Halo and Philosophy

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Halo and Philosophy Page 9

by Cuddy, Luke


  The Plasma Rifle is harder to master. At first sight, you may think that pressing to fire is all that you have to do. To be precise, this weapon has two fire rates: a fast one (compared to the Plasma Gun) and a faster one. The second rate is reached after holding the trigger for a few seconds. It is more powerful and less accurate but it also heats up much more.

  As far as I know, the most efficient way to use the Plasma Rifle is to keep shooting at the first fire rate. To do so, you need to press and release the trigger at the right rhythm. It allows you to fire longer with a fast and accurate weapon. I came to know, and like, so much about it that the Plasma Rifle is one of the reasons why I stopped playing Halo 2. There are two Plasma Rifles in Halo 2: the Elite blue one and the Brute red one. The first was supposed to be my dearest Plasma Rifle, but it was not.

  First, it did not look exactly the same (though this didn’t bother me much). Secondly, its sounds were different, but I could have worked it. The really annoying thing was that its rhythm had changed; its feeling was completely different. Not mastering new weapons is quite normal, I could bear it. But I could not suffer being once again a beginner with the Plasma Rifle. This change made all things I had learned about this weapon, and all the time I spent to learn them, meaningless. I know it may sound extreme but it felt like a betrayal.

  My Two Unforgettable Moments

  After gameplay depth, let’s consider another critical aspect of the game: emergence. Halo, in its very structure, has the ability to create unpredictable and yet logical experiences. This became clear to me after two remarkable episodes.

  The first moment happened while I was sneaking around, looking for the right place to start my next attack on a Covenant unit. Just after rounding a corner, I came face to face with an Elite. Actually, I was facing its back. I used the Melee Attack for a stealth kill. Then I laughed and I certainly got killed right after because I was laughing. The difficulty was high (heroic or legendary); a surprise meeting with an Elite should have resulted in a tough situation.

  I knew I had just lived a rare and unpredictable moment, so rare it only happened once. I knew that because of my many hours playing Halo. You almost never get a free stealth kill on an Elite. I mean a “real” free kill, not one decided by the game designer. It may happen though, because the game is scripted but not completely. Its small parts of randomness allow these kinds of moments to occur.

  My second unforgettable experience took place in legendary mode. I was facing a Jackal in an open space, with nowhere to hide. It was at about ten meters. I saw a green light on its gun and made one step to the right, one to the left, and one more to the right. These steps made me dodge three bursts of three Plasma bullets. After the last one, I ran to the Jackal and threw it off balance with a Melee Attack. Then I could shoot its feet and make it fall before finishing it.

  I did not plan to act like this, it just came naturally. It was not a matter of reflex but only knowledge and anticipation. I felt like a superhero dodging bullets by reading the enemy’s mind. At that very moment, I became aware that I knew almost perfectly the Jackal’s fire pattern. This knowledge was not enough to avoid all the bullets, but it was all that was necessary.

  Once again, it happened because the game allowed it. The Jackal’s pattern was both complex and predictable. Dodging it was very difficult, yet doable. It gave meaning to a higher progression. Killing a Jackal in legendary mode without grenade or charged fire is not easy. Doing so without being touched requires even more skill. It could have been impossible. Believe me, an unavoidable pattern is easy to create, it is also true for one that must be easy to avoid. A “hard but not impossible to avoid pattern” requires a lot of work and testing.

  Uncertainty, the Dark Side of Learning

  Learning in a videogame is uncertain. It’s uncertain because you’re not forced to play a specific game. If I did not play Halo, I would not have written what you are reading at the moment. It is uncertain because the game allows you to not understand. Tutorials aside, Halo never forces you to understand one particular thing. Information is available but you have to decide to look for it. So you may as well miss it. There is nobody behind you telling how you should play—well, there could be someone, but in my case there wasn’t. You can finish the game in easy mode while ignoring most of what we have discussed here. I finished it in legendary mode and I know I did not master everything.

  You only have to learn when you’re facing difficult situations and when you want desperately to overcome them. But there are so many different skills that it’s impossible to predict which one you will acquire or improve in order to do so. The game designer can only hope that the player will not give up the game. For example, it isn’t possible to foresee what a player will have learned after finishing the game once. This is why learning in videogames, and particularly in Halo, is unpredictable and deeply uncertain.

  But instead of fighting this uncertainty, as a teacher would, Halo embraced it. Each play is different and some playthroughs are more significant than others. Each skill or mechanism may be understood roughly or deeply according to the needs of the player. He or she may choose which new skill to acquire and which to leave undeveloped. Giving meaning to a deep understanding or knowledge rewards the attention paid to the game and makes the player aware of his or her own progression. Even if the game gives every reason to work in order to progress, the decision is always up to the player. This is the main difference between learning in videogames and learning in school.

  6

  Halo and Music

  BEN ABRAHAM

  In August of 2005, amateur film maker and die-hard Halo enthusiast Cody Miller recorded a video of his single life, legendary difficulty completion of the Halo 2 campaign. Miller had practiced for weeks leading up to his three-hours-plus marathon gaming session. To do it he had to memorize the location of every single instantkill jackal sniper, figure out the fastest and safest routes through every map, practice each shortcut until he could make every grenade jump, first time every time, and generally be an extremely good player.

  Watching this feat of almost superhuman ability and endurance gives us the distinct impression that the game was never meant to be played like this. And yet Miller’s subversive play style did not require the changing of a single line of code.

  The hectic pace Miller keeps occasionally forces music to be cut short or begin playing one over the top of another, confounding the intended effect of the otherwise separate pieces. And yet he never breaks a game rule and never dies. And because of this, his now enshrined speedrun video is an entirely valid “telling” of the Halo 2 story. This gives rise to an awfully important question: if this is a valid arrangement of the myriad possible strands of the Halo 2 narrative then why does it seem as if the music is so unprepared for Miller? Why is it unable to keep up with the pace he set?

  This question goes to the heart of fundamental issues with the nature of both music and videogames, and whether the two are even compatible.

  Cracks Begin to Appear . . .

  In the majority of industry discussions around the use of music in videogames, cinematic film-scoring techniques are held up as a best practice. It’s a proven way of drawing upon audiences’ familiarity with the way sound and image have been used throughout the twentieth century in film and television. It’s also an approach that Martin O’Donnell, Bungie’s resident composer and music director, told me he stuck to because he was wary of “walking away from something that has a giant history of success.” O’Donnell’s assessment is all the more persuasive because of the great success of the series. But it’s also clear that O’Donnell cannot simply “score” the music to the image on the screen as if he were a film composer. The issue boils down, O’Donnell says, to one of indeterminate duration and behavior: “Because it’s a game and there’s a human being interacting with it . . . I don’t have any knowledge of . . . exactly how long the entire experience is going to last.”

  In the First Person Shooter (FPS)
type of game the player assumes control over a character’s action in the world, down to the level of deciding how they orient themselves, or in other words where they point the camera (in this case where they point the helmet of the Master Chief). This freedom of choice for the player has a dramatic impact on the narrative methods that can be employed to tell a story, and by extension, how music can be used to help that story.

  To demonstrate the difficulty in turning a compelling cinematic narrative into a comparable situation in-game, imagine the shower scene from Hitchcock’s film Psycho delivered first person. The player, put in charge of where to look, might spoil the climactic moment where the killer pulls back the curtain to stab the showering victim. Perhaps they were distracted by a bar of soap, and miss the dramatic reveal altogether. What’s the music to do in a case like this? With the killer obscured and out of sight, the effect of the iconic “stab” music would at the least be diminished. It would certainly lose the all important relationship with the action shown on screen, the relationship which gives it so much of its power and effectiveness in the film. Having a directly correlated audio-visual relationship is only one way to tell a story with music, but it is the focus of this chapter because of the potential shown by the approach in audiovisual synaesthesia games like Rez, Everyday Shooter, Audiosurf, and the myriad Guitar Hero style games.

  In the Psycho shower scene situation, to give the music a relationship to onscreen visuals similar to that enjoyed by the film, most games would respond with a cinematic approach, and by taking away player control to deliver the plot via cutscene. And while Halo 2 uses cut scenes, what happens in the game while the player is actively engaged rather than passively observing is more interesting. To achieve the same audio-visual effect without resorting to a cutscene, the composer is faced with two choices: force the music to fit the action, or the action to fit the music.

  Depending upon the type of game, the latter may not be commensurate with maintaining key features of the design, such as player agency. For those games in which music is most important, like the aforementioned musical games, a price is paid for their strict adherence to playing a predefined piece of music in the form of a more restricted range of player actions or behaviors. Play a song again in Guitar Hero and you’ll never get the option to play any different notes (excepting the ability to change difficulty levels). Play a level in Rez and your “gun” will not destroy the enemy at the very instant you press the shoot button—there is often a slight delay simply because the game needs to match onscreen action with the music that is playing. In contrast, for the Halo series, action has primacy and so the music must make itself amenable to things happening in the game.

  The Incompatibility of Music and Interactivity

  O’Donnell feels that music “tells basically linear stories.” But as we’ve seen, this does make it hard for music to maintain a strong relationship with on-screen visuals in an interactive videogame. By the same token, however, since Halo only uses music that is for the most part linear, what kind of indirect relationship does it have with the visuals?

  Film theorist Michael Chion provides us with a useful concept from film studies in his book Audio-Vision which may help explain the effects of prerecorded (and thus predetermined) music played over moving images. He wrote of an audio-visual experiment that reveals what happens in this situation, suggesting his readersTake a sequence of film and also gather together a selection of diverse kinds of music that will serve as accompaniment.... Success assured: in ten or so versions there will always be a few that create amazing points of synchronisations and moving or comical juxtapositions, which always come as a surprise.31

  He called these happy accidents of synchronization “forced marriage” and the phenomenon demonstrates audiovisual synchronisation occurring even with music composed with no regard for the visual elements they will be thrust upon. While this effect has largely been acceptable in the history of videogames to the current point, no one has yet figured out what to do if they want to make the Psycho shower scene of videogames.

  Our identified incompatibility between unpredictable, interactive videogames and pre-composed “linear” music is only an issue if a piece of music is composed, rather than performed or assembled live. In fact, the incompatibility is actually only an issue for a certain preconception of what music actually is, and more specifically, for the conception of music that arose from the Western musical tradition. If we were to expand our conception of music beyond what is heard in the concert hall or through the TV set, the perceived incompatibility between games and music might dissolve entirely.

  Music According to Whom?

  Using the term “song” rather than the broader term “music,” Plato places the following assertion into the mouth of Socrates in Book II of The Republic: “song consists of three elements: words, musical mode, and rhythm.” Acceptable notions of what constitutes a musical work have changed drastically throughout the ages. At the very least the necessity for music to contain words as found in Plato’s time is nowhere to be seen today. Furthermore, the idea that a piece of music requires a tonal center, what Plato referred to as “musical mode,” itself an early version of the key signature, has been questioned by various movements throughout the twentieth century.

  Murray Schafer in his landmark book The Tuning of the World attempts a more catholic definition of music, partially in response to developments in recording technology and artistic practice. As Schafer says: To define music merely aso sounds would have been unthinkable a few years ago, though today it is the more exclusive definitions that are proving unacceptable. Little by little throughout the twentieth century, all the conventional definitions of music have been exploded by the abundant activities of musicians themselves. (p. 5)

  Schafer identifies the ancient roots of our modern conceptions of music by noting two competing Greek myths that explain the origins of music. In the first, the Apollonian, music is borne out of the emotional expression of the gods, and implies that music is itself emotion made manifest. In the latter, the Dionysian myth, music was conceived when a god discovered the resonant properties of a tortoise shell, and therefore music has its origin in the properties of the material world. They bear different implications for what can be called “music” and Schafer describes them as “the cornerstones on which all subsequent theories of music are founded.”32

  Schafer is still only addressing the history and conception of music in the West, however. John Miller Chernoff in his study of African music, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, tells his Western readers, “we must be prepared to open our minds . . . to the possibility that they may have an entirely different conception of what music itself is.”33 Chernoff goes so far as to say thatWhen a Western friend for whom you might play some African music says in disgust, as he sits fidgeting in his chair, “That’s not music,” he is ironically both right and wrong. African music is not just different music but is something that is different from “music.” (p. 33)

  And yet leaving non-Western music-making to its fate as “not music” seems an unappealing prospect and carries overtones of cultural imperialism. Famed ethnomusicologist John Blacking in his pioneering study How Musical Is Man? advocated that music departments perform a recategorisation of their study of music: “more modestly, as a system of musical theory and practice that emerged and developed during a certain period of European history.”34

  For one thing, Western musicality has a preoccupation with the musical object (usually the “score”) as the determining aspect of a piece of music (replaced more recently perhaps by the recording artifact), a preoccupation not shared by many oral musical cultures. For example, indigenous Australian musicality lacked any form of notation at all, and songs were transmitted orally through the practise of performing the song. It’s particularly hard for our Western minds to comprehend the inability to separate the practice of performing a piece of music from its very existence, but for these musicians, and indeed for many other oral traditio
ns, there is nothing beyond the memory of the song and its performance to point to as the definitive form.

  The idea of a musical “work” comes with some serious cultural baggage. As Marcia Citron notes in Gender and the Musical Canon, “important social variables such as power, class, and gender can be inscribed in a work” (p. 121). For Citron then,music, like its sister art forms, grows out of a specific social context. It expresses in various ways fundamental assumptions about the culture in which it originates. Aesthetically music entails communication, and this can take place at many levels and in varied combinations of work, composer, performer, and receptor. (p. 120)

  On a rather different tack, The Javanese and Balinese gamelan orchestra sounds, to Western ears unaccustomed to their unique scale and tuning, like the mad crash and clatter of un-tuned gongs. But they are in fact just another product of a very different idea of what makes sound musical.

  Music the Halo Way

  So where does O’Donnell, and the Halo series, stand on the subject of music? We’ve seen that O’Donnell thinks of music as telling basically linear stories, which places him well and truly within the Western classical tradition. In defense of tradition O’Donnell notes that, despite interactivity, when a person is done playing the game they have inevitably had “a linear experience because that is all you have, when you play a game you are having a linear experience . . . you play for ten minutes, you have a ten-minute experience.” For O’Donnell then, since duration is the uncontrollable factor, he places much importance upon being able to successfully manage this aspect of a piece, dealing with the problem of interactivity by fixing the beginning and end sections and making the middle malleable.

 

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