Rethinking Halo

Pretty sloppy, really. Heck, Wiki could have given more enlightenment about the Master Chief in 2 paragraphs than you managed in that essay. For one thing, there IS an official backstory to the Master Chiefs history, its a shame you’ve failed to research it.

The essay itself suffers from other problems. The second Halo storyline puts paid to many of the contentions in your essay unless one is determined to pretend that the first Halo is the only game to exist.

For two, the main point of your essay, even if *for the sake of argument* valid at the time of the launch of the first XBOX certainly isn’t true today. Microsoft has successfully given the XBOX and XBOX 360 the personality and reputation of hardcore gamer machines and that is where they focus most of their marketing effort.

A little simple research would have shown you this. It’s too bad that you wasted alot of psychological analysis on a flawed premise to begin with.

Comment by Clarence from Baltimore, US — September 26, 2007 @ 2:55 am

You seriously need to read the books. There is a seriously deep back story to everything in the game that in many ways directly contradicts some of the conclusions you have made.

I am not sure your audience is really into all the psycho-babble, over analysis either.

A for effort though. :)

Comment by What?! from Portland, OR — September 26, 2007 @ 7:22 am

Hugh!! I just wanna blast the monsters.

Comment by ash from Boston — September 26, 2007 @ 8:38 am

Congratulations on a brilliant essay.

I’m glad you took the effort to ignore the sequels and backstory established by the novels. Too often people devote themselves to mastering Sci-Fi and Video Game Lore like they were engineering manuals and as a result lose track of the forest for the trees. Viewing the original game on its own merits and establishing it as a metaphor for Microsoft itself was awesome.

If video games are ever going to be considered art, they are going to have to reconcile their differences and establish a relationship with the mediums that came before it. Movies make peace with novels through symbolic language. Novels accept poetry by using outlandish language.

Games, along with their once scorned fans, will have to start accepting other perspectives if they intend to ever grow as a medium.

Comment by L.B. Jeffries from The South — September 26, 2007 @ 9:15 am

I was fascinated by the analysis. Very compelling. However, having played the game over the years, I was immediately struck by the lack of fact-checking involved in drawing the conclusions one does about the game (and its creators) in general. Even a passing familiarity with the people at Bungie would reveal their strengths as people and developers, a glance at the story told in-game would reveal that the Chief’s motivation is much more complex. (However, in an infinitely amusing twist, having read the novels, I can say that Cortana is indeed quite Oedipal, being the virtual incarnation of the woman who made the cyborg super-soldier the way he is.)

The hard introduction to the story at the beginning of the game is probably meant as tabula rasa. The humans are quite literally lost: they don’t know why the Covenant hate them, why their fighting, and who they’re even fighting against (most encounters ended with no survivors). Et cetera. Depending on how hard you look, you can find quite a bit of nuance in the game. By completing it, one would have found out all sorts of useful tidbits central to one’s understanding of the story.

All in all, I would definitely recommend revising this article: read the first two novels, play the first two games, and you’ll come to realize that the Halo series is not only an interesting dynamic of the Xbox’s nascent entry into the entertainment industry. It stands on its own as a narrative describing first contact, and what might develop based on what turns out to be a complete misunderstanding.

Comment by Anonymous — September 26, 2007 @ 11:43 am

Only thing you succeeded in was getting me to view your ads. What a lame essay.

Comment by Nick from Austin — September 26, 2007 @ 12:25 pm

‘Master Chief’ is just a shortened way of saying ‘Master Chief Petty Officer’, a rank used even today in the USN.  Though redundant, it needs to be distinguished from other petty officer ranks. 

And regarding the relationship between a serviceman and his superior… perhaps you should serve a while (in the service of your choice) before you ask why one follows a superior’s orders.

Comment by Lyall from Saskatoon — September 26, 2007 @ 1:06 pm

The essay was obviously written from the point of view of someone who simply bought the console and the game, not knowing there were any books. I didn’t know there were books, and I bet most people did not, either. I also bet most people who have played the game have EVER read the books. You guys do a lot of pissing because you know the background, but you are ever the minority.

Comment by chuck from hartford, ct — September 26, 2007 @ 3:18 pm

Terrible… absolutely terrible…

Honestly don’t write an essay without making it through college folks, its not a pretty sight.  Eh, who knows right? Assoc. don’t count.  Especially if your going to start throwing around famous psychoanalysts in reference to a space helmet one might find on any futuristic suit of armor.

I only assume you never went to college by googling your name.  You should try google some time, its crazy.  If you googled Halo and Bungie for instance, you would know this game had been under construction for ages before Microsoft acquired it.  If you googled say… ratings and halo you might come across this little know site called metacritic, which shows a meta(weird how they named their site metacritic..)analysis of ratings done by other sites on the game. It goes 97, 95, 96.  So I guess 2 was… a failure?  One whole point off the average I guess constitutes that…

You obviously didn’t play these games, it has no less story line than any other action game out there (maybe half life has a little more, but certainly not much, i guess thats valve struggling for identity).  If anything this is one of the most well thought out progressions a shooter has ever gone through.  I shouldn’t even be criticizing your essay, because its not one, or the opening paragraphs would have some sort of statement of direction.  By the end you have gone nowhere and even manage to self contradict with gems like “(and supposedly last)” followed by “with the sequels mounting”.

Thanks you google news for pointing me to a blog for a 16 year old pseudo intellectual.  God hopes the Darwin awards claims your editor for their next awards ceremony for allowing this to emanate its stupidity inducing photons into my eyes.  I hope to god I see your name on a Burger King employee pin when next it graces my recuperating retina.

Comment by veerex from bean town — September 26, 2007 @ 6:18 pm