Halo and Philosophy

by Cuddy, Luke

  In terms of function, there are two major differences that mark the distinctions between the types of warfare the Chief and Rookie engage in. The strongest difference is the lack of energy shielding in ODST armor.84 As such, the Rookie lacks a key component of protection that is fundamental to the Master Chief. He (and the player) are exposed to a higher level of danger in every firefight because of it. The Rookie must be continually aware of his surrounding in the wreckage of New Mombasa, because a stray sniper shot would not simply deplete an energy shield. This continued tension showcases that the Rookie experiences the full tactile nature of war, as well as a requirement to strike from the flanks of the enemy. Referring back to Clausewitz’s third reciprocal action, the Rookie’s limitations of armor force him to adopt tactics fueled by subterfuge and not moral strength.

  The second difference is the lack of a motion tracker in the HUD of the armor’s helmet.85 It subconsciously feeds information in the middle of firefights, letting the Chief plan his attack and subsequently execute it with efficiency. The deeper issue that the motion tracker conveys is that, as part of a Just War, the Chief can morally judge who are combatants and who aren’t. He is utterly confident both in who his targets are and his ability to dispatch them. In comparison, the Rookie has Visual Intelligence System, Reconnaissance (VISR)—an enhanced-vison mode that enables his HUD do two things. First, it enhances the ambient light on the streets of New Mombasa. This reinforces once again the fact that the Rookie is forced to strike from shadows in order to establish a superiority of force against the Covenant. Secondly, and more importantly, it outlines friendly contacts, enemies, and important objects with varying colors. This reinforces that the Rookie is involved in a “total war” campaign, as he has to visually identify his targets instead of relying on a sense of moral strength to justify his actions.

  Silence of the Rookie

  Hey Rookie, you out there? Respond, that’s an order!

  —Gunnery Sgt. Buck, “NMPD HQ”

  Unlike the Master Chief, the Rookie is a true silent protagonist. He never speaks throughout the entirety of the Halo 3: ODST campaign, responding to questions with body language or direct action.86 His silence only reinforces the loneliness that inhabits the city—while the Rookie works to establish what happened over the span of time he was unconscious, he has no friendly contacts to respond to. This lone-soldier reality, made much more poignant due to his limitations of equipment, showcases the total war environment he has dropped into. He literally has nobody to call for support: no AI companion speaking in his ear, no alien sidekick to help spring traps or cover his back.

  He steps into a situation where the only option is to treat every living creature as a possible threat. It could be argued that Vergil, the Superintendent-class AI inhabiting the city itself, serves a similar role as Cortana does to the Master Chief. This comparison falls short when push comes to shove, though, since Vergil can only speak through signs and machines. He lacks the emotional complexity of Cortana, and cannot satisfy the position of a fully-capable teammate.

  The other noteworthy consequence of the Rookie’s silence comes during the climax of the game. After being reunited with both Dare and Buck, the Rookie suddenly has teammates who speak freely during firefights and more quiet moments. The primary impact this has is to make the battlefield much, much noisier . After an entire night of silence, of hiding and striking from shadows in order to establish superiority of force, the Rookie is thrust into a cacophony of taunts, orders, and status updates. The effect is disorienting. The player struggles along with the Rookie to establish that clear focus of the previous hours. The Rookie is not the Chief, however, and clearly is meant to function as a part of a team. He eventually finds that the total war the Covenant has been inflicting can be turned back around much easier with teammates, regardless of the additional voices now surrounding him.

  You’ve been solo since we dropped? Fighting on the surface? Unless you spent all night hiding in your pod, you must know your stuff. Show me.

  —Captain Veronica Dare to Rookie, “Data Hive”

  As with Master Chief and the Assault Rifle, Bungie made the decision to equip the Rookie with a signature weapon. In all of the cinematics in Halo 3: ODST, the Rookie is shown wielding the M7S, a sound-suppressed caseless submachine gun. First handed the weapon by a fellow ODST, the Rookie can continually find more ammo for it in the many supply caches throughout the city. Like the games that feature the Master Chief, the Rookie can wield any other weapon prior to triggering a cutscene and still be shown with his respective default weapon. The fact that the Rookie’s default weapon is a silenced version of a mid-range weapon is just as telling as the choice of the Assault Rifle for the Chief.

  From a gameplay perspective, the M7S is arguably far more useful in-game than the Assault Rifle. It gives the Rookie the ability to engage smaller patrols of Covenant troops without alerting others nearby. Similarly, it possesses a remarkable ability to strip the armor from the Brutes that the Rookie encounters. The rather limited range of the submachine gun calls into focus two things. It showcases the type of conflict that the Rookie typically experiences, which underlines the seriousness of the threat due to his lack of shielding. In addition, it also suggests the tactics that Bungie had in mind when crafting the character. He is not intended to thunder across an open area, whacking Grunts with the butt of his rifle then trading shots with a Brute captain; he is meant to strike from the flanks, mercilessly hitting the enemy where they are weak.

  The M7S has become just as synonymous with the Rookie as the Assault Rifle has with the Master Chief. More than just helping to represent a character, however, it erodes some of the moral strength which the Chief had been endowed with. As central of a character as the Chief is, he could never successfully “finish the fight” if troopers such as the Rookie were unwilling to face a more morally ambiguous battleground.

  What can I say? It was a hell of a night.

  —Gunnery Sgt. Buck, “Coastal Highway”

  The core of Bungie’s Halo universe is warfare. By offering two vastly different human protagonists, the game developer challenges players to decide which version they respond to most vividly. The Master Chief’s Just War Theory calls forth martial posters and representations of real-life soldiers as moral combatants, waging the good fight with clear consciences. In stark opposition, the Rookie’s mixture of Absolute War and Total War conjures images of embedded journalists and the harsh reality of urban warfare. The two combine to create a more realistic portrayal of warfare than either one could do separately, and leave players with a more complete vision of the differing efforts required to snatch victory from the maw of defeat.87

  14

  What Would Foucault Think about Speed Runs, Jeep Jumps, and Zombie?

  FELAN PARKER

  The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

  —-Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self

  Have you ever played Halo in a new way, different from the way it’s meant to be played? Maybe you’ve done a speed run, and tried to complete Halo 3 on legendary difficulty as fast as you can. Or maybe you’ve done some jeep jumping, gathering as many frag grenades as possible under a Warthog and trying to blast it over the archway in “The Silent Cartographer” in Halo: Combat Evolved. Perhaps in Halo 2 you participated in a multiplayer Zombie match, using a set of rules made up, perfected and enforced by your fellow players.

  If you have, you’re not alone. These novel ways of playing Halo are forms of “expansive gameplay,” the phenomenon of videogame players adding rules to a game in order to refine, enhance, or otherwise change their experience of it. Not only are speed running, jeep jumping, Zombie and other similar games-within-games loads of fun, they can be linked to the philosophy of Michel Foucault, one of the most (if not the most) influential French philosophers of the twentieth century.

  Foucault’s idea of aesthetic self-fashioning is a remarkably similar process to the examples descr
ibed above. Put simply, aesthetic self-fashioning is about developing rules to live by—a personal ethics—that allow you to become whatever you want to be, and to live in whatever you consider to be a worthwhile manner. For Foucault, the range of possible selves available to a person is strictly limited by the historically-specific institutions and structures that govern their societies and their lives. People are not, in this sense, free. The historical context into which I have been born makes me who I am—I cannot be anyone else, and if I try I will be ostracized or punished by society. However, Foucault contends that in between the rules and limitations of existence, there is space for what he calls aesthetic self-fashioning, which counterintuitively involves adding optional rules to the rules that already govern life. For example, acknowledging that the university cafeteria serves nothing but crap, I can choose to instead eat a strict diet of healthy, organic foods brought from home, and in this small way transform not only my body, but my experience of the world, as well. By imposing these personal rules, individuals can regain control over who they are—in the same way that players can add new rules to Halo and gain control over their experience of the game.

  There’s an uncanny surface resemblance between Foucault’s conception of aesthetic self-fashioning and the phenomenon of expansive gameplay, which I’ll explore in more detail below: individuals and players, within the historically-specific constraints of lived existence and the rules of a game, impose additional, optional rules, and in doing so gain some measure of power or control over themselves and their experience.

  Of course, it would be foolish to simply read meaning into this resemblance uncritically, but it is difficult to ignore. Foucault spent much of his career breaking down certainties and singularities, so it would be profoundly un-Foucauldian to present only one way of pursuing this resemblance. Instead, I’m going to explore the convergences (and divergences) between these two concepts from several perspectives.

  First, expansive gameplay can be understood as an explanatory metaphor or model of Foucault’s concept of aesthetic self-fashioning; second, expansive gameplay can be understood as an actual example of aesthetic self-fashioning and liberation from constraints; and third, expansive gameplay can be understood as a kind of simulation of aesthetic self-fashioning, allowing players to experiment with ways of constructing themselves in the real world on a smaller scale. What does it mean to add rules to Halo, and what does this have to do (if anything) with the aesthetic self-fashioning Foucault describes?

  Aesthetic Self-Fashioning

  Foucault’s earlier work on the institutions and discourses of the human sciences, madness, prisons and discipline, and sexuality establishes how structures of knowledge and power—what he sometimes refers to as “games of truth”—constrain, dominate and constitute human beings as subjects, determining the range of existential possibilities open to them. For Foucault, knowledge and truth are not universal, and have taken many forms in different historical eras. Knowledge controls minds, determining what is commonly accepted as true and legitimate in a given historical context, while power relations enforce the official laws and unwritten rules that govern human bodies and behaviour.

  There’s no escaping this omnipresent structure, sometimes referred to as “Power-Knowledge,” for it is always already there, making people who they are. Power-Knowledge can never really be challenged or changed, because everything people are, everything they know, everything they believe, and everything they can do emerges out of their positioning within these structures—without them, individuals would be so fundamentally different that existence would be rendered incomprehensible. This seems like a pretty dire situation—not only am I powerless to change the structures that dominate my life, I don’t even have control over my self or who I am. However, in his later work on sexuality and subjectivity, 88 Foucault argues that within these constraints, individuals can engage in specific kinds of practices that are in some sense liberating.

  As individuals, people are subjected to power, but are nevertheless constituted as active subjects that can use the power available to them to transform their selves and experiences. Although they are restricted by Power-Knowledge, people are not brainwashed automatons—they are more-or-less thinking, acting subjects who can learn to harness the very human powers of thought, imagination and desire within the limits of our historical context to gain a measure of control over themselves and their lives. This later turn toward the self as the third component of his philosophy (Power-Knowledge-Self) is intended by Foucault to “show people that they are much freer than they feel,” to articulate spaces of freedom, and to search for alternative ways that people can construct themselves.89 “Individuals . . . constitute themselves as subjects of the moral code of their culture that simultaneously provides a field where it is possible to re-create oneself” (p. 154). Through an ethical and aesthetic practice of self-fashioning, Foucault argues, life can become a work of art. Foucault never specifies what life as a work of art should look like, because he does not believe in a singular, fixed ideal. Rather, each individual determines for himself or herself, based on constant, rigorous self-examination, what they will become, and how.

  According to Foucault, modern subjectivities are limited and fashioned by many different forces, but the right attitude or approach to life can challenge this limitation. The key question therefore becomes how individuals can intervene in this process by engaging in further fashioning of the self, in order to move beyond their historical contexts. Foucault outlines four elements of aesthetic self-fashioning: the ethical substance is the specific part of the self that is “worked on;” the mode of subjection is the reason or motivation for engaging in self-fashioning; ethical work is the particular means, tools or activities by which change occurs; and finally the telos is the goal, the ideal or the aspiration of the process, which is constantly changing over time as the self is refashioned again and again (pp. 141–42). So, if physical exercise is for some people a form of aesthetic self-fashioning, the ethical substance would be the body, the mode of subjection would be a recognition of the body as something that can be improved, the ethical work would be the exercise itself (jogging, lifting weights), and the telos would be the goal of a fit body.

  To engage in aesthetic self-fashioning is to exert power on oneself —that is to say, impose rules and disciplines on the way one lives—in the same way that an artist exerts power on his or her materials in order to make a work of art. These “tactics by which we live in the world” allow people to “reinvent ourselves as subjects, better fitted for living with the self and with others.”90 These rules are not about what you do, but rather how to be. They are things you don’t have to do, but you do anyway to make life better. Playing the last level of Halo 2 on legendary with all the lights off and the sound cranked to high isn’t necessary, but it certainly makes for more exciting experience!

  In cultivating a relation to the self, it is possible to cultivate relations to and a responsibility for others, making aesthetic self-fashioning a fundamentally social practice. The fashioning individual must look both inwards at the self and outwards to others at all times in reflecting on his or her situation. The care of the self and of others intensifies social relationships that already exist, having been constituted by Power-Knowledge. Taking care of oneself and knowing oneself are key, linked parts of this process.

  Individuals must come into the knowledge that they are constituted, through active contemplation, identification, acknowledgement and problematization of their situation. Foucault’s version of the self is a malleable material open to stylization, not a singular, universal, transcendent “true self” to be unearthed (this is not about “unlocking your true potential” in the manner of self-help books). There is no fixed end point to the process of aesthetic self-fashioning. Whenever a goal is achieved or a person becomes what he or she desires to be, the process must begin again and new goals must be determined in order to continue transforming the self. Throughout an individual’s l
ife, he or she must pay close attention to, learn about, test, improve and transform himself or herself in order to construct these new ways of existing.

  Gilles Deleuze sums it up nicely: “It’s no longer a matter of determinate forms, as with knowledge, or of constraining rules, as with power: it’s a matter of optional rules that make existence a work of art, rules at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute ways of existing or styles of life . . . the will to power operating artistically, inventing new possibilities of life.”91 Personal rules of conduct transform selves and experience, allowing individuals to build (and rebuild) new possibility spaces that exist within the limitations of Power-Knowledge, by using whatever power they have been allowed to possess by those systems. Something as simple as riding a bicycle to work, cutting across parks and through alleyways instead of following the main roads, can become a practice of aesthetic self-fashioning. When reflected upon, this practice highlights the limitations of everyday existence (in this case, the structure and rules of a city) and creates new ways of navigating and living within these limitations by imposing new rules about where and how to travel. The point of all this is not the kind of systemic change of an idealized Revolution (Foucault, in his later work especially, seems to think this kind of change is either impossible or would be catastrophic); rather, Foucault’s modest ideal at the end of his career is a life-long, constant process of revolutionary change in (and between) individual people—life as a work of art-in-progress.