Halo and Philosophy

by Cuddy, Luke

  Ironic Killtacular

  What are we to make of this? Well, here’s where Halo itself comes in. The Republic—and we can use this one mega-dialogue as an emblem of the entire Platonic corpus—as mimesis seeks to train its audience, readers and listeners, to be like the characters performed in the dialogue. Indeed, The Republic is a training simulation course in dialogue itself. Its values are the values of the fantasy of the philosophical city, and those values are pushed into the audience through the power of playing philosophic pretend, the same way the Socrates of The Republic tells his listeners that Homeric epic pushes all sorts of potentially-questionable values into the audience of epic.

  If we can prove that Halo is somehow a training in philosophy, we might be able to bring our 360’s to Magnesia (the name of the city the lawgivers of The Laws are founding).

  The most important objection Plato made to the Homeric epics was that their main characters—Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Odysseus—are not worthy of emulation. Achilles deserts in a fit of pique; Agamemnon is an incompetent commander; Hector runs away from Achilles before turning around only because he has no choice; Odysseus lies like a rug.

  Such is not the case of the characters of Halo. Captain and Commander Keyes, Sergeant Johnson, Cortana, the noble and infinite marines and ODST troopers: all of these NPC’s do their duty, uttering only the occasional wry remark, and help you save the universe in the process.

  Most importantly, of course, there’s you, Master Chief. You have no choice but to do your duty; to do otherwise is to fail to play the game (from a practical standpoint, to fail to finish the level you’re on and move to the next). And when you see yourself in the cut scenes, the basic nobility of your character is absolutely manifest. Your care for Cortana, your relationship with Johnson, the way the marines look up to you: all of it declares the Master Chief to be our last, best hope of saving the universe.

  And the mechanics, direct as they are, vehemently reinforce this mimesis of nobility: the things that you do to play the Master Chief are the things that you should do to save our species. Whether it’s hitting the sweet spot on a Hunter with a pistol or jacking a Wraith to take out a plasma-gun emplacement, you’re doing it for the UNSC and for the planets it protects.

  The same is true of the Arbiter. Even in Halo 2, before the Arbiter and the Master Chief join forces, the Arbiter is fighting the Flood—the very same enemy, of course, that UNSC and the Master Chief are fighting. When the Covenant splits, the Arbiter is of course on the “save the universe, including the humans” side.

  What about the Violence?

  The violence of Halo, like the violence of many other popular videogames, is of course what critics of the medium always seem to concentrate their fire on. From Plato’s perspective this factor would have posed not the slightest problem. Ancient Greece was a place where war was a fact of life. To make a young man unwarlike would have seemed to Plato just as bad as to make him a quitter or a liar.

  Shooters of armed conflict, so to speak, tend to take less criticism on this score than ethically-ambivalent games like Grand Theft Auto. Mainstream culture tends, for largely the same reasons as Plato, to pay less attention to violence done in the name of a notionally—and nationally—good cause.

  On the other hand, the concerns of parents and educators about kids spending many hours immersed in this violence, however universe-saving it might be, also have a Platonic side: this is where the criticism of mimesis that bequeathed to us the translation “imitation” comes in. Is there something about this kind of playing epic pretend that, as Plato’s Socrates says, makes pleasure and pain be “the rulers of our state”?

  The very existence of The Republic and the rest of Plato’s dialogues says no. To grasp this truth we have to make a final stop, in the famous cave of Republic Book 6.

  This is a story about education and culture, and the lack of those things. That’s what Socrates says, but very few readers even notice him saying that. Imagine a bunch of people forced to sit and play Super Mario Bros. all day every day. Super Mario Bros. is all they know of the entire universe. Their arms and legs are tied down to the couches they sit on. They’re playing co-op, and the levels are never-ending. Now imagine that one of them is released, and dragged out of the house; somebody shows him the sky (of which of course the nearly ever-present sky of Super Mario Bros. is a representation—that is, a mimesis, a play-performance), and he grows to like it. He goes back to help the others see what he’s seen, but even if he can untie them, they won’t get up.

  He tries to play Super Mario Bros. again to get their attention, but they pwn him because his reflexes are shot from having spent so much time outdoors, and so when he tries to tell them that they should get up, they kill him. So who’s educated and cultured, in this scenario? That’s the trick—both the Mario-playing prisoners and the guy who went outside are educated; they’re just educated differently.

  Plato’s shadow-puppet play—the one the prisoners of the original cave watch projected on the wall—is mimesis, just as the Homeric epics are, just as Mario is, and Halo is. To be released and to go outside seems to mean being free of that closed world of mimesis in which you do the things you play because that’s what you know of the world.

  But when we consider that The Republic is itself mimesis—a dialogue—things start to look different. Imagine that you’re playing a game in which you play as the person released from the couch, and when you get back inside after seeing the sky, Covenant forces are trying to kill the rest of humanity, still tied to the couches.

  Mario may be ineffectual, ethically, but Halo is about waking up (literally, in Combat Evolved and Halo 3, in which you as the Master Chief wake up from cryogenic sleep and paralysis respectively) to a reality in which you must save the universe.

  The Republic is about becoming a hero, philosophically-speaking. Plato is seeking to replace the tales of heroism of The Iliad and The Odyssey with a new tale, the tale of Socrates, because, of course, Socrates is the hero who tried to release the other prisoners, and died for it. In the Crito he is explicitly compared to Achilles.

  Is Halo philosophy, then? Yes, in the ancient sense—the Greek sense devised by Plato himself. Like The Republic, Halo is a way of thinking about how to live an ethical life: how to live up to our obligations, how to help others, above all, how to protect others from forces poised to destroy them. Achilles was the protector of the Greeks, Hector of the Trojans, Odysseus of his household on Ithaca, as the Master Chief is the protector of humanity.

  Guardian Training

  In Books 2 and 3 of The Republic we hear about the stories Plato’s Socrates thinks are fit for the Guardians to hear in the course of their education. We hear that almost all of the myths with which Plato himself was raised are unsuited for the task, because they depict ethically bad acts by supposedly heroic characters, like Achilles grieving over Patroclus. That discussion transitions into the first discussion of mimesis, and comes to a head in the following passage:If [the Guardians] play pretend at all, they should play pretend from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession—the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skillful at playing any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from playing pretend they should come to be what they play. Did you never observe how playing pretend, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grows into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?

  The word I translate “playing pretend” here is of course mimesis. When we think of the Master Chief in light of this passage, we see that even if we need Aristotle’s ideas about mimesis to acquit Super Mario Bros. from the charge of making its players go through life trying to jump on mushrooms, Halo ends up looking like remarkably good training for guardians.

  This Platonic analysis of the ethics of Halo leaves us with some big questions about playing space-epic. Can we imagine a world where this kind of violent Guardian training is no l
onger necessary? If we can imagine that world, should we try to get there, given that testosterone seems like a biological fact of life?

  Neither Plato nor the Halo series can help us answer those questions, but both can help us ask them more compellingly.

  4

  Does Cortana Dream of Electric Sheep?

  MONICA EVANS

  There’s a moment near the beginning of Halo: Combat Evolved in which Cortana is ordered to evacuate the boarded Pillar of Autumn. Between gunfights in the ship’s hallways and heavy fire from a dozen Covenant ships, Cortana takes a few seconds to glance around the bridge, as if she’s going to miss the place, before hanging her head and letting the Master Chief yank her from the system. It’s a surprisingly human moment, not only for an AI character, but for a game that is primarily concerned with run-and-gun shooting, combat tactics, and competitive multiplayer.

  In science fiction, we tend to focus on the spaceships, the robots, and the aliens, but it’s the emphasis on small human moments that often define the best work in the field. As a genre, science fiction is valuable for exploring the nature and purpose of humanity, especially as it is one of the few genres in which we can step outside humanity and look back at ourselves from alien eyes, extreme futures, and the vantage point of our very best and worst potential as a species. Science fiction has never been about the future, but about the present: about us as we are now, contrasted with what we hope or fear to become.

  But science fiction gets its point across through stories, and computer games, while they have great potential for storytelling, are an interactive, immersive medium, one that must present players with an engaging experience but not necessarily a traditional story. There are a wide variety of games that include science-fiction imagery, rhetoric, and themes. Some of the best-loved and most critically acclaimed game series fall into this category, including but not limited to Doom, Fallout, Half-Life, Metroid, Starcraft, Space Quest, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Unreal Tournament, and Metal Gear Solid, as well as games that take place in the Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, and Chronicles of Riddick worlds. The Game Developers Choice Awards, arguably the most prestigious awards in the commercial games industry, have named a “Game of the Year” eleven times; seven times, the award has gone to a science fiction-themed game, and at least one has been nominated every year.17

  More than this, computer games are science fiction. They are the feelies of Brave New World and the interactive wall screens of Fahrenheit 451, the dangerous cyber-playgrounds of Neuromancer and the metaverse of Snow Crash, and they are quickly becoming the not-quite-human intelligence systems of Blade Runner and the works of Asimov and Ellison. Yet more often than not the science-fiction content of games is limited to the superficial, present only in the visual atmosphere of alien worlds and the names of weapons. Too often, computer games fail to include the social commentary, fundamental questions, or examinations of humanity at the extremes that define the best science fiction in other media.

  Looking at the Halo series, we can’t deny that it has been hugely successful, both critically and financially, and that it has had a significant impact on the medium of games. We also can’t deny that Halo is science-fiction-themed. Alien races, slipstream capable battleships, and cybernetically enhanced soldiers aside, the core of the game’s single-player campaign—not to mention the series’ title—is the exploration and eventual control of a ring-shaped structure inspired by a partial Dyson sphere that immediately brings Larry Niven’s Ringworld to mind. The question is not whether Halo looks like science fiction, but whether the series addresses the same fundamental questions as its references and inspirations, and what it has to say about the nature of humanity when faced with its greatest and most insidious threats.

  I Was Gonna Shoot My Way Out. Mix Things Up a Little

  Science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, when he was fed up with defending the genre, “Ninety-percent of science fiction is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.” His point, that a genre shouldn’t be dismissed for including some less than brilliant works, was a response to science fiction’s most vocal critics who habitually used “the worst examples of the field for ammunition.” 18 (Game developers and players faced with a similar argument would do well to take note.)

  In the twenty-first century, science fiction has at long last become mainstream. Author Thomas Disch notes that science fiction is currently so pervasive in our culture that “its basic repertoire of images . . . are standard items in the fantasy life of any preschooler.”19 Science fiction is nothing if not relevant today, in our technological, interconnected culture that values personalization, individuality, and breadth of knowledge over depth, a future seen by at least some of the writers of the last decades.

  Despite its current popularity, defining science fiction is apparently an impossible task. John Clute and Peter Nicholls in their Encyclopedia of Science Fiction come right out and say that there “really is no reason to expect that a workable definition of science fiction will ever be established. None has, so far.” Author Damon Knight’s flippant definition is amusingly one of the most widely used: “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.”20 Nevertheless, there are some common elements among the different definitions. To many, science fiction is primarily concerned with the nature of humanity, and with humanity’s relationship with science and technology. A great deal of science fiction falls into what Neil Gaiman calls the “what if” or “if this goes on” kind of story, one that explores an extrapolated future to look more closely at an aspect of present society, culture, or technology.21

  In computer games, the definition most commonly used seems to apply to iconography: if there’s a spaceship, a robot, or an alien race, it’s a science fiction game. Sidestepping the contentious issue of story and games, we can at least say that defining a subset of interactive games by way of a narrative genre presents difficulties. If the substance of science fiction is primarily expressed through narrative, computer games as a medium have a two-fold problem: game designers are not authors, although their creative processes may be similar, and players are not necessarily paying attention to the designer’s planned experience as much as their own personal narrative, which may be as simple as “I killed those three guys really effectively,” or “I beat level six in nine minutes.”

  Computer games are based on deterministic systems, and many of the major issues explored in science fiction, including social and political commentary, morality, ethics, love, otherness, and reality, are extraordinarily difficult to reproduce or express in black-andwhite terms. On the other hand, there are a number of standard mechanical conventions that may seem to address science-fiction themes, but are taken for granted by players. The fact that a given computer game includes multiple lives and save states does not mean that it has anything profound or meaningful to say about the ethics of cloning or the potential for radically extending human life expectancy. Games that do “hang a lantern” in this way run the risk of overemphasizing mechanics that are often seen as fundamental to games.

  Computer games also progress along a learning curve: as players become more skilled, the game world becomes more challenging, and more tools and options for overcoming those challenges are presented. For realistic games, particularly those that take place in present day, introducing future tech as the game progresses is a common way to increase both difficulty and the player’s options. Once the shotgun, double-barreled shotgun, and combat shotgun have been exhausted, introducing the plasma shotgun may be the easiest way to increase a player’s arsenal, and suddenly the game has become science fiction, at least superficially.

  These and other issues may account for the sheer number of science-fiction-themed games, but they offer little help to designers who not only intend to create great science fiction in games, but to tell stories and ask questions that are best or perhaps only expressed through games. For examining humanity at its extremes, through the lens of an “other”, or in relation t
o advances in science and technology, the interactive nature of computer games must be leveraged in service of the science fiction content to create meaningful, substantive experiences for the player.

  The Right Man in the Wrong Place Can Make All the Difference

  You can create an excellent game with a science-fiction setting that does not address larger philosophical concerns. The Metroid Prime series, for example, perfectly captures the feeling of being alone and isolated on a hostile alien planet, but goes no farther than that. Given that the series is focused solely on gameplay, primarily balancing exploration and platforming puzzles with first-person combat, no deeper exploration of human issues is required, and in fact might be detrimental to the game experience.

  For a game that does intend to explore larger issues, the medium of computer games can be used to startling effect. One of the most successful examples is Half-Life 2, a game that makes a clear commentary on the nature of human survival and how easily we can convince ourselves of normality as things around us are spiraling out of control. In Half-Life 2, the science-fiction elements—such as the pervasive Breencasts, the concentration-camp-like City 17, or the character of Dog—are supported by a structure in which fundamental questions of humanity are first raised by the gamespace and then explored through the player’s actions.

  The human race is presented in the context of survival in three major groups: those working with the alien Combine that have enslaved the human race, believing they can save their own lives; those who have given in and keep their heads down, hoping to stay alive as long as possible; and those who are actively fighting against the Combine regime, believing that revolution is the only way to save the human species.