by Cuddy, Luke
The player character, theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, is in this last group, as Half-Life 2 is an action-oriented First Person Shooter (FPS), but the active nature of the character allows the player to see as much of the devastated world as possible. Freeman’s somewhat remarkable transformation from research physicist to hard-core soldier and messiah figure is never directly explained by the game, but the fact that Freeman’s skills improve at the same rate as the player’s makes it easier to accept. Here the game’s learning curve works in service of the story, rather than as a separate mechanic.
Half-Life 2 avoids many of the pitfalls of science-fiction games by presenting a world and a problem rather than a traditional story. The player learns everything they need to know about the Combine in the first five minutes of the game, a quietly harrowing train ride to City 17 (motto: “It’s safer here”), where humans are treated like cattle and the Combine soldiers look like nothing so much as concentration camp guards. The mission-based plot is more straightforward, often consisting of little more than “Here is a problem, go and fix it” or “Bad things are coming, escape them!” but the player’s motivations and Freeman’s are always in tandem. The player is part of the action, not separate from it, making the claustrophobic, defeated space at the game’s beginning all the more compelling: you aren’t simply told that things are bad, you live it for the space of the game’s introduction.
It’s also nicely ironic that Gordon Freeman fights against the Combine and Dr. Breen, the game’s human antagonist, through the literal application of the human survival instinct, something Dr. Breen urges the rest of humanity to overcome in his pro-Combine propaganda (most notably in response to a “concerned citizen” who wants to know why the Combine have effectively sterilized all humans within reach).
One can of course play through Half-Life 2 without paying any attention to the surrounding details, and a great deal of the game’s success depends on the fact that it is, regardless of story, an excellent game. Nevertheless, the vision of the game is not undermined but supported by its interactive nature, and both the pure narrative moments and the complex interactive experiences in Half-Life 2 are enough to make at least the philosophically-minded player consider what humanity might look like when survival is the only remaining option.
Our criteria for science-fiction games might be that they not only include the props of science fiction—the robots, spaceships, and aliens—but also challenge the player to consider humanity in a new light, particularly in terms of scientific and technological advances. Additionally, the science-fiction game creates experiences that are best explored or understood in an interactive medium, and that are enhanced by the mechanics of the individual game and the medium as a whole. The science-fiction game is one in which fundamental, philosophical questions are handled with as much care as core game mechanics, and in which the player is inspired not only to win, but to think.
This War Has Enough Dead Heroes
In Halo: Combat Evolved, we can see a clear pattern in the way humanity is represented: in the world of Combat Evolved, we are fighters, and no strangers to sacrifice. The nameless soldiers that accompany the Master Chief on many of the game’s missions do not often survive, nor are they expected to unless the mission objectives call for it. Likewise, the eventual fate of Captain Keyes and the destruction of the Pillar of Autumn, both intended to prevent the Halo installation from eradicating all sentient life in the galaxy, emphasize that humans, or at least those of the United Nations Space Command, are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the species.
The one human seemingly exempt from this description is the Master Chief, who is constantly presented as hero and savior, the person other people make sacrifices for. It’s no accident that the Chief is woken from cryosleep to the sounds of a hushed choir and the awe of the two technicians in attendance. While the Master Chief is presented as different from other humans, no comment is ever made about the specifics of that difference: that as the last survivor of the SPARTAN II-project, he is a fully-augmented, cyberneticallyenhanced human. On the contrary, the Master Chief’s augmented status simply makes him a better soldier, and in the narrative serves primarily to help the player feel more like the hero of the game.
In terms of the alien antagonists, both the Covenant and the Flood appear in the first Halo as faceless enemies, albeit with differing visuals and tactics. The brief story sequences present the Covenant as an advanced theocratic civilization and the Flood as a parasitic, nearly mindless organism, but in practice they amount to no more than two types of bad guys to kill. Given that the first half of the game is dedicated to fighting the somewhat traditional Covenant forces, the introduction of a second, radically different enemy faction was intended to create “surprise, drama, and impact”22 in the vein of Ridley Scott’s Alien; but while the Flood’s appearance complicates the story and forces the player to adopt new combat tactics, no deeper exploration of their species is ever offered. Both Flood and Covenant serve the same purpose as the Master Chief’s augmentation: to support the player’s sense of heroism, and to provide a variety of challenges for the player to overcome.
Ironically, the two most fully-developed characters in Halo are the two A.I., Cortana and Guilty Spark 343. Cortana may be the most human individual in the game: she is often witty or sharp-tongued, occasionally smug about her intelligence, clearly cares for the Master Chief, and is the only character in the game to truly lose her temper. Her commentary during missions is usually limited to guiding the player through the latest set of objectives, but even then she feels more human than any of the marines following the Chief through a given mission.
Guilty Spark, on the other hand, is presented as an advanced, albeit eccentric machine intelligence, in that he sees the world primarily in terms of outcomes. The casual, cheerful way in which he informs the Master Chief that the Halo installations are intended to wipe out the Flood by destroying their food source—all sentient life in the galaxy—and the equally cheerful way in which he instructs the waiting Sentinels to “save his head” speak to an intelligence that thinks very differently than the other characters and factions. Guilty Spark’s priorities regarding sentient life are also quite different. He is prepared to scour the galaxy of life without batting a digital eyelash, but is “shocked, almost too shocked for words” that the Master Chief and Cortana would think of destroying the Pillar of Autumn and its extensive records of human history. To Guilty Spark, the existing humans are less real, and certainly less worthy of study and categorization, than the digital artifacts they left behind.
Looking at the whole of the game, one can see that Halo: Combat Evolved presents an immersive science-fiction world but lacks substance in many ways. Apart from the bright spots of Cortana and Guilty Spark, the game includes the trappings of science fiction without the philosophy, and settles for creating a world that players can enjoy without questioning, with no hard choices and no expectations of those players other than mechanical skill. The core of the Halo series has never been the story-driven, single-player campaigns but the multiplayer capability, and the continued success of the series owes much to that community of players. Nevertheless, one can see the seeds of something greater in this first attempt, and the potential for more complex and insightful science fiction in future versions of the characters, factions, and gameworld.
Politics . . . How Tiresome
The opening sequence of Halo 2 stands as one of the more surprising risks taken in the name of narrative by a development studio, particularly given the runaway success of the previous title. Where the experience of Halo: Combat Evolved can be fairly described as “Master Chief blows up alien bad guys,” Halo 2 begins not only by humanizing the Covenant, but by turning one Elite soldier into a sympathetic, tragic hero and setting him up as a foil of equal skill and prowess to the Master Chief.
The opening sequence, in which the Master Chief’s accolades for destroying the Halo ring are juxtaposed with the Elite’s
trial, torture, and effective excommunication for allowing him to do so, also explores a great deal of the Covenant’s theology and political structure. Their subsequent attack on the Earth’s defense platforms can be somewhat jarring for players who have just become invested in their side of the story, but must immediately go back to killing faceless hordes of Covenant forces.
Over the course of the game, the personality conflicts between the Prophets of Truth, Regret, and Mercy, the Brute Tartarus, and the Arbiter himself turn the Covenant into a complex, fractured culture, as well as a collection of allies and villains with individual desires and agendas. The religious schism among the Covenant leadership also places them in stark contrast with the united human front, making their eventual alliance an interesting comment on the desperate measures of two civilizations in peril.
As for the Arbiter himself, his character fits the Halo series’s abiding interest in struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. When presented to the Prophet of Truth, he has fallen so far from grace that he considers himself already dead. Rather than have him hung by the entrails and his corpse paraded through the city—as the Council apparently voted—the Prophet makes him into a literal instrument of vengeance. As the Arbiter, he is expected to do everything in his power to secure the Covenant’s future, but he is also expected, even encouraged, to die in the attempt. The Arbiter’s crisis of faith, eventual betrayal by his masters, and alliance with his former enemies is a common story in both science fiction and fantasy tales, one with far more potential for explorations of the nature of humanity than the Master Chief’s equivalent missions.
Other old enemies are also presented in a new light with the introduction of the Gravemind, the cryptic and manipulative entity that is both the voice and the collected intelligence of the Flood. Physically formed from the corpses of the infested fallen, the Gravemind seems more specifically inspired by body horror than by science fiction in general. In terms of its actions, however, the Gravemind is an exceptional politician, sending both the Arbiter and the Master Chief on distracting errands to allow itself to invade and infest the civil war-torn Covenant city of High Charity in Halo 2, and changing allegiances on a seemingly daily basis in Halo 3.
Critical reaction to the Gravemind as a character was poor, both for its confusing and seemingly inconsistent motivations and its often clichéd villainous dialogue.23 That said, presenting the Flood not as a mindless parasite but as an intelligent character with ambitions and fears of its own suggests that the world of Halo 2 and Halo 3 is a place of more substance than the original game.
For the most part, the recurring human characters are presented as more fully-developed versions of their previous selves. In Halo: Combat Evolved, the nameless friendly marines complain about killstealing and say “My bad” during friendly-fire, making single-player missions feel like surrogates for an XBOX-Live experience. In the sequels, the chatter is humorous but more believable, and many soldiers are presented as at least names and faces, if not fully developed characters.
Johnson, Lord Hood, and Miranda Keyes are among the few individuals with major roles to play, and all three have character arcs closely tied to Halo’s themes of struggle and sacrifice. Both Johnson and Keyes sacrifice themselves for the greater good; Keyes to prevent herself and Johnson from being used as surrogates by the Prophet of Truth, and Johnson as the man in the wrong place at the wrong time when Guilty Spark realizes what the humans intend for the Ark. Lord Hood is left to give the fitting eulogy in the penultimate cinematic of Halo 3:Let us never forget those who journeyed into the howling dark and did not return, for their decision required courage beyond measure. Sacrifice, an unshakeable conviction that their fight, our fight, was elsewhere.... They ennobled all of us, and they shall not be forgotten.
In terms of sacrifice, the character that most stands out is the Master Chief, who is presented in even more heroic terms than in the first game. At the end of Halo 2’s first mission, the Chief discovers a Covenant bomb on the Cairo defense platform. Rather than defuse it, he drags it to an airlock, pushes itself and him out into space aimed at a Covenant ship, drops it off, and leaps into space again as it explodes behind him, to land safely on the surface of the In Amber Clad—a sequence that is so over-the-top in its heroics that it nearly comes across as parody. When controlled by the player, the Chief has to work for his victories, but the story sequences present him as an inhumanly powerful force—which, given his augmentations, is an arguable point.
The moments in which the Master Chief seems most human are those that he shares with Cortana, who evolves into something like a love interest in Halo 3. In fact, the third game begins with Cortana explaining how she was allowed to choose her Spartan, and that she chose the Master Chief because he had something special: he was lucky, a nice reference to the fact that the player, regardless of skill, has an infinite number of chances to win against the most difficult foes. Much of Halo 3 involves the Master Chief’s search for and rescue of Cortana from the Gravemind, and their reunion is another of the small human moments that raises the emotional impact of the narrative.
Arguably, the only moment of sacrifice associated with the Master Chief occurs at the very end of Halo 3, when the remaining Earth forces believe he has died destroying the Ark. In fact, he returns to cryosleep in the floating remnants of the Forward Unto Dawn with Cortana watching over him, ready to wake him in humanity’s next hour of need—a moment that seems more appropriate to Arthurian legend than science fiction. The relationship between science fiction and fantasy is easily as contentious as that between gameplay and story, but the more heroic aspects of the Master Chief suggest that the Halo series might have as much in common with the works of Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E. Howard as with Asimov, Clarke, and Bester. Despite the spaceships, aliens, and AI, the experience of Halo may be as easily if not better explored through the lens of fantasy than through the questions of science, technology, and humanity raised by science fiction.
Just Dust and Echoes
In April of 2006, the developers of Halo published the The Bungie Guide to Sci Fi, in which they continue to list the numerous inspirations for the series. The list begins with Ringworld, Iain Banks’s Culture series, and Starship Troopers, and takes a moment to address fan concerns that they “ripped off” the idea for the ring-shaped structure of the Halo installations: “Ring-shaped artificial worlds have also been used by Iain M. Banks and others because they are cool. And that’s why we used one. Because it’s cool and therefore the type of thing a Forerunner civilization would build.”24
Additional influences include Ridley Scott’s Aliens, Blade Runner, Snow Crash, Rendevous with Rama, Dune, Robocop, and Terminator, and older games such as Homeworld and the original Half Life. The developers at Bungie may not be science-fiction scholars, but they are proudly self-admitted fans, and their guide reads not only as an introduction to science fiction for those new to it but as a list of the high standards to which they held themselves while creating the Halo universe.
The question is not whether Bungie attempted to create meaningful science fiction, but whether they succeeded. It’s worth mentioning that the fan reaction to Halo 2, while overwhelmingly positive in general, was somewhat critical of the story elements, both for their focus and their execution. In particular, the Arbiter missions in Halo 2 were criticized for distracting from the Master Chief’s story and the defense of Earth,25 suggesting that for many players the attempt at narrative substance was less interesting than the new vehicles and multiplayer maps.
The story that unfolds across the three core games makes for a compelling, often thought-provoking frame for the single-player gameplay experience, particularly for players who know their science fiction. For the average player, Halo may not necessarily inspire deeper explorations of humanity or critical insights as to our relationship with science and technology, and it may not always live up to the classics of science fiction that were its partial inspiration. But Halo does reach its narrative goals in t
erms of pure engagement: emotional impact, dramatic twists, and letting the player feel like they’re the only one that can save the universe. And sometimes, even in science fiction, that’s enough. Whether Theodore Sturgeon would qualify Halo as part of the ninety percent crud or the ten percent brilliance, or whether the game qualifies as meaningful science fiction, may not be as important as the fact that sometimes it’s just really fun to be the Master Chief for a few hours.
After all, we’re only human.
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The Initiatory Journey to Legendary Play
SÉBASTIEN HOCK-KOON
I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m not that good. I don’t have incredible reflexes. I’m not particularly, or naturally, good at aiming or at dodging bullets. I play better than many people on Earth, sure, especially those who never or rarely play videogames. But among gamers, I am certainly not a star. Now, before you start thinking “Then what the hell are you doing writing a chapter in a book on a videogame?” just read on.
Despite my shortcomings, I finished Halo in legendary mode all by myself, without looking for help or tricks or cheats. And I achieved it because I was persistent and because I am a game designer. More precisely, I was studying game design at SupInfoGame when I first encountered Halo: Combat Evolved (Halo will refer to this first episode for the rest of the chapter). I did not play and replay it as homework but only because I enjoyed it. And yes, playing videogames is considered homework in a videogame school.
Thanks to this game, I have learned many things about game design. I would like to share this experience with you.
I Was Once Wrong about Halo . . .