by Cuddy, Luke
Even worse, because you’re connected with Master Chief, you are emotionally and mentally invested. Thus every time you lose a duel you can potentially take it personally. Especially when very nasty, experienced players have poignant things to say over chat like “You suck.” In short, at the beginning (and even later too), Halo really, really, really makes you mad. As an undergrad, several of my friends were Halo players, one of whom had one of the most laid back temperaments of anyone I know to this day. But when he played Halo for even fifteen or twenty minutes, he would come away swearing. This anger may be due to many factors in the game and out; but two of the strongest factors with reference to Halo are the possible worlds scenario and the immersion, which complement each other.
The beautiful thing about Halo is that, once you understand the game itself as provisional—say, after listening to the message of the avatar Bodhisattva (listening to yourself) and understanding the illusive nature of the ego, then mastering the game itself—you can begin to understand your emotional involvement with the gameworld. If the player learns to anticipate this emotional involvement (with anger, for example) then she can begin to work on mitigating it. The player gets to the point where the anger can almost be quantified: once a certain event occurs in the game the player knows how angry it will make her. If she recognizes it at the right point, she can stop her anger, stop her suffering.
The Dalai Lama, the Buddhist leader of Tibet, discusses the idea that our enemies represent the greatest opportunity for personal growth:If we investigate on a still deeper level, we will find that when enemies inflict harm on us, we can actually feel gratitude toward them . . . in order to practice sincerely and to develop patience, you need someone who willfully hurts you. . . . They [enemies] are testing our inner strength in a way that even a guru cannot. Even the Buddha possesses no such potential.53
Although this is a quite complex idea in Buddhism involving the development of altruism in the practitioner, the essential point in the Dalai Lama’s words is clear enough: our enemies give us an opportunity to develop patience and inner strength—because they make us so angry! The Buddha cannot hate us and behave maliciously toward us the ways that an enemy can. The presence of an enemy with malicious intent can really test our resolve.
Now, you might be thinking, “Feel gratitude toward the little seven-year-old fuck who pwns me again and again while calling me fuckface?” And the answer is yes, feel gratitude toward even him for providing you with such a great means of improving yourself. It just depends on your motivation: do you want to improve yourself and become a more compassionate and resolute person, or do you want to continue to let seven-year-old fucks get to you?
The Lotus Sutra discusses Devadatta, someone who attempted to kill the Buddha several times. Nevertheless, the Buddha says: “The fact that I have attained impartial and correct enlightenment and can save living beings on a broad scale is all due to Devadatta” (Lotus Sutra, p. 184). Despite Devadatta’s malice, the Buddha was able to not only to extend compassion toward him but also to grow and attain enlightenment.
Halo can behave in a similar way. The game gives us the opportunity to deal with hate and anger directly, and we can watch the occurrence of the entire process. By remaining conscious of the process, rather than the process occurring spontaneously as in a heated marital debate, we are better able to control it. (I’m discussing the use of Halo after we have acknowledged the possibility of his enlightenment, after we have been shown the light by the Bodhisattva Master Chief and escaped the metaphorical burning house.)
Something else is brought on by the possible worlds/infinite lives scenario in Halo: repetition. When you can’t beat a checkpoint, but you really want to, what happens? You do it over, and over, and over, until you get it. In Chapter 6 of The Lotus Sutra, the Buddha gives predictions for Buddhahood to a few members of the people at an assembly. In each prediction, the Buddha essentially says the same thing, only changing his words slightly. A reader unfamiliar with the Buddhist tradition might wonder why he seems to be reading the same thing over and over. As a Buddhist scholar explains:Repetition has a very important function in religious life. To do something repeatedly makes a deep impression on our minds.... Anyone who tries repeating Chapter 6 [of The Lotus Sutra] with his whole heart will find himself repeating the description of man’s ideal state. . . . Through frequent repetition these ideals will penetrate the depths of his mind . . . when it comes to Buddhist practice, we must not shirk repeating everything exactly. Unless one repeats the same thing wholeheartedly as often as possible in studying music or in practicing basketball, he will never improve.54
Repetition is very important in Buddhism—and other religions for that matter—in coming to a deeper understanding of certain core principles. The importance of repetition also exists in Halo. A player does not gradually improve in skill level (or advance to the next checkpoint) unless she practices over and over again, sometimes monotonously.
The importance of repetition in Halo is germane to the above discussion of immersion. I contend that, with the assistance of the strong immersion factor in Halo, one could potentially mitigate anger and begin to grow compassion. One of the things that allows this to happen is the already existing repetitive nature of the game, the importance of which is to improve one’s skill level. But if this tendency to repetition were redirected, say, toward mitigating anger and growing compassion, Halo, or similar game, could be used in a very beneficial way.
Halo as a Catalyst for a Buddhism Videogame?
Probably the main objection to seeing Halo as upāya is the violence. Halo is certainly a violent series of games. But what if the violence is actually necessary? What if the violence itself is upāya in that it appeals to a certain types of living creatures who otherwise could not be reached? Namely, people who like to play violent videogames. If the Buddha indirectly created a Hello Kitty videogame (which exists, by the way) it might reach some, but it would not reach those people who want to level a Rocket Launcher at Hello Kitty stuffed animals.
But Halo is about defeating other players or enemies through skill as much as it’s about violence. A monk and poet, Master Kyunyo, discussed the idea that people need to be led to the teachings of Buddhism from a base that is comprehensible to them. He wrote poems designed to cater to a popular audience with the intention of reaching as many people as possible. I might say a similar thing about Halo. That some may laugh at the idea of something like a videogame being at all useful for enlightenment is beside the point. What’s important is whether or not people can benefit from it.
Even if you, as a reader, disagree with the specific analysis of Halo here, consider the following. What about an enlightenmentoriented videogame in general, maybe using some of Halo’s game mechanics as a guide? I can see the Xbox game already: The Dalai Lama’s smiling face is on the cover and it is called “Enlighten Yourself,” boasting full enlightenment in just under thirty hours of game play! Okay, so maybe that’s not the way it should happen. Maybe it should be an expansion for Halo: Reach.
Heroic
9
Apocalypse Halo
RACHEL WAGNER, TYLER DEHAVEN, and CHRIS HENDRICKSON
The close relationship between games and religion is nothing new. Game designer Marc LeBlanc reports that players of the ancient Egyptian game Senet believed that the game was a sort of divinization oracle that foretold afterlife experiences.55 In his landmark study Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga also sees an intimate relationship between games and religion. He describes the “magic circle” of play as being “marked off beforehand” just as space is marked off for religious ritual:The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc. are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. (p. 10)
All of these “magic circles,” he says, are “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance
of an act apart.” Gameplay, then, has rich religious overtones. The Halo universe is a perfect example of a magic circle in its elaborate development of an otherworldly experience, drawing players into a visionary journey that invites their full imaginative participation.
Videogames, especially First Person Shooters (FPSs), also resemble a very specific religious form of the magic circle: apocalypses. The adjective “apocalyptic” as commonly used today typically refers to cataclysmic imagery and predictions of the end times. However, the word “apocalypse” has a more specific usage for biblical scholars, identifying a genre of ancient Jewish and Christian texts composed between about 300 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. in the ancient Mediterranean region. These apocalypses exhibit fixed forms and structures, describe events of the end times, adhere to predictable literary patterns, and deal with recurring themes. They also describe otherworldly journeys of visionaries who observe the coming end times and God’s violent imminent judgment against evil.
Despite being created some two thousand years after these Jewish and Christian apocalypses, Halo fits the definition of apocalypse as articulated by the Society of Biblical Literature Apocalypse Group in 1979:An apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.56
The Halo mythos is rife with apocalyptic imagery and exhibits a narrative inevitability that shares features with the notion of theological inevitability in traditional apocalypses. Indeed, the formal similarity between Halo and traditional apocalypses is remarkable, even if these two end-of-the-world forms appear to be serving different functions for the communities who value them.
God the Programmer
Videogames, like traditional apocalypses, can be viewed as “revelatory literature” with a “narrative framework” about an “otherworldly” location. This framework involves a human recipient and an otherworldly mediator who describes “eschatological salvation” which is located in the future and presents “otherworldly realities” (p. 9). Videogames like Halo are similarly structured according to a narrative framework, and invite players to actively enter into a “world” accessible to the player only through the medium of the videogame console. In fact, videogames typically thrive on the imaginative creation of fantasy environments within which players can “really” move and act, and in which they learn about the otherworld.
One of the most important features of ancient apocalypses is their determinism. Apocalypses presuppose history’s unfolding as pre-established by God, who could be seen in this case as a sort of cosmic software engineer. Collins argues in The Apocalyptic Imagination (Eerdmans, 1998), that apocalypses are “augmented” by “a sense of determinism . . . by affirming that the course of history or the structure of the cosmos was determined long ago” (p. 40). We see this idea portrayed in Halo in the device of the Portal, which resides on Earth (and thus is accessible to humans but not to the Covenant). The Portal leads directly to the Ark, in which resides the nerve center of the entire Halo array. In this sense, then, humans (and especially Master Chief) appear to be chosen by the Forerunners in antiquity for events that unfold within the game. Humans, it seems, were meant to enact the divine purposes of the Forerunners. They also enact the purposes of the software engineers of Halo, who have predetermined to some extent the myth’s interactive unfolding in gameplay.
Apocalypses, then, exhibit a sort of theologically-motivated narrative rhetoric. If we think of God as a programmer, then we could say that God has engineered the set of player choices we have as humans, with history revealing the unfolding of his design. Such a sense of predetermination is comforting to the hearers of apocalypses. In videogame theory, this notion is called “procedural rhetoric.” In Persuasive Games (2007), game theorist Ian Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as those processes that “define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems” (p. 3). Bogost convincingly argues that procedural rhetorical claims are “every bit as logical as verbal arguments—in fact, internal consistency is often assured in computational arguments, since microprocessors and not human agents are in charge of their consistent execution” (p. 36). This kind of assurance is akin to the apocalyptic rhetoric of God’s certain judgment, his divine procedural rhetoric.
Procedural rhetoric works by creating what Bogost calls “possibility space,” which is “the myriad configurations the player might construct to see the ways the processes inscribed in the system work” (p. 42). This sense of “possibility space” could be considered a sort of “covenant” with the player—he or she has agreed to abide by the rules of play and in so doing, has entered into a set of possibilities that are transcribed by the parameters of the game before it even begins. Theological perspectives also demarcate a “possibility space” for believers, who see the world and act in it according to the procedural rhetoric of the belief system.
Games even exhibit the dualism of apocalypses in that both exhibit a marked concern with forces of good arrayed against forces of evil, usually with the assumption of a procedural rhetoric of victory for the forces of good. In Halo, human forces oppose the forces of the “Flood,” a huge collection of parasites that collectively consume sentient life with sufficient biomass to sustain them. The Flood is a socialist society in which there is no pain, no hunger, and many of life’s problems appear to be solved. Unfortunately, the Flood’s success is also grounded in the brutal murder of other beings. When viewed as a force of evil, the Flood in Halo may be read as a metaphor for unsustainable and rampant contemporary consumerism.
The Flood’s uncontrollable exploitation of sentient life can be interpreted as a scathing criticism of industrial greed that heedlessly dominates life for its sole benefit. In this way, then, players are invited to see themselves arrayed against the forces of consumerism, as they battle the Flood’s literal “consumption” of other living entities in Halo and as they return to their own lived daily lives. This kind of metaphorical allusion to contemporary social ills is also a common feature of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses, which regularly targeted oppressive regimes like Rome via rich symbolic imagery of beastly and destructive creatures.
Initial contact with the Flood is treated by the Forerunners as a disease instead of a military threat, a mistake that increasingly becomes evident. Once the Forerunners commit to fighting the Flood, they realize that traditional military and naval tactics will not apply. The Flood has, by this time already consumed several cities. Thus, the Forerunners begin to gather and preserve life in a particular place, an installation they call “The Ark.” Within it, they deposit life forms as actual creatures or as stored DNA. This sets the stage for the internal dualism of the game: the forces of “good,” symbolized by the Forerunners and their human descendants versus the forces of “evil,” symbolized by the Flood, analogous to demonic forces in their parasitic consumption of the life-force of others. In both Halo and in traditional apocalypses, people enter into the magic circle already convinced that evil will ultimately be defeated and good will win out. In most apocalypses, God and his messianic agents enact this unfolding of history. In videogames, the player serves a messianic function.
Apocalypses, then, could be said to exhibit God’s “procedural rhetoric” in their narrative description of the unfolding of history in a way that God has designated, with a certain amount of human “play” within the rules. Videogames are similarly delimited by fixed narrative modes which nonetheless also allow a certain degree of interactivity. But videogames snugly fit within a fixed magic circle of play believed by their users to be fully insulated from the real day-to-day world. Traditional religious apocalypses, by depicting the cosmos as subject to God’s rules and shaped by God’s own predetermined design, can be viewed as the ultimate game, shaped by the ultimate procedura
l rhetoric.
The Halo Mythos
Halo’s narrative is rife with explicit religious imagery, much of it overtly apocalyptic. Like many traditional Jewish and Christian apocalypses, Halo exhibits an interest in both time and space, what scholars of apocalypticism describe as “a temporal and a spatial axis.”57 For traditional apocalypses, the temporal axis is revealed in an intense interest in history unfolding: how it began, where humans fit in, and what is to happen in the end times, which the authors believe will take place very soon. The spatial axis involves a recurring motif of travel to other worlds, in which visionaries are privy to experiences unavailable to normal human beings. In Halo, the player takes on the role of visionary.
The Covenant is comprised of a group of races who together want to “ignite” the “Sacred Rings.” In so doing, they will follow the Forerunners (a race of beings who existed thousands of years before Halo) into divinity. The Forerunners’ eons-old civilization was based on the idea of the “Mantle,” alluding to biblical prophetic notions of the prophetic mantle which commits one to a life dedicated to social justice in the name of God. The Forerunners saw it as their sworn duty to protect and perpetuate life in the Halo galaxy, which is also understood as our own galaxy a few hundred years from now. Thus, as players we are drawn into the mythos of Halo and invited to see it as our own. The Forerunners successfully protected life in the galaxy until the invasion by the Flood. This could be an allusion to the biblical stories about life before Noah (and thus before the biblical flood). In both cases, Forerunners (or biblical forefathers) were originally dedicated to the maintenance of creation. In Halo, the appearance of the Flood event kicks off the story that unfolds in the games.