[Note: I wrote this article in August-September 2006; it was near publication at Salon (I know, I know...) when top edit apparently decided it wouldn't appeal to a broad enough audience. Frankly I think that's silly, but it's not for me to decide. Indeed, now it's for you to decide. Is this article worth anything? I would like to think so. If you agree, by all means tell someone. Enjoy.]
Good news, everybody! Last night I stayed up 'til 3am and figured out a few things about the current situation in the Middle East. I did this while playing Bungie’s highly-regarded Xbox game Halo 2 - indeed, all I know about the war in Iraq I learned from that game, a 'first-person shooter' set in outer space in the far future. Sounds crazy, maybe. I know. But I'd like to suggest that you could learn a thing or two from it yourself, should you care to take the time, and that its complexity and just-maybe allegorical applicability fly in the face of some silly and self-serving myths - about Iraq, I suppose, but mainly about stories, and kids. The game is a couple years old, but now more than ever it remains a potent allegory for events in which the U.S. and her allies find themselves hopelessly enmeshed.
Halo 2 is a video game about a zealous suicide bomber and an American soldier known to the bomber's people as The Demon. The zealot is put to work by a troika of fanatics, eliminating dissident 'heretics' and fighting for control of a 'promised land' known to the troika only through misunderstood holy texts and apocalyptic prophecies. Zealot and soldier stumble into the middle of an interracial conflict, on the ruins of a once-great but now misunderstood civilization, that started so far back no one can remember its origins or what prompted it; this conflict metastasizes into a civil war between an oppressed majority culture and a more powerful tribal minority. In the final frames of the story, both conflicts spread to America, where the fate of all living things must be decided by outcasts and dissidents.
Sound familiar? Here's a twist: the bomber's an alien, the war is in interstellar space, the minority ruling party consists of 1,000-pound bear creatures carrying laser-axes. But the storyline should seem familiar to anyone who watches the news these days.
Ready for the other twist?
You play the suicide bomber.
Now let's be clear: today's gamers are largely unaccustomed to serious moral drama in their ludic entertainments. Though the 80's saw the verbal acrobatics and melancholy of Infocom's text adventures (like the classic Zork) and the memorable comedy of the Monkey Island games, and the 90's brought the moodily cinematic Grim Fandango, the increased complexity of roleplaying games like Baldur's Gate and the later Final Fantasy titles, and the riveting 'sneakers' Deus Ex and Thief, it's rare to find a well-made game that takes on moral issues with the subversive dexterity of Halo and especially its sequel. The controversial Grand Theft Auto games are often cited as (un)ethically complex games, but they're largely pornography, hedonistic release devoid of dramatic integration or compulsion. They're American self-portraits. Halo and Halo 2 (and the saga's forthcoming conclusion, Halo 3) form the maddeningly-relevant saga of an American abroad.
If the iconography of Halo 2 is suggestive of the U.S.'s catastrophic engagement with the complexities of the modern Middle East, it couldn't be more different than the presentation of that sojourn in today's TV and film. The heroes-and-villains cinematics of CNN, the headbutting banality of the Sunday morning talk shows and newspaper op-eds, the stark lines of recent films like War of the Worlds and World Trade Center and Flight 93 - these 'adult' works treat only the consequences of American action, never the complex cultural field into which the U.S. has (less and less) willingly walked guns ablaze. The Middle East is a slightly older melting pot than the United States, yet typically we understand it as an endpoint, never a process. We've learned to take our cultural cues from Charlie, the heroin addict on ABC's adventure show Lost, whose inquiries into his fate are limited to, 'Guys, where are we?' But by the iterative, immersive mechanisms of new media such as video games (notably still 'new' after several decades), we can take up the wise words of pop philosopher David Byrne: 'Well? How did I get here?'
The actual moral lessons of Halo 2 aren't on-the-nose at all; indeed, the lessons are tonal rather than didactic, communicated through melancholy and anger rather than in lectures and summing-up. One of the game's neatest tricks is its portrayal of the perversion of knowledge by fairweather spiritualists - a topic as pertinent to American domestic politics, with its farcical invocations of Bible verse to justify the arrogation of power over bodies and minds, as to the modern Middle East and its violent fundamentalisms (which, according to which know-all pundit you read, are either central to Muslim identity or an unfortunate byproduct of Western meddling. Who knows?). In the Halo universe, the erstwhile villains (the Covenant) are believers in a coming transfiguration called 'The Great Journey' - off to Canaan-on-the-Milky-Way, they suppose. The player takes the part of a state-sponsored suicidal warrior known as the Arbiter, tasked initially with wiping out heretics who decry the Journey as statist hogwash. As it happens, they're right: the Journey is the activation of a weapon that'll kinda sort kill everything in the galaxy. The shared cultural history is a myth, the dream of empire and transcendence a ploy. Surprise: as the Arbiter, you still kill the poor bastards who're trying to spread the truth. It's your sacred duty. There's no option in the game to join forces with the dissidents.
Make no mistake: Halo 2 is not a lecture on the modern Middle East. But its daring narrative conceit - exposing the inner workings of what was, in its first installment, merely static, a pathology, an endpoint, and then daring to find sympathy and empathy within - is simply unlike the kind of thinking you find on Meet the Press. The strength of Halo is in its design, its writing, its art direction, its voice acting - old-fashioned stuff, 1930's Hollywood stuff - but the series also demonstrates concisely the power of spatial/procedural storytelling to put easy Good Guy/Bad Guy narratives by the wayside.
Now, reading Halo 2 as a kind of participatory allegory for the quasi-mythical battle between the West and Islam may (for all I know) go unnecessarily against the grain of the game's intentions; and I don't mean to suggest that it's the first complex sci-fi story. Not at all: there's a tradition of the middle chapters of sci-fi/fantasy series in other media exploring the psychology and society of their villains. The Two Towers, The Matrix: Reloaded, and The Empire Strikes Back, all arguably the best films in their respective series, enriched their major narrative arcs by shifting focus from abstract Evil to more complex portrayal of bad people and how they got that way. Of late, as well, Battlestar Galactica has shown an interest in the way its robotic villains live; Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity transformed the Empire of Star Wars into a well-meaning bureaucracy, with thieves and killers for heroes; the creepy science experiments on Lost appear to be meant to bring about world peace.
But by casting the player as the ostensible villain - by presenting the Covenant's internal dialogue in English rather than grunts, and showing the collective delusion that animates their theocracy without reducing their beliefs to 'kill kill kill' - Halo 2 takes a bold step in favor of even more complex narrative and unsettling, shifting motivations. After walking in the cloven feet of this jihadist (yes, why not?) it becomes difficult to fall back on easy Good/Bad structures of desire over the course of the story. Indeed, it is revealed in a cutscene (interpolated cinematic sequence) that the Arbiter's failure to die in battle makes him a liability to the theocrats who would simplify his memory, his myth, for their own ends. ultimately the aim of these intergalactic mullahs is the same as any government's: power. That seems like such a small, obvious claim, yet try and picture a Nightly News commentator addressing the U.S. and Iraq's shambolic government in equivalent terms. That kind of structural, systemic, analogical thinking comes easy to gamers and game-designers - assuming they have well-crafted games to play.
At one point in Halo 2's gameplay the Master Chief opens a door onto a firefight between factions of Covenant society. 'Maybe you want to sit this one out,' his onboard AI (a cheerful and weirdly moving female hologram named Cortana) tells him (and us). That's not bad advice - whether you interpret it as 'let the savages kill each other' or 'leave this to those who know what's at stake.' It's a small moment, played for black comedy, but its implications linger after the shooting stops. And tellingly, a few moments later the player is in control of the Arbiter again, trapped in a firefight just like it, this time killing his own kind. The sympathy the first game generated, a comforting and gratifying feeling but ultimately a manipulative one, is replaced by something more lasting and generative: empathy. It's not just the simulation aspect of the game that breeds this feeling, it's the slow tightening of the narrative screws. The game's writers have the audacity to show a military man deciding that rapid withdrawal might be a sensible alternative to fighting - even though the game's reason for being is the simulated experience of gunplay.
Halo 2 ends, as it must, with cooperation between the Arbiter and the Chief (bomber and soldier); yes they're still tempted to kill each other a little bit, but they're groping for something nobler. Yet in an important, subversive final turn, it's the Chief who storms off alone to do more killing on Earth; the Arbiter, the zealot, forms a coalition with human soldiers and cleans up the mess in deep space. The game's final frames show the Chief with his gun and his rocket ship, ready to enact some cowboy diplomacy, proclaiming, 'I'm here to finish this fight.' More affecting and promising is the last shot of the Arbiter: slumped over, faith challenged and changed, his weapon no longer to hand. One senses that finishing the fight and winning the war - changing the world for the better - aren't quite the same thing; lasting change to Covenant (and human) society will come from internationalists within. As paeans to anti-fundamentalist modernity go, it's a good one.
I don't know whether the militias and death squads in Iraq can be made to cease their crimes, or the seeds of functional democracy and communitarian modernity allowed to take root; I've no idea whether to take the bloody fantasies of apocalyptic Islamism at face value or listen to moderate voices who believe that a lasting peaceful coexistence is possible between peoples in the Middle East. Halo 2 will not make those choices less difficult, or those facts less complicated. What it can do is offer a complex fantasy, an alternative to the shared American myth of bullets, balls, and the flag setting all things right.
Perhaps most importantly, in Halo 2 I see the possibility of a mass-market entertainment, sold to testosterone-high teenagers, taking seriously the moral issues raised by the collision of cultures, dispensing with the need to label one or another as 'failed,' instead letting players tease out for themselves the complexities of the story at hand.
By now it should be uncontroversial that video games can be incredibly valuable teaching tools, yet every so often we reenact tired old moral panics about their negative effects on kids. In such debates the defenders of games' value largely don't do a great job making their case, so fairly obvious truths about their potential worth - as teaching tools, as art - fail to become common knowledge. In part this is because gamers hold up as classic examples of the art pattern-matching exercises like Tetris, or the superficial open-endedness of Grand Theft Auto III, or the brilliantly schematic Super Mario games, playable on autopilot. In addition, defenses of pop culture's value tout the complication and involution of shows like The Simpsons or Survivor, or the 'bring item A to location B' repetitiveness of typical computer roleplaying games (and 24), while forgetting to make mention of their lack of meaningful complexity. For instance: Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You, a bestseller last year that touted the benefits of certain pop culture media forms, said true things and new things about games, but almost nothing that was both, starting with its deliberately provocative title, which was neither. Indeed the title pointed up the book's major flaw, an insistence on dispensing with moral evaluation in praising pop media, even if only for the sake of his cognitive-benefits argument. Which is to say again: he makes a virtue of complication and not complexity. Nonetheless Johnson is on the side of the angels in this one; it's testament to our misunderstanding of media culture that books like his are necessary.
And he would surely agree on this point: children in America are babysat all day and night by tales and imaginative worlds that comfort but rarely challenge them; a cursory glance at CNN or its insane doppelgänger Fox News makes clear that adults are happy to live in similar imaginative poverty - but worse, for its irresponsibility. It behooves us to recognize well-told stories that demonstrate moral seriousness and generous humanism; Halo 2 isn't Don DeLillo (who shows the former but not the latter), nor Napoleon Dynamite (which went the other way around), but its own thing, an enveloping fantasy that prompts a kind of learning or expansiveness of imagination. Gamers, accustomed to the imaginative projection such gameworlds require, might end up having something to tell us about the complexities of moral worlds too. But without serious games - and Halo 2 is one, thanks largely to its writers, the unsung old-fashioned heroes of media in transition - they'll inherit the same poverty of moral imagination as those raised on a steady diet of CSI or Jackass or Dan Brown, or the gaping cultural abyss inbetween. The stories we tell ourselves and our kids now will be the dreams that motivate our foreign policy in 2040, and if we can learn about that fast approaching future (and our all-too-real present) by reading and playing through imagined ones, then for reasons pragmatic and poetic I say Game On.
