Halo and Philosophy

by Cuddy, Luke

  The first time I played Halo, it was on a computer in October 2003. The Xbox version had been released for more than a year and a half. It was far more colorful than many First Person Shooters (FPSs). But the gameplay itself was just average. From the very beginning, I had been wondering what people found so amazing about Halo. So I borrowed an Xbox and the game from my school, for the holidays (it’s the kind of thing you can do in a game design school). I first finished the game one time, in easy mode. It was good, but already far better on console than on computer.

  The thing is, I have not been astonished or even surprised by the game. The once incredible graphics looked bad a year and a half later. The novelty of vehicles did not touch me because I had played Battlefield 1942 a lot. The small number of weapons was ridiculous compared to the real gun fetishist’s FPS (a.k.a. Perfect Dark). The game was entertaining; I had no major issues with it. At the time, I didn’t realize the implications.

  At the school I was attending, I was taking a game design and project management course. Half of my homework was about game design. I was taught to see a videogame’s defaults and qualities. And I did not find any of the first in Halo. Not being able to find any flaw should have warned me but it did not. When I bought my own Xbox, I did not buy Halo. I waited until its release in the “Classics” collection (which, naturally, cost half the price of the original). Then, I finished the game in normal mode. It did not change my opinion much, but it was desperately enjoyable to play. So I tried to beat it in heroic mode. This was when I really started to see how great Halo is.

  The Real Halo Begins in Heroic Mode

  I didn’t realize it while playing in heroic mode. It only became obvious, even unavoidable, on legendary mode. Roughly speaking, I saw a pattern. In order to finish easy mode, I had to master two things: shooting the right enemy and moving at the same time. In normal mode, I needed grenade throwing mastery. The heroic mode required weapon mastery—choosing my two weapons wisely and switching cleverly between them while fighting. Finally, in legendary, I had to add the melee attack.

  It worked this way for me (it certainly was not the same for you, if you made it all the way to the legendary mode). Dajez notes the difference between the basic and the expert use of a videogame character’s action repertoire.26 Progressing in Halo cannot be considered linear (although the plotline might be regarded as such). There is not an overall “FPS skill” that you have to improve. There are many different skills. Your level in each skill is independent of the others. A player may aim perfectly, like an e-sport team member, while not having the ability to expertly throw a grenade in order to maximize the amount of Grunts that get blown to hell.

  The key, for me, was that I had mastered all these features after the first level of the easy mode. It took me four times the length of the game to master and use them all. Let’s stick to Dajez’s metaphor. Consider each new skill as a new word. Your vocabulary gathers all the words you know. Your lexicon contains the words that you use in your everyday life, in other words, the ones that you master. For example, when the tutorial teaches you how to throw a grenade, you learn a new word/skill that widens your vocabulary. This word/skill will go to your lexicon, when you are able to throw a grenade wisely in combat. To progress, I did not improve the skills I already had. I acquired new ones and used all of them together. The order I followed came naturally. It was not imposed on me by the game. It was certainly possible to change it.

  This means that every player may create his or her own way to reach the end of the game. The main features are given at the beginning of the game. The player decides which to master and when to do so. It coheres with James Paul Gee’s “Multiple Route Principle.” This principle allows players “to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem solving.”27

  At the same time, it goes against another principle. According to Gee’s “Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle,” good videogames should make the right information available at the right moment. In Halo, it can only be applied to tutorials and objectives. It works in easy mode. Against further difficulty levels, you’re on your own. The game won’t tell you the way to success; you must find it by yourself. Naturally, it is possible to cheat or to ask for help. But I, like many gamers, consider this route to be admitting defeat.

  Learning and Unlearning

  Let’s move beyond learning in a game and consider more specific mechanics, particularly concerning weapons. There were many points during my Halo tenure when I found myself realizing that I was wrong about something, and how dumb I had been previously. As my skills changed, my comprehension of the game changed.

  My Dear Needler

  The simplest example was the Needler. Before heroic mode, I thought it was the worst weapon of the game. Seriously, it is the only Covenant weapon that has to be reloaded. It launches shards that do not explode on impact. If you send enough on an enemy there is a big explosion, but only after a few seconds. This explosion is lethal, but because of the delay, you may waste ammunition and time shooting an already dead Elite. If you don’t shoot enough shards, you will only injure and not kill the target.

  I changed my mind in heroic mode as my understanding got sharper. The Needler is not usually a good weapon. Its qualities are circumstantial. Most of the time, it’s less effective than other weapons. But against the right situation and with the right technique, it may just be awesome. The higher the game difficulty is, the more attention you must pay to this kind of detail.

  Until normal mode, Covenants’ shields are not a real problem. They are annoying; but it is not necessary to deal specifically with them. In heroic and legendary mode, you have to care about them, especially those of the Elites. You cannot allow yourself to waste ammunition and time in combat any more. The fact that Covenant weapons tend to be more effective against those shields eventually becomes significant. Thus, you tend to use them more and more, because their advantages become obvious and relevant.

  But let’s return to the Needler. It has many features that make it great against Elites. First, no matter the difficulty, the explosion is fatal. Other weapons generally become less and less effective, especially human ones as the difficulty increases. Secondly, with experience, I realized that the shards were slightly homing to the target. It allowed me to focus a little less on aiming and a little more on dodging and analyzing the situation, so that I could stay alive. Thirdly, the delay between the last shard necessary for explosion and the explosion itself may be counter-balanced.

  When you are shooting at an enemy, you generally stop when the enemy is dead. The best is to stop right after the “killing” bullet is shot rather than when the enemy actually falls. While you are firing, you are exposed. It means that you can also be shot. Most bullets are too fast, it is impossible to profit by this delay. With the Needler, you have a few seconds between the shot of the “killing” shard and the explosion.

  When you think that you have fired enough, you can hide and wait safely for the sound of the explosion. Thanks to the Needler’s fire-rate and homing shards, you can reduce significantly the time during which you’re exposed. More importantly, this weapon tells you without any doubt whether or not your enemy is dead. You can also fire shards in order to detect enemies. If the trajectory is curved, there is an enemy around. The Needler may provide you with something often neglected and yet vital in combat: information.

  I think this kind of evolution is somehow typical in FPSs, at least in good ones. But it is often neglected by researchers. Linderoth, Lindström and Alexandersson made two girls play Perfect Dark in deathmatch mode. The girls found the Reaper good compared to other weapons.28 When I read this, my first thought—well the polite version of my first thought—was “What the hell? The Reaper is the worst weapon of the game!” It was a gamer’s reaction. In Perfect Dark, the Reaper is the Skeddar version of the minigun. It is heavy and absolutely not accurate. When you press the trigger, it takes a few seconds to warm up befo
re firing. I would rather use the basic pistol than this useless fan-like weapon.

  After this, I checked on the Internet to see whether my view was shared among players. And yes, according to many people, the Reaper is definitely one of the worst weapons in Perfect Dark. Anyway, I decided to consider that these girls had a good reason to appreciate it. I asked myself what its characteristics were and in which situation they could make it a better weapon.

  The Reaper has a high dispersion rate, so it is difficult to aim precisely at someone. When it fires, its rotating blades turn it into a melee weapon at the same time. If you do know how to aim, the Reaper reduces your chances to touch your opponent. But if you don’t know how to aim correctly, the Reaper actually increases your chances to touch with bullets or blades.

  The efficiency of a weapon does not rely only on the weapon itself. The skills of the user and the situation can change everything. A beginner should use a Shotgun rather than a Railgun, on the contrary an expert would be far more dangerous with the second than with the first. While I was progressing, my perception of the Needler changed. I could tell the same kind of story about each common weapon of Halo. Some revealed their real value in time, while some lost their interest to me. This evolution is about understanding the true power of a weapon and the best way to use (or not use) it. The very best way is generally learned where you need it, in heroic or legendary mode. You could have used it in easy mode. It would have worked as well, even if it was not necessary in order to win.

  My Dear Grenades

  There’s a particular weapon whose use changes according to the difficulty: grenades. At the beginning, I just wanted to write about Plasma Grenades. I did not use Fragmentation ones much. I found their trajectory too random and they could not stick to an enemy. I certainly could have learned to use them properly but I did not. So I finished the legendary mode without using them. I thought I couldn’t say much about them, but I was wrong—it will often happen in this chapter.

  The fact that I could go through the game all the way without Fragmentation Grenades is definitely relevant. It means that it’s not necessary to master every part of gameplay in order to beat the highest difficulty level. It sends us back to Gee’s “Multiple Route Principle.” In order to progress, the player can choose what to improve and what to ignore. So I created my own way of playing Halo, which is one among many. In my way, I almost only used Plasma Grenades.

  In normal mode, I used them quite normally. You throw them to a group of enemies and they explode, killing or at least hurting them. As mentioned above, I did not need them in easy mode, so I did not use them. Sadly or happily, things changed in heroic mode. It became almost impossible to get several enemies with one grenade. They would dodge or jump away. The only way to be sure to kill one was to make the grenade stick. Because of this, I suddenly found them far less effective. I considered Plasma Grenades useless in heroic mode. But I did judge a bit too fast. Yes, it became very hard to kill with a grenade, but no, they were not useless. After a while I realized that when an Elite dodged the explosion, its trajectory was rather unsurprising and moreover it was absolutely not shooting at me.

  Throwing a grenade to a group changes a potentially chaotic system into a predictable one—at least for a few seconds. A well placed grenade may help you shoot your enemies. Sure, Plasma Grenades are less effective in heroic or legendary mode. But they may be effective if you really know how to use them.

  Halo as a Game Design Lesson

  Playing Halo taught me many things about the game itself. But I also learned about game design. Halo is the game that really made me understand what “gameplay depth” means. Depth in gameplay is often related to complexity or variety. I do not understand it that way. I consider that depth is the ability of a game to allow a progression based on the mastery of mechanisms that were not told but discovered by practice. Depth is about acquired skills based on self-discovery of hidden knowledge. Naturally, you can search the Internet for tips, but you will miss the most important part of the game.

  This definition may be applied to the Needler. However, in the next section I want to address two weapons I have not yet said anything about: the Plasma Rifle and the Plasma Gun.

  My Only Two Weapons

  At first sight, it seems awkward. Why on Earth should I be limited to two weapons? It’s especially true when you have played, and loved, Perfect Dark and its plethora of weapons. It’s often said that limited weapons forces the player to choose wisely which weapons to pick up. It is certainly true, but is that it?

  Consider the following. You are just about to enter the Truth and Reconciliation. You have to choose among many available weapons. A casual gamer would choose his or her two favorites, but a hardcore gamer would want the weapons best suited to dealing with the level in question. There are many possibilities. You know that one is the best, but you don’t know which one. If you were playing Perfect Dark, the best decision would be evident: take every weapon you find. In Halo, you have to evaluate each combination. Actually, the two weapons limitation does not reduce choices, it increases the number of possible choices as the best one is not obvious. I argue that it makes the player “stop, think, and (most importantly) care”29 about his or her weapons. And making people think and care about a videogame is absolutely not a bad thing.

  According to Salen and Zimmerman, a key element of good game design is “meaningful play.”30 This expression means that the actions of the player are taken into account by the videogame and that the player can see the outcomes of his or her actions. I would replace “actions” by “progression” and consider meaningful progression.

  Meaningful progression means that the progression of the player is taken into account by the videogame and that the player can see the outcomes of his or her progression.

  Inside the Truth and Reconciliation, you have to fight two Hunters. They are tough enemies unless you have the right weapon and the right technique. Three different weapons may kill them in one shot: the Pistol, the Sniper Rifle, and the Shotgun (at very close range and it may take two shots). Only the Sniper Rifle is available in this level. In order to kill the two Hunters easily, you should keep it. But, in order to do so, you have to know that you will face them onboard as well as the right way to kill them. Let us imagine two different players; Player A is doing the level for the first time, while Player B already knows that there are Hunters inside. They both know how to kill Hunters easily.

  If it was possible to carry every weapon without counterpart, players A and B would both take them all. They would both have the right weapon to face the Hunters. There would be no differences between the results of their play. Player B’s additional knowledge would be meaningless. As they could only take two weapons, Player A may have made a wrong choice. Then, there would be a difference in the result. Player B would have the advantage.

  In the first case, the game would have given meaning to their progression because they were both able to kill the Hunters easily. In the second case, the game gave more meaning to the progression of Player B. As far as I’m concerned, better skills or knowledge, in the way one plays, should always lead to better results.

  I could probably stop here, but I am not done yet with the limitation. Judging from the comparison I made between Halo and Perfect Dark, one could think that the first is better than the second. Fortunately, it is not so simple. As I mentioned before, Perfect Dark is a gun fetishist FPS. Its fun lies in firepower, playing it is about having too many far too powerful weapons. On the other hand, the fun of Halo: Combat Evolved lies in combat. It’s about choosing the right two weapons and getting the most out of them by choosing the right tactic according to the situation.

  In Perfect Dark, changing weapons is not a common fighting action. It takes too long to do in combat, as you generally have many of them. In Halo, switching between your weapons requires only the press of a button. As you only have two, you can reach the other one very fast. If you make a mistake or change your mind, ju
st press the button once more. Switching between weapons is a fighting action in Halo. These two games are very good ones, they are both considered FPSs, but they are definitely not alike.

  My Dearest Plasma Rifle and Plasma Gun

  I loved the Plasma Rifle from day one. I found it far more useful than the Plasma Gun. Once more, I was wrong, but that’s not the point right now. The Plasma Rifle made me understand how to use switching to increase my firepower. More precisely, it taught me how to fire longer without stopping. In order to do so, I combined the Plasma Rifle with the Assault Rifle.

  First you start with the Plasma Rifle. When it overheats; you switch to the Assault Rifle. Once your magazine is empty, you switch back to the Plasma Rifle which has cooled down. And you can fire again. I used this combination as an example of depth during the final presentation of my first year at SupInfoGame.

  Now, I know it was a mistake. Someone could have asked “Hey, Sébastien, why don’t you take a Plasma Gun instead of the Assault Rifle? You could fire endlessly.” No one did, but my answer would certainly have been “Well, perhaps because I am stupid.” Combining the two Plasma weapons was actually obvious, even desperately obvious. Yet, at this moment I had not thought about it. The two rifles combination was enough at the beginning of heroic mode. It did not need more firepower, so I did not look for it. But I had to, later. I also had to understand the subtleties of these two Plasma weapons.

  The Plasma Gun may seem simple and it is. You press and release the trigger, it shoots. You press and hold it, the gun charges. You release, a big Plasma ball is fired and the gun overheats. But this Plasma ball is not only more powerful, like the Needler’s shards, it is also slightly homing. And it can annihilate an Elite’s shield. The charged Plasma Gun is perfect to start a skirmish by destroying the leader’s shield.