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 I just finished “Halo 2”
In the world of gaming nerds, or at least Halo nerds, I know that’s not big news. In fact, it might indicate a pathetic lack of devotion to the series.
Personally, I’d rather it look at it as a success. As a journalist, I don’t get a chance to finish as many games as I’d like to. As an older gamer, I’m simply proud of having plowed through the whole game on “normal” difficultly. I know this doesn’t mean much to the average thumb jock. But to me, it’s like hitting a home run, even if it is in slow pitch softball.
But more than anything, finishing the single player campaign mode gives me the platform for make some comments about the game. What I learned from playing “Halo 2” to completion is:
- ”Halo 2” wont change how games are made, but it might change how games are marketed.
- Ludology drowns out narrative (And dying over and over doing the same stuff is never any fun)
- ”Halo 2” is a only a little better than “Halo “because of hardware constraints
- In some respects the “Halo 2” hype was good and in some respects it was bad.
If you want the details, read on. There are not any “spoilers” in this discussion, unless you find intellectual twiddling with a game to be sort of buzzkill. But, if nothing else, I promise not to reveal any of the “Halo 2” “secrets”.
“Halo 2” wont change how games are made, but it might change how games are marketed.
To the casual observer, the “Halo 2” hype was a result of a hugely popular game title releasing a long-awaited sequel. But to the curious critic, something else is afoot.
By almost any measure, “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” will out-perform “Halo 2” in the market. Why? There are just a lot more PS2 in the market than Xboxes, so there are a lot more consumers.
So, the simple fact that “Halo 2” won the PR war is going to draw attention from PR and marketing departments. I can only imagine that even Rockstar is scratching its head, wondering how the media shifted its attention from its sprawling ethnic epic of gang banging crime to a baroque space opera.
I’ll leave it to brighter marketing minds to try and unravel the enormous success of the “Halo 2” hype machine. But let me detail a few obvious things they did that I suspect will become a part of the cannon of videogame marketing—at least for triple-A titles:
- Say very little about the game during development: A lot of games do this. But very few managed the level of secrecy of “Halo 2”. Since no one knew much about the game, the anticipation grew. Look for many publishers to shroud anticipated titles in secrecy rather than invite press in early for endless previews and pre-preview pre-press.
Hold review copies until the bitter end: In almost 10 years of covering games, I’ve never seen such a tight release. Very few press even got copies of the game prior to the week-before release. This includes some of the big news outlets that usually get everything. Hollywood has a tradition of not pre-screening movies that they think critics will pan. I suspect we will see the opposite in videogameland, with more hot games not going out to critics until the last minute to help build mystique and buzz.
- Viral marketing and clever marketing: I Love Bees. Need I say more? Bungie’s meta-marketing and coy clue dripping paid off. Expect more of the ironic—I know that you know that I know his is a game marketing event, but I’ll pretend that it’s not if you’ll pretend that it’s not.
Ludology drowns out narrative (And dying over and over doing the same stuff is never any fun)
Whatever you make of the H2 story (and I guarantee, whether you like it or hate it, you will have a strong opinion), the tale is more sophisticated than the usual trolls, wenches and treasure that underpins most game scripts.
But as much as I wanted to get into the story, I never did. I was too busy shooting things. Most times, I was too busy with the slaughter of the enemy to catch what I can only assume was important narrative or dialog. I kept the basic idea of the plot in mind. But if “Halo 2” was striving to reach the mythological complexity of “Lord of the Rings”, then the equivalent of my summary of what went on would be, “Short people steal jewelry then fret about it.” That is, the luxurious tale being told was blasted away in a barrage of energy beams. Trying to follow the story of “Halo 2” amidst all the action is akin to trying to read “Moby Dick” while sticking your head out of a car driving 75 miles per hour.
And part of the problem is that even if the story starts to flow, you run into a stupid circumstance that requires you to replay the same set of events 10-20 times. Rather than feeling like you are savoring a really rich passage in a John Fowles novel, you feel more like you are in “Groundhog Day.” Your frustration rises as you try to decode the perfect approach to the rule system to simply get along with the game. At this point, you’ve been reduced to a rule theorist, testing different strategies and weapon combinations in hopes of moving onto the next thing. Whatever grand theme was developing in the narrative is washed away in the redundancy of the interactive trial error that absorbs you.
When the game stops being fun the narrative doesn’t matter.
I’d summarize this point by saying that the concerns of the game—the ludological components—completely overwhelmed the story components—the narrative. I suspect I could write an entire PhD dissertation on this subject. But the nut of it is, in the battle of paying attention to the game or the story, “Halo 2” tells us that the game wins.
Halo 2 is a only a little better than Halo because of hardware constraints
Another thing that struck me was show similar “Halo” and “Halo 2” are. Despite the smash success of “Halo 2” and the presumable latitude that comes with following up a commercial success, there was only so much developer Bungie could do with an increased budget and development timeframe. Why? Because “Halo” and “Halo 2” both came out on the same platform. The hardware constrains possibility, and even with optimization, there was only so much headroom to improve H2.
In an ironic sense, H2 shows that videogames need new hardware platforms. The current machines are not enough to leverage a significant increase in budgets to create more complex, evocative or entertaining worlds. Developers complain about spiraling development costs. But we are probably sitting near the top of the cost curve for the current generation. Spending more than Bungie did on “Halo 2” is not going to deliver a dramatically different gaming experience—at least in term of raw structural elements—AI smarts, graphic depth, world complexity, etc.
As a side note, this also points to the need for stylistic and game play innovations. “Katamari Damacy” is a huge leap forward for gaming. In part, it achieves this by simplifying graphics, using a non-interactive soundtrack and focusing on the game and its own quirky style.
In some respects the “Halo 2” was good and in some respects it was bad.
Hype is always a double-edged sword. It gets people excited but, invariably, it leaves them feeling a little let down in the end.
Overall, I think the Halo hype was good for the business. It got a lot of people that don’t normally think about videogames asking about them. And Halo hype is a much better form of attention than “videogames and violence” or “game developers work too hard.”
Still, there is a dark side to the hype. For one thing, this game brought the game business to a halt for more than a week. All anyone seems to be doing since launch is playing H2. I have games sitting on my desk, begging to be played and reviewed that just had to sit and wait while I waded through Covenant forces.
Hit are good. And hype is good. But unlike a hit movie or book, a hit game can soak up enormous amounts of gamer time, boxing out other games in the process. This year, GTA: San Andreas and “Halo 2” will reap the rewards of gamer attention. But it would not surprise me to find that game revenues are flat otherwise. Big wins for Take 2 and Microsoft could actually spell financial hurt for other game producers. And in case you are not connecting the dots, this fuels the high-stakes speculation in hit games and hurts the industry’s ability to build, incrementally on innovation and focus on sustainability.
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As for narrative vs ludology, I'll have to aggree that when you're in the thick of things, the story really doesn't matter. That's because you're participating in an event rather than watching a recording of an event or reading about one. Playing Halo 2 is similar to being a soldier on the battlefield - when you're on the field all you care about is surviving, accomplishing the tasks so you don't care about politics. You might complain about your orders but you follow them because that's what you need to do in order to proceed. Same thing with videogames - when I'm playing Mario, I've got just a simple objective: rescue the princess. Then there are other objectives, jumping across pits, going into pipes for coins. When you're a Halo marine, your objective is to take out that gun turret or that tank. All you care about is making that jump or blowing up that Covenant: when you're concerned about accomplishing the objective, the story doesn't matter. There is very little time for reflection when you’re jumping about or shooting stuff.
So what's the point of story in a game? Maybe it provides us with a poor pre-rendered cutscene to view after a hypothetical game of tennis as Steeve Poole suggests in TRIGGER HAPPY. Or maybe it's just a skeletal frame to keep the events of the game from floating in cyberspace, to keep them grounded in reality with reasons why you're doing stuff in the game. This seems to be the reason behind some game developers, that the story isn't really that important and that you shoehorn whatever story you want into the game instead of shoehorning the game into the story.
But what does a story do to the play experience? Games are getting deeper and more involved stories these days so you can’t just slap on the game a simple story about rescuing a princess anymore. You need background, character information, and all that rubbish that nobody cares about outside the instruction manual. You need more why than ‘because it’s a game.”
One effect a story can have is to keep the player playing to find out what happens next. But has anyone ever asked WHY that’s the case? Why should anybody play through a game just to see what happens, especially a really bad one like Resident Evil: Survivor. If you think back to games you’ve played where you really liked the story or played through to find out what happens next, what do you remember most about the story? More importantly, how did you feel at the time?
I’ll take a guess that the primary importance of a story in a game has to do with emotion rather than context. If I’m a Halo marine, I don’t really care about how the war began: it began and I’m here to fight it. What I do care about though is when I get betrayed by my comrades or ambushed by the enemy. That makes me feel shock and anger. Or surprise when something totally unexpected comes up, or grief when one of my favorite characters is going through some real trauma. These are powerful emotions. That’s the same thing a soldier on the real battlefield would feel if the war takes an unexpected twist.
When I think back to games with stories I like, the most memorable parts of the story seem to be tied to emotions. Further, my most favorite and memorable characters tend to be the ones for whom I have a lot of empathy towards. So when I play a game like Final Fantasy VI, I remember the characters because they have their own foibles and failures but also because they have a sense of nobility that allows them to overcome their flaws. In a game like Halo, the empathy comes more from the look of the character and awe at what he can do. You really don’t hear anything about Master Chief’s history but what you do see a lot of is Master Chief kicking ass. There is a lot of awe towards a character like this, someone who looks cool and can do all these great awe-inspiring moves. And when you’re playing Halo and the marines cheer you, you feel proud to be such a badass.
I’d say in terms of characters in games where there are very few and where character interaction is minimal, the focus has to be on the look and feel of the character rather than depth, which is more important when the characters interact with each other more and when there is a larger cast.
So perhaps what game designers should be looking more into is generating those emotions and empathy towards the characters beyond just the shallow exterior of the look and feel of the character and the ambience of the environment. They need to generate positive emotions from the player like surprise, wonder, and fear, not negative ones like frustration and boredom. Games are more like roller coasters – you experience them rather than reflect upon them, so there should be a wider range of experiences – of emotions - than what we tend to see in games. Of course, there is also room for reflection and I think that comes from having the player make important choices that mean something to the player or having something in the game speak to the player, and that involves having the player do something more than just running, jumping, and shooting.
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"Until next time..."
Captain Commando