by Cuddy, Luke
However, this doesn’t change the fact that Master Chief is still a virtual character and cannot be harmed in the way a real life human being can. To participate in SIB through Halo we must find other ways to inflict this punishment and find relief. That is, we can’t simply cut our avatars and feel the pain. We must use alternate methods to punish ourselves and find that sweet release. We do this by constantly queuing up for losing games. That is our self-punishment. Our sweet release comes when we actually win. This is the endorphin rush that physical cutting causes. We just have to work a little harder to get the “medication” into our system.
This idea that emotional harm is also a form of SIB is supported by the fact that more than thirty-three terms have been used to represent SIB, some of which include “suicidal behaviors and indirect forms of self-harm, such as risk taking, promiscuity, and drug abuse, in their definition.” An expanded definition such as this would allow a much broader range of activities to be accepted as SIB. They would not have to be behaviors that resulted in direct physical harm. Not all risky actions, such as sky diving, result in physical harm. Not all promiscuous actions result in physical harm either. However, some can, and with definitions that vary this much, the idea that “mental harm” is another form of SIB is not a far stretch. If we accept this, we see how Halo can fit right in. It would qualify as an “indirect form” resulting in mental harm and not physical. Some people may even argue that driving a Warthog so often is self-injurious.
Maybe I’m just “special,” but I seem to spend more time with my Warthog upside down, exploding, or stuck on something than actually driving it or firing the gun. I’m really not sure why anyone lets me drive anything anymore, and don’t even get me started on flying the Hornet. All I do is die. Talk about voluntary self-injurious behavior. My co-op partner had to do that whole part himself. Yet, I continued to play the game. I didn’t stop when it became infuriating. I was willing to put up with the pain and—I hate to admit it—shameful carnage of my repeated death to continue until I found a place of sweet release. I don’t think I’m alone in having my own “special moment” in the game where I die over and over and over. Most players will find that moment, each differing based on particular skills, especially those of us who start with legendary mode.
Who? Me?
All these things point to psychological consistencies between SIB and playing Halo. Each gives the participant a purpose beyond simple entertainment. Each fulfills a need. We play Halo to do more than entertain ourselves or pass the time. We play it to help relieve loneliness, hopelessness, or some other feeling. We go there because it provides a haven. It allows us to find others like us without all the social pressure. Both SIB and Halo have some meaning behind the actions involved. This is one of the main reasons Halo can fall into the category of SIB. It can be used both to reinforce destructive patterns and as its own destructive pattern.
“Estimates of SIB have ranged from 400 to 1,400 cases per 100,000 annually,” reports Jennifer Muehlenkamp. This number, however, fails to consider the rest of us, those who do not use physical self-injuring to self-medicate. It might end up being much, much higher. Does this mean that everyone who plays games has some masochistic personality? Not hardly. Does it mean that some do? That seems clear enough. Maybe next time you sit down, headset on and controller in your hand, you should consider why you’re playing the game. You might end up realizing you’re just like the rest of us, and that we all need a little self-medication from time to time.
11
Playing with Fantasies in the Spartan (Sub)Consciousness
PATRICK TIERNAN
You sit down to another afternoon of videogame play, lost in an electronic world of post-apocalyptic proportion. Equipped with your Spartan Laser, you form an alliance with United Nations Space Command (UNSC) forces who relish the opportunity to seek out and destroy the insurgency of Brutes.
Now hit the pause button—literally and figuratively. To what extent is your gaming fantasy real? So you’ve kept current on your electric bill and your Xbox is still under warranty despite the “red ring of death,” but what about the implications of encountering this new reality which has you as Master Chief John-117? You are the stoic military figure ordained to vanquish the Covenant forces and ensure the preservation of humankind. It all sounds slightly idealistic to say the least, as the last of a genetically enhanced soldier project. Yet when we immerse ourselves in Halo we encounter a world not of our making with a storyline script written for us. It is a journey that brings us along in the search of what it means to be an individual.
When we say “I’m playing Halo” we must ask if this refers to the individual at the helm of the controller or the digitized figure on the screen. How real is the act of playing a videogame? To what extent can a game role allow us the space to behave in ways that would otherwise be socially inept, or at worst inhumane? Are fantasies an acceptable means of escaping our own reality? In examining these questions, let’s consider what we perceive to be real and what is experienced as fantasy, what influences the person we are becoming and what we project as our ideal self.
Playing with the Future
When we play Halo, what exactly are we doing? We may often refer to the ways in which playing a game is a form of release from the mundane and pedestrian markers of existence. We play as an escape from the stress that makes commitments on our time and to indulge some fantasy of ours that transcends our everyday life. However, when we play a videogame, it’s the creator’s fantasy that we choose because of its allure. The cultural theorist Johan Huizinga says the following:Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.70
Several ideas can be taken from this passage as they apply to the battlefield, such as the Blood Gulch. First, there is the acknowledgment that playing a game does not garner any form of material or financial benefit (although many rogue Halo competition circles may beg to differ on this point). Second, there is a set parameter of time and space which provides the storyline for the game. The expansive timeline of the Halo series underscores this point—from the origins of the Forerunners as the pre-eminent species of the universe to the twenty-sixth-century conflict with the Covenant—that there is a defined history to which all players are accountable, to be aware of your origins as well as your destiny is imperative in the world of the UNSC.
The last point is perhaps the most intriguing in that Huizinga contends there is a social value in play; the multiplayer function in Halo 3 is an example of this group dynamic. To ponder the intricacies of weaponry, taxonomy of Covenant legions, and moral implications of preserving or destroying all sentient life in the known universe is, to say the least, an exhaustive feat for one to contemplate. Nevertheless, this is exactly what makes the Halo enterprise one of the most commercially successful games in First Person Shooter (FPS) history. By allowing its players to differentiate themselves from the everyday world in a dynamic storyline, Halo invites us to become part of a competition for the ideal representation of its protagonist John 117. We imagine what it would be like to embody the legend of the UNSC alliance! Like the Pillar of Autumn’s first encounter with the Halo ring, we have experienced a new level of reality which our language reflects as experience. The figurative nature of this is captured in statements like “You killed me” or “Take the elevated position and cover me.” In a subtle way, words can capture our imagination through unique modes of awareness.
Play as a form of escapism can also be classified as mimicry in which one assumes
another identity whereit can consist not only of deploying actions or submitting to one’s fate in an imaginary milieu, but of becoming an illusory character oneself, and of so behaving. One is thus confronted with a diverse series of manifestations, the common element of which is that the subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another.71
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and this is no truer than when we assume the role of the Spartan commander. As a cultural icon, John-117 has been the hit at numerous Halloween parties across the globe and even took over the John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard to resemble the Master Chief during a 2007 MIT prank celebrating the release of Halo 3. The Red vs. Blue phenomenon is another example of the popularity it takes for granted in certain Internet circles. While most people playing videogames do not explicitly mimic the character they are navigating, there is a way in which players try to one-up their friends who participate in the same storyline like getting the plasma sword in multiplayer mode or debating over who drives the Warthog in co-op mode. All of these contribute to the notion of mimicry where we engage in the play of the moment. Caught in this free play while interfacing with an electronic storyboard allows us the imaginative space to ponder what it would be like to stand in the military boots of another. While we may not think we somehow leave our “true self” out of imaginary play, it is intriguing to consider what we mean when we use “I” statements as conscious individuals aware of ourselves in the world.
When the Screen Stares Back
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed the human psyche could be divided into three concepts—the real, imaginary order, and symbolic order. The real refers to a pure state of nature before our birth. He describes it as a state of fullness or completeness that is marred by the entrance into language; to name it would only impose limitations. This state is comparable to the era of the Forerunners where life was innocent, blithely unaware of the cataclysmic disorder that lay waiting. Lacan was often quoted as saying “the real is impossible” and to some extent there is truth to this claim since without the Forerunners’ activation of the Halo Array, the ensuing narrative would have no relevance. This is not meant as a truism but rather as a way of perceiving the original state of the Halo worldview.
The imaginary order corresponds to what Lacan called the “mirror stage” where an individual is capable of seeing herself as a new manifestation. He states thatthis development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality . . . to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.72
The central idea embedded in this order is that it is primarily narcissistic, being completely enamored with oneself. The anticipation Lacan refers to here is the setting for the fantasies of desire. To fantasize about what we can become is an intriguing ontological dilemma because it questions what we understand by the nature of reality. I don’t necessarily believe I am an incarnation of John-117, but I may pretend, posture, or project myself onto the world of that character. For Lacan, a young child experiences anxiety in the mirror stage when he realizes his body is separate from the world and his mother (insert your favorite Freud joke here). This continues throughout our adult life as we seek to fill that void with physical and material desires. We may also maintain a fantastical image of ourselves, what Lacan called the “ideal ego,” by emulating people and figures that reflect our deepest desires. Consider the mystique surrounding Master Chief whose identity is veiled in myth but retold in militaristic narratives. His reflective helmet shield conceals his true identity, allowing any FPS player to project her own identity onto this blank slate.
The final aspect of the psyche is the symbolic order which is primarily about desire. This is the way we enter into a world of language to describe our unconscious desires. It should be noted that psychoanalytic theory deals with those unconscious thoughts, feelings, and experiences that influence an individual’s beliefs and decisions. Our past in many ways shapes our present. For example, consider how Halo: Reach serves as a prequel where the figure of John-117 emerges from this narrative. There is an inherent tension among these three realms of the psyche in which we struggle to discover ourselves while at the same time reach out to know others—those friends we play the game with and the characteristics of the characters we emulate in the game itself. This is what Lacan means by the function of the symbolic order. It is not so much attaining the object of our desire as it is the act of fantasizing about it that is paramount for understanding this psychological position. As most gamers will attest, it is not actually becoming Master Chief that is appealing but the thought of what it may be like that is the source of this attraction. As a case in point, our psyche allows us the opportunity to imagine the act of taking out the Prophets in an epic battle to preserve the human species. Fantasy is not the same as actually living out the desire to become a savior (most individuals would call this neurosis). The fact that Halo takes place in the 26th century is significant here insofar as it is undoubtedly beyond the realm of wishful thinking—as opposed to a setting in say 2050 where one could make reasonable predications about the state of humanity and technology. So how does all this relate to how we perceive ourselves and others?
Does the Covenant Have a Personality?
Carl Jung was a seminal figure in the field of psychoanalysis who developed what he called archetypes, universal models that influence subsequent figures and ideas.73 Part of the commercial success of Halo could be attributed to the way in which its characters act as personas that could represent individuals we encounter in our own lives. We may know someone with the solemn confidence of Master Chief, the religious commitment to the mystery of the divine like the Forerunners, or the sagacious leadership and intelligence of Cortana. While these figures are specific to this particular videogame, in their totality they embody characteristics that we discover in many of our twenty-first-century relationships. Jung notes that the concept of the archetype comes from the universality of characteristics or themes that continually emerge from different forms of literature; they tend to be reaffirmed by our dreams and fantasies. In one respect, the characters encountered in Halo are not novel to our everyday experience but are merely re-imagined in a futuristic storyline.
While there are numerous archetypes in his writings, I will describe a few. The persona is our public image, our “mask” that the world sees. According to Jung and his philosophy of the individual unconscious, we may believe what we pretend to be. This resonates with me whenever I hear my students discussing Halo strategies as if they had life and death consequences! The animus and anima are the gender aspect of our persona for men and women, respectively. Together they are called syzgy, referring to the unity and complementary nature of these dynamic identities.
We could make the argument that Cortana and Master Chief symbolize this archetype of interdependence but more importantly it shows how an overwhelming number of Halo players are men who identify with the aggressive, stoic, and defiant male persona of Master Chief. Nevertheless, their interdependency is witnessed by being “alone together” in a life pod as they make the voyage home after the final battle where they are presumed dead at the end of Halo 3. Finally there is the archetype of the self which is described as the ultimate unity of our conscious and unconscious identities, a perfection of personality that is only attainable in death. There is tension between this archetype and the persona of Spartan soldiers exemplified by the fact they are never listed as “Killed in Action” to preserve the awe of their military efforts.
These J
ungian archetypes provide us with a framework for exploring the types of personalities we put forth, both in the public square and within the confine of our own conscience. The Brutes and dignified Elites signify how archetypes are presented as antagonistic forces in the mission of Master Chief. There are universal traits that we associate with specific relationships in our everyday lives—social friends, work colleagues, family members, and those outside our developing network of connections. This Jungian analysis of archetypes transcends particular personalities and allows us to generalize human nature in terms of the characters we encounter in the grand narratives of history. For example, the hero serves as another archetype grounded in Halo which allows for the conflict between a protagonist and antagonist in a climactic ending requisite for any storyline! By highlighting these universal norms of personalities, we can begin to see the social allure of seeing ourselves as part of the UNSC struggle because we are able to identify with its parallels to human history. Jung’s perspective on human nature is helpful in our analysis because the psyche—our collective memories and fears, fantasies, and desires—is the culmination of a lifetime of experiences.