset prices high, etc.
Many western countries now how a U-shaped happiness curve - happy when young, happy when old, relatively miserable in old age. The meme "Nick 30 ans", perhaps not so common in the US, embodies this. If you are Nick (male), 30 years old and working, you are paying into a system that benefits everyone but you, chiefly the old, the the young, then women and then maybe the unemployed. I am one of these Nicks, I am 28 years old and I pay, for the country I reside in, a massive tax bill (probably 5-6x the median) and see nothing for it.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, the the purpose of modern western democracies is to drain young people (chiefly but not exclusively young men) and give the surplus to the old, the infirm, the antisocial. There is some rebellion or exit (people moving to Dubai etc.) though it's often hard to effectuate and sometimes punished by the system.
The striking thing is that when polled, most Nick 30 ans type people think old people are something like hard done to, think they deserve their pensions, think that the issues are not structural or redistributive but something to do with greedy corporations and the rich. I think some economists, Stiglitz or Friedmann or such, predicated concentration camps for the old due to accumulation of wealth and power, but young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system or the rich.
I sometimes wonder what the optimal thing is for someone who is the target of redistribution is to do. NEETdom is probably rational in many cases if you are not exceptional. I also wonder how various kinds of nationalists square the fact that their elders are quite happy to sell out their country, culture etc. for yet another cruise.
I'm pretty sure that young men have ALWAYS created a surplus which was used to support the young, the elderly, and women. The difference is that in the past, this surplus was distributed in a way that was less formal and more voluntary. Before social security, it was pretty normal and common for adult children to financially support their elderly parents; before AFDC women were far more desperate to marry and had far less contempt for men; a few hundred years ago, families were ecstatic about the birth of a healthy baby boy. In part because having an able-bodied man in your family could easily mean the difference between life and death.
So perhaps your real complaint is that your hypothetical 30 year old working man is not getting the respect he (arguably) deserves.
Maybe they should have a special express lane on the highway for people who pay more than $50k a year in taxes.
There's no need. When the support was voluntary, respect was required because the support could be withdrawn from the ungrateful. Now that it's mandatory, the supporters are merely slaves (or "tax cattle") and need no respect.
Young men were not an esteemed group in the past when that support was voluntary.
30 year old working men were not considered "young men" when that support was voluntary.
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I was born after the welfare estate was established, but my grandmother lived her youth at a time when there was no social security, no AFDC, etc. She was overjoyed to have a healthy young man as a grandson, to the point where it really annoyed my sister. I think this was a pretty common attitude among people of this generation. Has this attitude changed? My general impression is that it has changed quite a bit.
I am open to alternative explanations, but to me the obvious explanation was that back in the day, having an able-bodied young man in your family could easily mean the difference between, on the one hand, malnutrition and grinding poverty and, on the other hand, eking by.
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They absolutely we're. Strong young successful men were at the apex of social status historically in almost every culture. What makes you say this?
In the vast majority of traditional societies, male status continues to increase with age until you are visibly decrepit. I don't think there was ever a society where young men were at the top by default.
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The apex of social status was filled by strong young successful men; it does not follow that the majority of strong young successful men, or even a significant fraction of them, were at the apex.
I agree, but I think that in the past, a basic guy who worked an average job was respected more by society than a basic guy today who holds down a job. To be clear, I don't have definitive evidence for this . . I am just going by my general impression. People in previous generations just seemed to hold men, especially working men, in higher esteem.
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I’d settle for a plaque from Lockheed Martin/Raytheon/Northrup Grumman every time I pay enough tax to fund a new Tomahawk or something
Worth noting that more of your tax dollars are going to buy diapers and nursing for old people than those Tomahawks. You'd get more plaques for each bed year in a hospital you pay for.
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Exactly this too, it's not a new phenomenon. You were always having to take care of your elderly parents and your children, and often your wife. Now even back then it wasn't enough for most men to work just on their own, child labor was the default whether it be at a factory or on the land with their dad and women did lots of hard labor at home like hauling firewood/water/sewing clothes (did you know households used to spend a higher percentage of their budget on apparel than they do now on cars?)/cleaning which was way harder without modern chemicals and machines like washing machines/dishwashers/vacuums/etc, but it was the default that the man was the main breadwinner for any outside work.
We've helped to diffuse that responsibility through welfare programs instead, and technology freed women's labor from domestic chores to be used on outside work too. And everyone has become so much wealthier that we now consider it as immoral to have our kids work, despite being necessary throughout almost all of history.
It's not as if the people 200 years ago hated their elderly parents and left them to die. It did happen more frequently than it does now, but you've always had that responsibility to your elders. They give birth to you and raise you, and you work for their benefit the same way you have children now who will hopefully love you and help take care of you when you need it. The same with the sick and infirm, there was always cruelty to the disabled but they were often someone's sibling or cousin or parent or whatever who had the responsibility to take care of them.
The problem is that the lack of respect is there because we've made it non voluntary. You seem to see this as a good thing, can I ask if you are a middle aged man who pays a lot in taxes?
I agree that's a problem. I think the lack of respect issue is connected to the problem of family formation. A man who is respected is a more attractive marriage partner. And generally speaking we want young people to marry and reproduce. I have always found it fascinating that two of America's subcultures which do a good job in this area -- the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews -- both give men a clear path to obtain status and respect. With the Amish, modern farm equipment is forbidden and the practical effect is that almost every man can become a respected member of the community by working the land with a plough -- something which typically requires male physical strength and durability. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism offers the path of advanced religious study and rabbinical school, something which is open only to men.
Of course modern society doesn't impose these kinds of restrictions on people, but even without them I think it exacerbates the situation to forcibly transfer resources (money and social status) from men to women.
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What does this mean exactly? If your parents don't respect you, then it seems like a you and your parents issue. If you mean that older generations kinda look down on younger ones, I'm pretty sure it's always been that way. If anything, young people are more free in this sense considering the traditional view is to respect your elders and obey their authority.
I explicitly said I am against most welfare, but I can acknowledge the areas where it does help like with my own extended family members. And I don't think that governments should just shrug and not fulfill their promises.
I'm not "middle aged", younger, but otherwise yeah my family does.
Young productive men are functionally slaves in modern western societies. They work for a pittance while the vast majority of their economic output goes to their betters through many mechanisms of taxation and redistribution, they have no political representation as a class (it is illegal) and are regarded with malicious contempt by their master classes.
All areas of society are made to cater to women and the elderly under the systematic rule of this tendency, and young men are legal targets of institutional ridicule, persecution and ever growing extraction by legitmate authorities. Propaganda films are made showing them to be innately evil, large budgets are spend on their political reeducation and the press and entertainment media use them as scapegoats constantly.
This unthough hierarchy is especially salient in my own country of France. Pensioners have more income than working people (you read that right) and yet on top of it every class but young men gets subsidized tickets and other trivial advantages in every area of life at their expense. Moreover, goods, areas, services and even jobs are routinely reserved by custom and at times law to the elderly or women. A common feature of such systems throughout history.
Of course this is all a byproduct of a political regime of limited democracy that has both accidentally and by design minimized and essentially neutralized the political power of youths and men even as they are the providers of the security and violence that upholds the system. Another common feature of slave societies.
As others have warned before, including famously Friedrich Hayek, this is unstable and ripe for a revolution. One that I hope won't feature the concentration camps for pensioners he foresaw.
The main difference between this system and patriarchal elderly rule is that it is impersonal and therefore void of empathy. The State confiscates economic output out of the hands of productive youths and doles it out to its clients who therefore are loyal to the State, not to productive youths. And indeed the State uses this loyalty to repress and humiliate uppity member of its tax cattle, not to uplift or empower them. There is no ascension into the ruling class or passing of the torch here. Nor is there any recognition of the effort or reward to be expected except more confiscation.
Like the horse Boxer in Orwell's story, the system just wants young people to work themselves to death to fund pensions and benefits with no expectation of reward or amelioration of their condition. And explicitly no expectation that they'll get to enjoy pensions of their own because it is demographically impossible.
In contrast the traditional system would afford political leadership, familial leadership and social status to its earners in exchange for loyalty and sacrifice to the death for their dependents and the State. A more constraining deal on the surface, but also a much better one than subsistance as cattle bereft of rights or dignity.
Eh, in less modern societies it seems to me property has been king too. It'll be awesome to be a young able-bodied man with no property versus an old decrepit dude with no property, but any given property is more likely to be in hands of some older patriarch than the young man. Hereabouts in more rural times it was a common arrangement for the eldest son taking the reins of a homestead farm to sign a contract spelling out how to keep up his retired parents' lifestyle. A man without an inheritance will have a really hard time getting to having it made as good as one who does. The reason the industrial revolution was fed by an endless supply of workers happy to go for Victorian sweatshop wages and working conditions was, AFACIT, if you didn't have your own homestead or cottage or whatever, even if young and able-bodied, the pre-modern pastoral lifestyle might not give you much of a chance at a home or marriage or dignified old age. There was an endless supply of itinerant laborer men in dead ends that sucked way more viscerally than the the present day sort.
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Yep. What he said.
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I think there are really two separate but related issues here: The forced redistribution of wealth and the lack of respect. Based on what I know about human psychology, I think it's the second issue that's more important.
I tend to doubt this. Because if France is anything like the United States, there is still a lot of opportunity for the most talented (or otherwise elite) young men to achieve the social status and respect I mentioned above. Let's suppose you are earning roughly $1m a year as a man in the West. Yes, you are paying ridiculous taxes and probably supporting a few single moms, but there is still a lot left over to (voluntarily) make a nice life for yourself and for the people around you. A life which is far better than anyone could get from collecting social security, welfare etc. Why would such a man put together some kind of revolution and disrupt the system which is working reasonably well for him? And without elites, how far is a revolution going to get?
I think the bigger problem is family formation. When men achieve money and status, they tend to get married and stay married. When women achieve money and status, they tend to get divorced and stay single. Ergo, forcible transfers of money and status from men to women can be expected to negatively impact family formation. And this does seem to be happening in the West.
France is unlike the US precisely in this way. Which is why French Engineers are so numerous to leave and work for US companies.
I think Americans don't have a feel for how ridiculous taxation and redistribution is in France because they are always astonished when I give specifics. For instance: we are now to the point that the French State spending in proportion of GDP is higher that it ever was in the Soviet Union.
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France has very, very few salaries anywhere near that high.
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I don't think that is "explicit". You might consider it obvious but I don't think it's something political messaging typically owns up to - at most they acknowledge the existence of a problem but gesture at immigration as a surefire fixer.
French politicians have publicly declared on now multiple occasions that our pension system is unsustainable and will collapse if not drastically reformed. It is a commonly (though not universally) held truism in my country that even immigration cannot solve this problem. We no longer are in the 1990s. What was implicit is now explicit.
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He's talking about France, where everyone acknowledges that the pension system is going to have to be cut eventually- and eventually means 'in the mid term future', not 'in 100 years'.
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Young productive men are substantially better off now then they have been for practically all of history. Despite taxation, the amount of wealth even the poorer man in the first world can access is still greater than many kings of the past. No matter how rich or powerful you were in the 1500s, you did not have a car or a smartphone or a video game console or a TV or take flights to Hawaii for vacation and probably not even indoor plumbing in many areas. Your food was still mostly limited to regional availability and what was in season. Most of your children would still die before they were five, and you were still unable to treat health and pain concerns in a meaningful way. Have an infection as a king? Tough it out like everyone else
Even the poorest dudes working at a gas station, it is not "a pittance", you have wealth beyond the dreams of many in history. Your children are alive, you have basically infinite entertainment at your fingertips, you have all the tasty food you want, you have clean and good looking clothes, you have incredible healthcare that can do what just a few centuries ago would be considered miracles. You aren't spending your time hauling buckets of water or poop as domestic chores.
Are you not talking about the west here? Every young man has political representation in western democracy. IDK what country you could be referring to with "it is illegal", but I'm not aware of any where men do not have suffrage.
I will say I do not know the inner workings of France well, but I can confidently say that the general point that you are richer, meaningfully richer in what you have and the quality you have it in, than almost everyone in history remains true. And from what I can tell at least, France still has suffrage for young men so I don't know what you mean by it being illegal.
The same would be true, if you literally reintroduced African slavery in the US today, and It was probably even true back when slavery was still legal in the US, so I don't see how this argument is valid.
Gonna go out with a hot take here, the average modern first world man is not living a life remotely similar to slavery. We have a life more free and more rich than basically everyone in history.
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Rich slaves are still slaves, absolute wealth is not in contention, dignity and station are. The station imposed on young men by modern western society is one of subservience and inferiority.
Suffrage is not voice, nor is it political representation as a class. No political party or organisation represents the interest of men as a class and those that purport to are banned by law or decree in France, Germany, the UK under the aupices of discrimination.
Liberal democracy in effect only serves the interest of the selectorate, which by the demographic force of the baby boom does not need include young men. It follows from the natural laws of politics that all viable politicians are bound to extract from them to give to their coalitions.
The average modern man is more free and more rich than basically anyone in history, we are not in any way similar to slaves.
Even better than "political representation as a class" is you getting to personally choose who and what best represents your views. Men are not a hivemind and plenty of other men (perhaps like me) would disagree with you on a number of topics.
I don't know enough European politics to say much about it, but what policy ideas do you have, that you also believe are common among men "as a class", that are not represented by any party and is universally banned across all three nations?
One of the biggest reasons why young people typically aren't represented as much as they could be is purely by their own choice to not vote. When young people do actually bother to vote, they can have a meaningful say in things.
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I think people forget about how much labor household appliances have saved, and how poor a lot of people were until relatively recently. I deposed a guy who grew up in West Virginia in the 40s and 50s in a house without running water and he talked about how every Saturday his mother did the laundry and he, his dad (whose clothes were filthy from the mines) and all his brothers and sisters would spend half the day hauling buckets of water from a spring in the woods behind their house so their mother could heat the water on a stove and do the laundry with a wringer washer.
Let alone laundry- ironing all that took an entire day. They didn't have wrinkle free fabrics, and they didn't have electric irons either.
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IIRC it might have been here, but I recall reading recently that almost all of the Amish have adopted mechanized laundry.
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And besides just the hard work there, knowledge spread a whole lot slower and in much lesser quantity. The number of women with stories about coming from laundry day with their hands burned on the lye improperly mixing it and thinking that was normal is astounding. Even with labor that is still around, you were likely doing inefficiently and taking more time with more suffering than you do nowadays.
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I'd add to this that there really weren't that many completely infirm/economically useless people back then either. Without modern medicine, even assuming you got past childhood mortality, there were very few people who would've made it to their 60s since a lot of things we handle nowadays, such as early heart disease or infectious disease, would've just been fatal back then. In addition to that, while there was always some degree of welfare in states, the destitute likely would die within a decade due to their weakened constitutions.
It's a good problem to have that tons of people who would've been dead in the past are alive thanks to modern economics and medicine. That being said, their continued living does necessitate a societal negotiation on how resources are distributed.
Making it to your 60s was never that uncommon. Pre-modern life expectancy was low, but that low number masks a bimodal distribution where most of the ones who didn't die as babies lived into their 50s. There were some fairly-hard limits in a bunch of cases (e.g. commoners eating bread with rock bits in it will have their teeth ground away over time), but there were definitely quite a few people who made it to 60.
I think the point that comparatively few people used to live long past the point of becoming a net fiscal drain still stands, though. Modern medicine has made eking out low-quality end-of-life years, at exorbitant expense to the taxpayer, much more common than it once was. See also the comment downthread about Down syndrome life expectancy over the years.
To a fair degree, yes. Just spotted a common misconception regarding pre-modern lifespan and sought to point it out.
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Also a good point, like the down syndrome life expectancy went from their mid 20s to their 60s in just a few decades.
And in the same way with other disabled/elderly, those down syndrome people are our friends and family too.
Even if the numbers are inaccurate a bit, lots of Americans know someone with down syndrome and I doubt most would be too be happy to see those people get locked up or killed. So the "let's lock up or kill anyone with disabling down syndrome" isn't gonna get too much widespread support.
We've improved the life conditions of disabled people a lot, and through technology a lot of folk who wouldn't have been able to work before now can (although likewise a lot of people who were just barely able to work can no longer compete in more complex jobs), but even more than that we've just helped them live a lot longer than before in general. And we did that, because we want that. Because God said so/we evolved to be empathic for some reason/whatever you believe to be the cause, it is the truth that humans are generally kind and caring like that.
But it does mean they're a financial drain for longer.
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I'm generally against welfare but I do think it does have some actual value even to us who pay for most of it, a more stable and protected society. The default of the world is not modern peace, but more something like a third world country where gangs rule and government is basically just the biggest gang around. It's not perfect in the US, but for the average American crime is not actually that meaningful of issue anymore. Like as Cremieux covered on X, even things like murders are extremely hyperlocal, focused down to specific streets. Unless you go looking for trouble, you'll rarely ever get into it.
A typical leftist claim is that crime comes from poverty and need. I agree that a lot of crime would come from that, but one issue is that poverty, true deep poverty does not exist in the US anymore. The only people who do not get help are the ones who explicitly choose to forego it. There are no hungry orphans left needing to steal bread, our poorest children if anything get too much food now. Crime and antisocial behavior has been reduced only to those who want to do it, not those who are forced into it. And that is at least in part because of our redistribution. I have an aunt who went crazy in her early 50s (I presume in part from the severe abuse that my own father as the oldest was just barely able to escape albeit it with multiple scars, + her possibly being sexually abused) and for some reason in the past five years she somehow just got better? She's not great, but she went from not wanting to do better and living on the streets> wanting to do better, and now she has a shared apartment, a bus pass, clean clothes, food, etc other basics despite not having a job. She is on SSI now and lives in subsidized housing, with other programs like SNAP supporting her. When you want it, help is there. It is not perfect, bureaucracy would never see to that no matter the best intentions but it is there. Similarly I think that's part of why UBI studies seem to do much better in the poor countries and flop hard in the west, I. America we already have the floor available to anyone willing to stand up and work.
But what if it wasn't there for people like her? Well, I don't think she could have escaped her situation then. She's old and still somewhat unstable, I doubt she would have long term employement. Most likely she'd be either a direct parasite off of us or other family, or have to turn to crime now. The welfare services I pay into help to diffuse these costs, sure I pay a little bit to help other people's crazy aunts/brothers/parents/children/whatever relation, but other people pay a little for my family and my father is not left feeling responsible for her through the bad luck that my grandfather was a horrible piece of shit.
Do keep in mind a few things.
They do "deserve" their pensions. Either formally through pension systems or informally like the social security system, our current old people were promised their benefits back in their working years. Maybe the right thing to do is to renege on society's promise to them, or at the very least negotiate the terms better like the UK's stupid "triple lock" but it's not like I can't understand where the olds are coming from. Even Ayn Rand famously took her social security, because being against the program doesn't mean you can't ask the government to at least fulfill the promise it made when it took your money from you. She didn't think it should be stolen to begin with, but it's not hypocritical to say "then at least do what you said you would" right?
We're all going to be old and everyone knows it. A lot of the worries about social security right now I see even among young people is often that they're scared they won't be getting it. Their complaints are the same as the old people, they're just not in the fold yet. But they expect it too, so they're not willing to dissolve things and give up on their share of the promise either. Anything done to the old now is likely to be done with you too and people understand this. Like seriously, how could anyone expect concentration camps for the old unless they were delusional enough to think they'd stay young forever? What 50 year old is gonna be happy with "in 15 years we lock you up and murder you". And that's ignoring that the old are our loved ones and we don't want to hurt our loved ones. What psychopath would want to concentration camp his own parents?
Ah, the protection money argument. The thing is, the west didn't use to have to handout masses of money to people to keep them from rioting. Crime and poverty are not as connected as is often made out.
That is not "Boomer UBI". Disability pensions and the like also get abused but are the far smaller evil.
There are infinitely many options between "total boomer luxury communism" and "concentration camps for the olds". Though politically we seem to tend towards the former...
What does "deserve" mean? Pensions (and even things like 410k) are a fiction, they are redistribution from working people to pensioners. Money is a neat abstraction that allows expression of deferring consumption but if you look at the flow of goods and services it's always working -> non-working, barring AI and general (non-healthcare/welfare) capital infrastructure investment.
Of course I understand the boomers. Were I a boomer I'd have a massive incentive to believe I'm entitled to relief on property taxes, blocking development, fat pensions that grow faster than inflation, labour markets being propped up by mass immigration of "carers" without care for externalities, etc.
The social contract (as it even exists) when the boomers were working was markedly different from the one now. The boomers reneged on it already by not reproducing and offloading the resultant externalities on the next generation.
Right. Besides, what do we do to functional people who don't pay their protection money? We send men with guns to drag them off to jail. Why not skip the extra step and send the men with guns to drag any rioters off to jail? The men with guns have to be paid either way, but the rioters don't.
Actually people do have to be paid, jail is extremely expensive and even at the minimal level you still have to provide the main basics in that of shelter, food and clean water. You're just spending it in a crueler and less direct manner.
And no, "just kill them then" doesn't work because like before, they are our families and loved ones. My crazy aunt when given a little bit of support is fine enough, she's not a danger who needs to be locked up for our safety. So why would my family we want to do that to her?
My father would be appalled if the solution was to lock his sister up in jail, he still loves her as family. We would much prefer that she can get the basic needs without such cruelty, because we are not psychopaths who want to lock up our family and concentration camp our elderly.
Likewise I have an uncle (well great uncle) on my mom's side who is developmentally disabled. When left alone during the day while his caretaker (another extended family member) is at work he is fine. He can press the button on the TV to turn it on which is kept on his favorite channel. He can take a frozen meal from the fridge and use the microwave by pushing the +30 seconds button a few times but is forbidden from using the other buttons cause he'll set the time wrong and leave the microwave on for hours cause he inputted wrong and won't think about it, and he can use the bathroom on his own. But he is a man who needs great support. And it is helped immensely that he is on SSI, SNAP and has a housing voucher for shared rent despite his inability to work. It's an immense drain on the family member still, but it makes life far better off than it would have been before. We've diffused the responsibility for my uncle, and many people like him, throughout society.
And just like before, we are not psychopaths. I like my uncle, he's slow and dimwitted and can't hold a good conversation but he's one of those types who is lighthearted and cheerful anyway. I don't want him in a concentration camp or a jail because I am not a sicko. And yet if it wasn't for our family and the support systems from society, I don't know what would happen with him. He'd probably be exploited and used by criminals and end up clumsily going around trying to steal food or something until he did get locked up. Which again, is something I do not want if it can be helped cause I love the guy. And I do not want that for other people like him.
I want people like my crazy aunt and dimwitted disabled uncle to have a free life without torture if it can be helped. So does most of society, modern nations all around the world have welfare programs to help support people like them. And it can be helped, and it has been helped.
For almost all societies, there was always some form of welfare for the poor. The amount varied, but the only time I can think of when a society either showed complete indifference or actual facilitation of harming the poor was when the poor was an outgroup. St. Domingue being an example.
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It is scaling incredibly poorly and proving a considerable dead weight. Especially when any milquetoast charitable gesture like expanding Disability coverage or refugee status inevitably ends up getting abused to the enth degree as it naturally snowballs.
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There's tons of violent crime throughout history, the US itself started as a violent crime. There have been civil wars and revolutions across the world regarding civil and fiscal inequalities, and that's still putting aside that crime is down significantly since the past too.. And keep in mind, a lot of things we would deem as violent crime nowadays wouldn't have even counted in the past like capturing and enslaving others, beating children hard for not working enough in the field, dueling being a primary way to settle disputes, the honor killings. Or things that might have been technically crimes but were overlooked, like the lynchings. When 11 Italians were mass lynched future president Teddy Roosevelt referred to it as "rather a good thing" and journalist editorials while many might have hem and hawed a little often would openly support the lynchers. Or how about the many many many violent strikes and riots by worker unions. It's extremely rare for an American union to beat up the scabs nowaday isn't it? Mass widespread violence was pretty normal of the past.
Also of course one big issue here is in the inequality itself. People who don't know there can be a better life are going to be more content with what they have. There's a reason why North Korea goes to extreme extents to prevent the average citizen from seeing western wealth, because even they understand their regime is rockier and less stable if people know there is better if a revolution happens. The more people can improve their situation, the more likely they are to take action. North Korea has to constantly suppress the people to prevent revolution, meanwhile the idea of another revolution now in the US is laughable because there's not much to earn and a lot to lose. They don't have to suppress it with force, most Americans just don't want to revolt.
Imagine you get offered a service, you pay 100k now and in 40 years they'll pay you 50k a year. If in 40 years they change their mind and don't pay, they scammed you. They broke their promise. While pension services don't work exactly like that, it's a similar logic. Workers are essentially promised their pension schemes in exchange for the money stolen from their paychecks, so when the time comes they have in fact earned it. It is a scam if they are not able to collect.
Normally when this happens you get to sue them for breach of contract and you win, that gets you a piece of paper and if they have money left over you get it taken from them and given to you. However if they are out of money you just end up with a piece of paper and nothing else, the government doesn't then increase taxation on everyone else in society just to fund your agreement and make sure you are made whole. The fact that there was a promise by the other side and they broke their promise doesn't mean shit.
Something similar can be said to apply to pensions, now you may say that as long as the government itself isn't bankrupt you should get your money because pensions come from a government subsidiary and the government can always increase tax to get enough money to pay for its obligation (or just turn on the printer), but that's not how contracts work either, if you have a contract with B which is a subsidiary of A and then B goes bankrupt in normal situations you don't get to recover from A, you're just out of luck. Similarly with pensions. A government can very easily go "Our pensions department will have X% of government earnings each year, funded from general taxation, if the total liabilities are higher than this then everyone takes a haircut, end of".
In this case though it is the government itself that made the promise. And it made that promise while taxing you, but then it tries to say it can't tax others later? It's perfectly fair to call BS on that. We don't expect government to fulfill the private promises of a private person, but we should be able to expect it to fulfill its own promises. Who wants a country where the main dominant power structure keeps rug pulling its own citizens?
Which promise are you talking about? In most countries the payouts from state run pension schemes have some hard lower boundaries but are otherwise subject to the whims of the legislature and the courts. Few systems keep a personalized account that creates concrete contractual financial claims.
Even disregarding that, the promise you're asking the state to keep is not the same promise that was in effect when the Boomers were young. You can look up how much of an average worker's wage bill went to elderly welfare in e.g. 1950, 1980 or today and notice a steep increase, the idea that what's being asked of today's workers is somehow equivalent to what the current recipients paid in is ludicrous.
The legal technicalities surrounding what beneficiaries are actually entitled to and the financial realities of what they're getting compared with what they paid in aren't relevant to the discussion. Bring that argument up to conservative retirees who will bitch endlessly about all the handouts "the blacks" get and you'll see them get defensive about their Social Security checks. "That's different; I paid into that for 40 years!" Same with Medicaid.
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Which is why I said there's room to negotiate the terms. The UK's triple lock is stupid. Retirement ages need to be upped around the world as people are healthier and able to work at older ages (the general promise at least for social security was an insurance for old age, so only when old age is crippling to most should it apply). Etc other examples of ways we could better the system without having to break the promise.
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If a subsidiary of a government department or a contractor that's 100% owned by the government (we have this in the UK for certain IT and Software development functions) makes a promise and then the subsidiary fails due to lack of cash that doesn't leave the rest of the government liable and you may very well end up out of luck.
Plus we already have the government rug pulling its citizens literally every year every budget. This is something that isn't unique to a specific country or situation.
The tax collector can't count as an unrelated branch of government that doesn't have to pay you because when the government was making the promise, the government claimed that the tax collector was closely related enough to fulfill the promise. If the government now says "it's just the subsidiary who has to pay you, and the tax collector is not related to the subsidiary", the government is contradicting what it originally said about the relationship.
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Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed ad nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
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The Promised argument makes it seem as if our society actually honors or cares about promises whatsoever. Social Security was Promised to never be spent on anything else. Income tax was Promised to never go above 2%.
Don't go on about Promises as if they actually mean anything when it comes to political decisions in the U.S.
I would recommend looking up how social security and trust funds work cause the funds for it have never been spent on anything else.
The funds were “invested” in Treasury bonds which means that they were spent more or less immediately on whatever the government at the time wanted. The return on that investment will ultimately come from taxing future generations, or inflating away the debt, so it’s really just an intergenerational Ponzi scheme with extra steps.
But I agree with you that this was the plan from Day 1, so strictly speaking it’s not a broken promise per se (at least not yet).
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Ok, the issue with the protection money argument for welfare- and I'm 100% willing to believe that certain programs reduce the crime rate- is that most of that welfare goes to criminally-uninclined demographics. Old people who can't maintain a normal standard of living are a known phenomenon, we know what it looks like, and they're not mugging people with their walkers. They're living in squalor and dying of malnutrition-worsened diseases. Sure, that's bad, but the argument for avoiding it isn't 'well it's worse when they rob a liquor store' because they won't rob liquor stores.
Again, I'm 100% willing to believe that, say, TANF reduces shoplifting and prostitution rates. But that's a completely separate argument.
Like I covered before, in modern societies you don't have to do crime for basic survival and needs anymore. It's imperfect and has some wait times obviously, but people in need like my crazy aunt can get the food and shelter and clean water they need. Modern crime in modern first world nations is a choice. Now I'm a big arguer that criminals are mostly idiots with poor reasoning and self control skills before they are particularly "evil", but the point remains that crime isn't necessary in the first world and anyone being rational wouldn't resort to it for their basic needs. The diminishing returns hit really hard when it comes to aid. People will steal and fight and mug to go from 0 meals to 1 meal. Most won't to go from 3 to 4.
"Old people who can't maintain a normal standard of living are a known phenomenon," isn't really a thing in the US and most other developed nations, at least not at all how it used to be. But regardless the welfare for old people isn't from the "protection" scheme logic anyway, social security and pensions are from the "promise" logic. Like Ayn Rand wasn't gonna go around stabbing people, but she still collected on what was promised to her.
Yes, it's not a thing in the US. There's nowhere in the world, ever in human history, where the elderly committed lots of crime to survive. They just died. The logic for taking care of the elderly is compassion, not crime prevention. There are places right now where senior citizens need to eat dog food to survive. They're not stealing better food(potatoes and shit, not steak). 'Old people suffering from malnutrition until they get knocked out by flu season' happened because they'll just suffer rather than steal/rob.
My argument for the elderly isn't crime prevention, crime prevention is for people like my crazy aunt. The argument for the elderly is that they were promised pensions or social security either explicitly or implicitly and I don't think it's right for governments to rug pull on that. They were stupid promises, but you still should keep stupid promises.
I think it's more just for the government to rug pull than to commit to a civilizational suicide pact even if the boomers and whoever preceded them promised themselves riches 3000 years ago off the expense of future generations. What obligation does the younger generation have to a policy where they're robbed during their youth and left with ruins when they're old? And to finish the civilizational KO, we're being replaced en masse where we have 3% of newborns being named Mohammed. We have a pincer maneuver of a labor shortage of short-supplied generations who can't support pensioners and a Boomertopia which is so rotten that you can't even find a job as a new grad.
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Why do you think MAID is being pushed so hard? We won't "murder" you, we'll just convince you life isn't worth living and let you murder yourself. Conveniently, we've already been abusing this method of avoiding the costs of helping certain demographics for years by ignoring the causes of elevated rates of suicide...
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1 is somewhat absurd when a huge chunk of people aren't meaningfully paying for themselves, and as a younger person I've got the full expectation that whatever current plans for funding the elderly will be nuked from orbit by the time I'm in any position to get hold of them. People simply aren't working enough years in comparison to an extended dotage of consuming insane amounts of medical spending. Something has to give.
Plus the current state of effective years of healthy living added to the end of people's lives versus 'we have continued the heartbeat at massive expensive' is not good calculus. MAID is unfortunate but to a certain degree the calculus of these efforts would work a lot better if palliative medical science hadn't responded so effectively to the gigantic pool of money on offer to squeeze another year or two out at the very end.
Already being done. They're talking about means-testing Social Security and Medicare, and proposals to tax away the houses of those older people who have paid for them are a dime a dozen.
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They did pay for themselves, they paid taxes for 40-50 years (some began working at 15 and didn't stop till 65!) to "buy into" the system.
See exactly, your complaint is theirs. "I'm afraid I won't get the due I've been told I'll get in exchange for my taxes now". It's just that you personally don't want that potential risk so you want the rug pull to happen earlier to your parents generations.
Which is why really, we should have been ratcheting up the retirement age more as people have been able to work into old age more often. The US is able to get away with this way easier than the typical pension countries even since the idea of social security was always a buy in into an insurance for people who can not work any longer whether that be from infirmity or seniority. But the latter especially is far less crippling nowadays so it's far less of a rug pull to ratchet the age requirements up. But pushing up age requirements upsets the current workers too! The 50 year old is thinking "I gotta work for 18 more years and not 15? That's bullshit" and gets angry because again everyone knows they gonna get old
No, they paid for the people receiving benefits when they were working. They didn't pay for themselves. Now workers are paying for them.
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Not really in most cases. The average person's tax burden is barely covering their normal consumption of government largesse, especially if they're low enough income to receive governmental support. This whole shambolic 'but I put my $10k a year in for 30 years, gimme $50k a year from 55 till 90' side of things doesn't balance, especially when a large chunk of people are immediately getting most of their contributions back in other social spending.
I know that the current system is a gigantic unsustainable ball of stupidity that's only semi-tenable since pensioners have huge power in Democracies due to lack of else to do with their time. That goes for both senior generations and my own. It needs to be cut down to stop literally collapsing most social democracies.
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This is all downstream of more general phenomena such as egalitarianism and the resultant democracy it produces. There is no point discussing this, the redistribution is zero-sum and is bad for people like you, but people like you either don't have the power to get out from under the thumb of the democracy, or you don't have the stomach for it, because it would mean reducing the majority of people to servitude underneath you. In this thread people talk about „Boomer concentration camps,“ but the upper middle class young-to-middle-aged Patriarchy doesn't even have the nerve to demand the servitude or submission of their elderly parents, or their wives, and increasingly their children, who they usually drug up for behaving poorly, instead of directly confronting them. There is no abolishing of old age pensions for people who are afraid to tell their elderly mother to be obedient to them.
It’s hard to demand obedience from your wife when she can divorce you, take half your assets, and take away your children based essentially on nothing other than her feeling “abused.”
Hard, but not impossible. Jim the Reactionary talks about this. And the laws are how they are because your male neighbors don't have the stomach for it. It's not some conspiracy, it's just your neighbors.
The conspiracy was to get children away from their communities and educated by the state and big media to give them those weak stomachs.
Public schools are run by the local community. There is no conspiracy to education children in centralized boarding schools far away.
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I mean, fascists are generally fairly open to the idea of there being a whole pile of parasites on society, and for all its usual reactionary trappings it's fundamentally a young man's philosophy.
(Not all nationalists are fascists, of course.)
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You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
Mathematically someone has to balance the books here. The total cost is the same whether it's concentrated or diffused, the difference is who pays for it.
Sure, some people benefit by having their parent's care socialised, but I think that's rarely Nick 30 ans - his parents are generally not that far gone yet and if he had to subsidize them he would at least get a say over how much, what extent, how much healthcare, etc.
You wouldn't pay Mom's rent anyway, Mom is more likely to have property, which she then might have to liquidate. Some people would have to pay Mom's rent. Mom might live a lot less well than under boomer UBI.
Most people get their inheritance in their 50s. I think on average it'd be better for UMC people to not subsidize old people for hope of a diffuse future payout but to rather get to steer the economy now.
Probably and that might mean even more immigration and at some point sovereign defaults.
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
Having moved from a Western country to an Asian country where 'elderly are taken care of by their children and tend to cohabit houses' is the norm. The latter seems verymuch more functional than the current metagame of the West? I'm admittedly fortunate in that nobody in either of my families is a high-grade fuckup and I could see how that'd cause issues with the current state of things.
I've got small children, I much prefer having access to elderly members of my wife's family within a 3 minute walk versus my parents having fucked off to Australia's equivalent of Florida that's a 2 hour flight away. There's a ton of issues created by allowing the elderly to do luxury space communism.
IMHO this is literally the entire argument (whatever you think of its merits) for a redistributive welfare state to take care of the young, the old, and the incurably indigent. You are indeed very lucky to have at least some family members of an older generation alive and in good enough shape to provide a degree of childcare, but from behind the Rawlsian veil, such good fortune is hardly guaranteed.
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It’s almost like borrowing and dropping a bunch of cash into certain industries have caused costs to explode.
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Mom is overwhelmingly likely to be a homeowner and be able to indefinitely defer property taxes.
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There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
I agree that this is a significant issue. Before social security, it was pretty normal and common for children to financially contribute to their parents. So that in effect, social security replaced a system that was informal, voluntary, and disorganized with one that is formal, involuntary, and better organized. And it definitely seems like older people are -- in general -- collecting an amount which is not subject to the vagaries of their children's fortunes.
But still, it does seem you lose something when you switch to an involuntary system. Arguably, in a voluntary system, the hypothetical 30 year old man would enjoy a great deal more respect from his parents; his (hypothetical) wife; and the people around him. In an involuntary system, there's much less need to respect the guy since he is going to provide either way. There is some hypothetical single mom out there; he's supporting her along with some other man's child; and the mom has utter contempt for him. (Ok, that's an exaggeration, but you see the point.)
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What proportion of this is just wildly inflated end-of-life medical care? Seems to me the real trap is that families spend four times the accumulated total lifetime medical costs up to that point in the last few months or years of their loved ones' life. That money isn't going to old people really, it's going to insurance companies, nursing homes, palliative care, home nursing etc. For the most part, it doesn't buy anything except a longer death.
The demand for medical care is, for all practical purposes, infinite.
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Personally I moved to Paraguay.
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Ok, but average life expectancy is ~80. If we assume retirement at 65 and full time employment starting at 21, that's 44 years of full time work vs 36 of nonproductive time. So a forty hour workweek is still far more than 20 hours of productivity not allocated towards old age.
Buddy, I have bad news for you ...
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Who did you think the welfare state was for? Yes, you have to pay into the system, but you have freedom not afforded to the young and physical and mental ability not afforded to the old. That's the social contract. The theoretical benefit of immigration is that you bring in people who haven't spent 18 years consuming resources and are putting money into the system immediately; of course it doesn't always work out that way.
And people here absolutely complain about the spiraling healthcare spending growth (though in the past few decades the US has grown more slowly than comparable countries). It's pretty clear that medicare/SSI are going to fuck the budget soon, and it's politically impossible to seriously cut them.
The freedom is not something given, but taken away.
I am aware of the concept of a social contract. But the contract here is drafted almost solely by those benefitting at this point - that's not a contract, that's coercive extraction of resources from those with power from those with none, with most people being unaware where the money is flowing and who is paying for whom.
The social contract being boomer UBI is also something somewhat unprecedented in a democracy. Maybe not in history.
Exactly. Plus the current boundaries of the amount of Boomer UBI, the age it's received and what it can be spent on (Endless arm-wrestling with the grim reaper to claw a month at a time is just not useful for anybody) can all be shifted without killing 'the social contract'. Most people are effectively not covering their own costs, retirement is a privilege.
You can also, much more easily, just end the cap on social security contributions. Sure, the high income won't like it, but an almost literal 'raise taxes on the rich and only the rich' policy would be popular enough that they realize it's not going away.
"Just" raise the top tax bracket to 50%.
Much easier than getting your government hands on the boomers' medicare.
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The social contract is whatever society's representative (the state) says it is, and nothing more or less.
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I don't recall signing a contract. More like the social imposition? I would only agree to a contract that gives me what I deserve.
Obviously it's impractical to get voluntary agreement from everyone. The idea is set up a system with a kind of rough proportionality of advantage (ex ante) and then impose it on everyone willy-nilly. But even so, the system should be fair, sustainable, and pro-social. Based on these criteria, I would say there is a lot of room for improvement in the current system.
Yes, well, too bad, because it's not a valid contract without this element.
With respect to whom? It is none of these to Nick 30 ans, but it may feel that way to Pierre 68 ans.
In the strict, legal sense, I would agree. But when people say "social contract" that's not what is meant.
For every category of person.
If that's correct, then that's a big problem. If the social contract is abusing (ex ante) a category of persons, then it's arguably illegitimate.
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