Sunday, June 14, 2015

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Importance of Co-Op in the Halo Universe!



I'd be lying if I said the Halo series had never been important to me.  It was a seminal part of my high school and college gaming experiences, and arguably the last great split-screen shooter before consoles transitioned to predominantly online multiplayer frames.  Before I started drinking, I'd go to convenience stores with my friends where we'd buy shitloads of candy, and then sit down and play hours and hours of Halo co-op in my friend's basement, skipping all those pesky story sequences so we could get into more killing and shouting at one another.  We'd swap controllers each time someone died, pausing only to put on new South American techno and hip-hop tracks, occasionally interrupted by Manu Chao.

Halo 2 arrived while I was an undergraduate, steadily developing a tidy drinking problem and far, far too poor to buy a console to play it on myself.  It wasn't until I came home for vacation that Halo 2 became my go-to game.  I'd sit down at the same friend's house and, now that we were slightly older, we'd drink in his basement and shit talk endlessly, this time playing split-screen multiplayer. 

Co-op was a thing of the past, competitive multiplayer the wave of the future.  Accusations of screen watching abounded, and the same few players, who actually spent time during the year with the console, would retain their controllers, while one of three members of the "losers circle" would take up their own controller and vie to unseat one of the entrenched victors each round.  Every once in a while we'd play co-op, but Halo 2's many odd level design decisions kept us from engaging with it the way we'd engaged with the first Halo.  With four controllers and no good reason not to, we got drunk and played Halo 2 well into the morning throughout the summer.

By the time Halo 3 rolled around, I'd finally graduated from college and moved across the coast, far from my gaming friends.  I fell into a series of boring office jobs, where I had friends, but no friends that I would sit and regularly play console games with.  Those days were behind me, by and large.  I bought Halo 3, played it, and enjoyed it as the widely recognized "found their stride" moment in the series that it was, and I did the same for the Halo 3: ODST stand-alone that came out and, in my mind at least, blew open the potential for Halo as a franchise.  But these were solitary experiences, divorced from the kind of fervor, argument, joy, and shared success and failure that defined my early experiences with the Halo titles.  They faded from my memory quickly, divorced from the multiplayer frames that sustained their predecessors for me.  Without other people to keep me engaged, Halo, a game that I spent nearly every night of my summer vacations playing, a game whose internal fiction hooked me in even when I wasn't playing it, a game central to the life of Mike from age 18 to 22, wasn't even a blip on my radar.  Halo: Reach and Halo 4 came and went without eliciting so much as a nod from me.  Halo Wars was barely a footnote, and Destiny, which isn't Halo but persists in a kind of parallel continuum adjacent to it, along with the Marathon series, still doesn't feel like a substantive enough body to warrant even the most cursory glance from me.  The Halo series was done for me.  I understood that it existed, but its firmament perpetuated itself outside of the spectrum of my interest.

That is, until recently.

About a month ago my girlfriend showed up with a shopping bag full of X-Box 360 games.  She'd downloaded a number of games to her more modern and more robust X-Box and wanted to clear out the space they'd once occupied.  Some of them were games I already had, but a few were new titles, titles I wanted to play.  I was more than happy to take them off her hands, and I dug into them with aplomb once she arrived with them at my apartment.  My childishly avaricious inventory blossomed into us discussing the titles, what she thought of the ones we'd both played.  We talked until it became apparent that she'd never actually played past Halo 2 in the series, despite giving me an extra copy of Halo 3.  When I asked if she wanted to play through the various permutations Halo 3 went through, together, she was game.  So I disconnected my old X-Box USB controller from my PC, hooked it up to my 360, and we sat down together on the couch, which marked the first time I've actually sat down to play games on the couch in my current apartment, to play through Halo 3: ODST together.

What followed was remarkable.

These were games I'd played a few times in years past, largely as one-and-done enterprises.  I did some achievement mining, and my usual "let's see if I can do this on Legendary" tweaking, but I never delved as deeply into the Halo games as I'd dug into, say, the metafiction surrounding those games in ARGs like I Love Bees.  But as we moved through New Mombasa's ruined streets together, uncovering the buried dialogue between Virgil and Sadie, something reignited in me.  I started to care about Halo's circumspect internal fiction, and I was hooked by the gameplay again, remembering all the tricks I'd encountered before, the strategies I'd learned to beat some of the more puzzle-like battles that ODST foisted upon its players.  The rush of coordinating fire with another player, as my girlfriend hung back and plinked off distracted hostiles while I flushed them out of cover by charging wildly, was intoxicating.  We tracked down weapons for one another, traded guns, established complimentary preferences and patterns of behavior.  I explained the origins of Sadie's story, why it felt incongruous in places, and how it related to the larger narrative of I Love Bees, how it spoke to the central plot of ODST.  My girlfriend was fascinated by the internal fiction, wanted to dig into it, as well as the other titles.  It took us only two days to finish ODST, clocking in at around ten hours, total, of gameplay.  We started Halo 3 and finished it the day after completing ODST.

Now, in the wake of our binge-play, we've determined to play through the Halo games I missed: Halo: Reach and Halo 4 are now not only on my radar, they've now taken up residence in my already-crowded summer docket.  The ever-expanding world of Halo and the chaotic, bombastic play the series provides are coursing through my veins again, and that addictive swoon I felt as a younger man is back.  Perhaps there's something about the Halo games that demands recognition or reinforcement from another party for it to all click: Halo's world is strangely incongruous and dark, a relic of its troubled development history and the various authors who have contributed to building the world beyond the core games, which both colors their play, and contains a richness undermined by the sometimes shallow world-building that the first Halo game presented.  You need to be able to sound out ideas and establish paradigms for what works (the birth of the Helljumpers as a combat group in the lead up to and gameplay of the second Halo game echoes some of the more interesting parts of military history in general) and what doesn't work (the dark nature and history of the Spartan 2.0s, of whom Master Chief is merely the most prominent, is strangely benign, and completely unmentioned in the core games).  Being able to talk those various concepts, and their various iterations, out helps a great deal.   

There's also something odd about the gameplay of Halo that simultaneously rewards and punishes wanton aggression, without necessarily making it clear what it expects of players.  More recent titles have improved in that regard, through a combination of verbal cues and mission objective indicators, but even then a certain degree of cartographic tea-leaf reading is necessary to play a Halo game.  Having a friend along helps in two ways, providing an extra layer of tactical analysis and assistance.  If things go wrong in a firefight, having a battle buddy who can respawn you is great, and keeps you from having to start from the last checkpoint, and if an area isn't entirely clearly laid out (which, as the last week has reminded me, is a constant problem in the Halo series) then a second pair of eyes and legs to explore and survey a given area can be a tremendous help.

There's more to be said as well: the cooperapetitive nature of Halo's Team Scoring mechanic has a "right" feel to it, as if the game was built around it, a quality highlighted by the fact that, at least in Halo 3, the co-op partner is actually built into the single player campaign.  Then there's the fact that Halo is all about hordes of enemies, interspersed by asymmetrical boss fights. That means having some constant allies, even if it just the one friend, can make a big difference when it comes to navigating the rage-filled hordes.  Feeling like you're part of a team, instead of feeling alone and isolated against a horde of foes, makes a big difference to the psyche of a player.

Halo is, perhaps, a case study in the importance of co-op in a game, which is especially appropriate when one considers its initial conceptual incarnation as a multiplayer oriented shooter the existed in a larger persistent world framework.  Stripped of these elements, Halo caught some hate, at least in part from industry taste-makers like Penny-Arcade.  But Bungie buckled down, and managed to turn that shade into criticism that allowed them to create some solid games that have inspired truly great work, even if the originals haven't aged well.  What's more, the fiction surrounding Halo has effectively grown beyond the confines of the games, and the world illustrated in the various audio dramas, movies, comics, and franchise-fiction that surround the Halo games is arguably more interesting than the world those games promote has ever been.  Which, in and of itself, displays the importance, in a sense, of co-op in imbuing Halo with value.  Much of the intellectual heft possessed by Halo comes from collaborative efforts, many of which Bungie never had a hand in, aside from providing the initial impetus behind them, the original three game-projects.  Perhaps one such collaborative effort just unfolded in my living room over the last week.  Given how Destiny turned out without our assistance, I'm inclined to believe the latter.

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