Halo and Philosophy

by Cuddy, Luke

  Expansive Gameplay

  As noted above, expansive gameplay is a term I coined to refer to the phenomenon of videogame players creatively or pragmatically imposing additional rules on themselves and the game in order to expand, refine, reinvigorate or otherwise enhance their gameplay experience.92 By adding rules to a game, the player acts within digitally fixed rules, but not necessarily in alignment with the intended or implied ways and goals of playing the game, which sets expansive gameplay apart from straightforward strategizing.

  A relatively simple example of expansive gameplay is “role-playing” a game character according to an ethical code, a style or a personality—refusing to murder or steal and choosing friendly dialogue options as a “good” warrior in a fantasy world, or insisting on using certain favourite strategies in favour of others in spite of potential rewards, for example.

  Expansive gameplay is different from related practices such as modding (manipulating an existing game to create a new version or an entirely new game, such as Halo’s “Forge” mode) and machinima (the use of videogames to create animated narratives or imagery, such as Red vs Blue, the popular web series using in-game footage from Halo). Unlike modding and machinima, expansive gameplay takes place entirely within the fixed rule-based system of the videogame. The player doesn’t “break” the rule-based system, he or she expands it from within by adding new, optional rules, hence “expansive” gameplay. This phenomenon can take many forms, and is not limited to any one genre or type of videogame. Presumably due to its widespread popularity, the Halo series has been an extremely rich site for expansive gameplay, yielding a diverse range of examples.

  One of the most popular forms of expansive gameplay is “speed running,” which imposes a quantifiable goal—rapid completion—on top of the existing, fixed rules of a videogame. In essence, a speed run is an attempt to successfully complete a game (or part of a game) as fast as possible. Video recordings of top times are shared and compared in online communities such as Speed Demos Archive (http://speeddemosarchive.com) that establish a social space for verification, competition and encouragement (after all, a record speed run isn’t much good without bragging rights).

  Although older games like Super Mario Brothers and Doom are popular choices for speed running, examples can be found for virtually any well-known game, and the Halo series is no exception. A website called High Speed Halo (http://www.highspeedhalo.net) is dedicated to Halo speed runs, and compiles statistics and videos of standard speed runs as well as other variations with additional or alternative rules. “Pacifist” runs require the player to complete the games, or specific levels, as fast as possible without killing any enemies (no small feat in an action-oriented game like Halo). “Zero Shots,” similarly, are completed without using guns or other ranged weapons—only close-combat melee attacks and hand grenades are allowed. All speed runs posted on High Speed Halo are expected to be completed single-player (unless otherwise stated) on the hardest difficulty setting, in order to ensure an equal playing field for all competitors. Needless to say, the rules of speed running and derivative forms of expansive gameplay are not inherent in the Halo games: these additional victory conditions are imposed and enforced entirely by individual players and speed run communities.

  A famous example of expansive gameplay in a multiplayer context is known as “Zombie,” which was originally cultivated by players of Halo 2. The game begins as a timed round, and requires each player to be equipped with a shotgun and an energy sword (a powerful close-range melee weapon), and two teams. One player starts on Team A, as the Zombie, and uses the energy sword exclusively. All other players start on Team B, and use the shotgun exclusively. If the Zombie kills a player on Team B, that player must manually switch teams, joining the Zombie on Team A and now using the energy sword exclusively. In keeping with the zombie theme, this is known as “infection.” (Evidently, these rules are inspired by the conventions and “rules” of zombie horror in fiction and other videogames.)

  The game ends either a) when there are no players left on Team B, because they have all been infected (zombies win); or b) if the time runs out and there is still at least one player left on Team B (surviving humans win). Zombie was subsequently integrated as an official game mode called “Infection” in Halo 3 due to its popularity—one of several examples of expansive gameplay being appropriated by game developers in “official” fixed game modes.

  “Jeep jumping” in Halo involves players using grenades and other explosive weapons to launch the in-game Jeep-like vehicle, the M12 Warthog, as high as possible (or sometimes in an attempt to clear a specific obstacle). The classic challenge is to clear the massive rocky archway on the beach in “The Silent Cartographer” level of Halo: Combat Evolved,93 but jeep jumping can take place in many different areas throughout the series. In some cases, videos and screen-captures are then posted. Unlike speed running, jeep jumping is less of a quantifiable competition and more of a performance, evaluated mainly on aesthetic grounds. (In fact, many of these videos are edited and set to music.) Nevertheless, the performance proceeds according to a specific set of rules imposed on the fixed rules of the game, designed to produce a specific range of entertaining, and frequently hilarious, possibilities.

  Expansive Gameplay as Metaphor

  Philosophers are no strangers to game-related explanatory models—indeed, it would not be out of the question to suggest that the game, the roll of the dice, and the strategic move are privileged metaphors in a fairly wide range of philosophical work. Although he does not cite specific games, Foucault himself returns to the general metaphor with some frequency, as indicated by the epigraph to this paper and the aforementioned concept of games of truth.

  Games of truth are the systems of rules that govern various institutions (such as the asylum, the school or the prison) and create the accepted truth within those institutions. Everyone is positioned by and within these systems of rules, and they produce or constitute everyone’s subjectivity. Describing networks of power and knowledge as games—that is to say, as rule-based systems—certainly seems an effective way of explaining how people are constituted as subjects (players) within those networks (games). The university classroom, for example, can be seen as a game of truth: an assemblage of institutional structures and hierarchies (power relations), accepted ideas and ways of thinking and seeing the world (knowledge) that produces a specific version of truth in its subjects, the students.

  For Foucault, entirely free choice cannot exist, because people are always already within the constraints of Power-Knowledge. However, if the rules of the game (society) determine the possibility space of experience, and the range—however limited—of available options, then people can add more rules (aesthetic self-fashioning) to change and refine that possibility space (making life into a work of art). Think about someone who carefully considers and meticulously arranges every aspect of their lives, from the way they look, to the food they eat, to the home they live in, the people they spend time with and so on. It would not be uncommon to call this person’s life a work of art, and he or she would appreciate life and enjoy it as such. If people are all players within the fixed rules of the game of existence, then the most effective path to some kind of liberty is to refuse to be content with “playing the hand we are dealt,” and to play it with style and engage in what Foucault calls “practices of liberty” or “practices of freedom.” This is an accurate, if simplistic, description of both expansive gameplay and aesthetic self-fashioning, but it’s worth pushing the metaphor further.

  Can Foucault’s four elements of aesthetic self-fashioning described above (the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, ethical work and telos) be explained in terms of expansive gameplay? Consider speed running in Halo. The ethical substance, in this case, is the player’s skill and reflexes: his or her ability to play the game as rapidly and as efficiently as possible. While an ordinary single-player game of Halo involves a variety of different “substances,” including reflexes,
aim, spatial awareness, resource management (in terms of ammunition and health points) and so on, expansive gameplay highlights certain aspects (and reconfigures them) as the substance to be refined and improved. The mode of subjection is more difficult to explain in game terms, but presumably would involve an awareness of (or boredom with) the limitations of the game, and a desire to expand or transform the experience and difficulty of gameplay with a new challenge.

  The ethical work of speed running and other examples of expansive gameplay are the imposed rules noted above (the new goal of rapid completion), and the establishment of the community necessary to engender competition. The ethical work produces the desired change in experience; different sets of imposed rules produce different changes. And what is the telos of speed running? As in any competition, the telos is constant improvement, successfully achieving increasingly more difficult goals, whether this takes the form of a new personal best or a world record.

  Foucault’s aesthetic self-fashioning is in some sense an “expansive” ethics, based on similar principles and operating in an analogous manner to expansive gameplay. By imposing additional rules onto the structure of existence, the possibilities of life can be worked upon and expanded in the same way that gameplay can be enhanced beyond the fixed rules of the game. Neither concept is (necessarily) subject to a transcendent universal ideal, as the goals and parameters of these practices can be endlessly reconfigured in order to produce different results for different individuals. This metaphorical compatibility, however, could easily be challenged. There’s always a quandary in relating philosophy to art and other cultural objects.

  What’s to be gained in straightforwardly “using” videogames to explain philosophical concepts, or in uncritically applying philosophical concepts to videogames? Neither strikes me as particularly interesting. To engage Foucault’s theory with concepts derived from Halo, or to engage Halo using Foucault’s concepts, should require that both the theory and the games are transformed in the process. Nevertheless, as an explanatory model for aesthetic self-fashioning, expansive gameplay in Halo is surprisingly satisfying, and indeed the tenets of aesthetic self-fashioning are surprisingly useful in explaining the practice of expansive gameplay.

  Expansive Gameplay as Practice of Freedom

  At what point does expansive gameplay cease to merely resemble aesthetic self-fashioning and become an actual practice of freedom? Perhaps the metaphor described above is satisfying precisely because expansive gameplay is more than an explanatory model, and is in fact an example of Foucault’s system of ethics in practice. The rules of Halo and other videogames can, after all, be seen as very real parts of the systems of power and knowledge that constrain experience and constitute people as subjects. Can expansive gameplay therefore be seen as a “real” site of resistance?

  First and foremost, not all practices of self-fashioning are genuinely practices of liberty. There is nothing inherently freeing about jogging—it has to be framed in a certain way to be liberatory. However, any discipline or activity can in theory become ethical work when approached with the right attitude, so what differentiates some practices from others? The discussion of Foucault’s philosophy in sport and exercise studies is useful here. According to Pirkko Markula and Richard Pringle, the “sporting self” that adheres to a personal code or mandate within the larger moral codes of sport (and the rules of the game in question, of course), can in some cases be seen as a form of aesthetic self-fashioning. It’s like the old adage: it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. When an athlete is concerned with the process and experience of training and playing (which is about his or her relation to himself or herself and to other players), rather than simply the outcome of the game (which is mandated by the “official” rules), he or she is stylizing their sporting life in a way that can be described as aesthetic self-fashioning. It is clear, then, that playing videogames might also be part of a process of aesthetic self-fashioning.

  A key component of Foucault’s philosophy is the problematization of the self, as constituted by systems of Power-Knowledge, which develops when people test and ponder the boundaries of those systems. In other words, the individual must recognize (or “verbalize”) and grasp the societal rules that produce their subjectivity and self in order to self-fashion as an ethical being within those rules. Understanding how the game works, and how it constructs and positions the player, is fundamental to a practice of freedom within a game. Foucault often says that power produces its own opposition. By creating a field (however tiny) in which individuals are not completely helpless (a space of possibilities), restrictive systems allow them to recognize their boundaries and to act freely within those boundaries. Expansive gameplay in videogames, therefore, can be seen as genuine aesthetic self-fashioning, but only in contexts where the rules of the game are actively recognized and problematized.

  An ordinary multiplayer game of Zombie in Halo 2 doesn’t necessarily indicate a Foucauldian ethics in practice, because presumably no such questioning occurs (indeed, the socially imposed rules of Zombie are so formalized it seems decidedly unlikely). However, acting within one’s means as a player in ways that highlight or challenge the real-world games of truth of which Halo is part and parcel just might count. Take, for example, the Pacifist Run described above. The Halo series is unquestionably dogmatic in its glorification of violent, male military heroism, and war for survival against foreign, alien beings—that’s a big part of what makes it so thrilling. Completing the game without killing anyone while deliberately bearing this glorification in mind, therefore, could be seen as a practice of freedom. Saving humanity without firing a shot makes an interesting point. By the same token, the performance-based expansive gameplay of jeep jumping, if approached from a certain standpoint, could become a meaningful appropriation of fictional tools of violence and domination to create a spectacle that can only exist within the rules of the game, but embraces an aesthetic completely different from the game’s intended heroic interpretation.

  Are these effective or productive forms of aesthetic self-fashioning? Do they allow individuals to make life a work of art? Well, probably not, because as I have argued, Foucault’s ethics depends entirely on the specifics of a given situation. A major problem with interpreting expansive gameplay as a practice of freedom is that it is far too tempting to simply declare “it counts as self-fashioning if you really mean it,” and leave it at that. In reality, most of the time expansive gameplay in Halo is not particularly introspective or thoughtful (even though it could be in theory) and is in no way part of an ongoing process of critical reflection and self-fashioning.

  For Foucault, the difference between a reactionary politics that ineffectually rages against “The System” and an actual practice of freedom is that the latter recognizes and comprehends that subjectivity is fully and irrevocably constituted by the very system that is being critiqued. Furthermore, this way of understanding expansive gameplay relies on a conception of games as being entirely part of the larger system of Power-Knowledge, and many theorists of games and play would be very hesitant to commit to such a statement. The relationship between games, culture, and social reality is much more complex, with games and other art forms existing in an in-between space that is not entirely real or entirely imaginary. Although aesthetic self-fashioning in or through videogames is possible in certain hypothetical instances, approaching expansive gameplay as a general cultural phenomenon from this perspective seems ill-advised.

  Expansive Gameplay as Simulation

  Finally, I propose a hybrid option. If expansive gameplay as metaphor glosses over some meaningful aspects of the relationship between systems of rules in reality and systems of rules in games, and expansive gameplay as an actual practice of freedom presumes equivalency between these systems, then the notion of simulation represents in my view an appealing middle ground. From this perspective, videogames simulate the kinds of systems that are experienced in reality, in games scholar Ian
Bogost’s sense of simulations as systems of simplified rules or principles that reference real-world systems.94

  My somewhat unconventional use of the term ‘simulation’ doesn’t refer only to the representation of specific real world processes. Halo simulates gunplay, driving, running and so on, but what’s important here is that games also simulate the form of rule-based systems in general. Game rules are a special class of rules that reference and emulate the kinds of rules people live with in the real world. Expansive gameplay can thus be understood as more than just a metaphor: as a simulation, it is inexorably linked to real-world practices and serves a similar function to aesthetic self-fashioning, but on a different scale. Reality is not just a game, and games are not entirely “real.” Games are like scale models that simulate, adapt and recontextualize the systems of reality.

  According to this conceptual framework, expansive gameplay takes place within a simulation of real-world systems of rules, and so, as a practice, it too is neither wholly real nor wholly imaginary. As such, it can be understood to have a meaningful-but-not-equivalent relationship to aesthetic self-fashioning, in the same way that games have a meaningful-but-not-equivalent relationship to reality. The rules of games like Halo constitute a culturally and socially demarcated (but not completely isolated) space for the pleasurable exploration of rule-based systems.