Sunday, June 28, 2015

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Framing Narratives Within Existing Continuities!



I recently finished the final act of The Wolf Among Us, a task that took, according to Steam, a mere 12 hours, which actually occupied roughly a year of my life.  This was my second engagement with Telltale's unique hybrid breed of puzzle-conversation gameplay/collaborative narrative development, and the emotional residue from my first engagement with that style of play, in Telltale's The Walking Dead, carried over in force to The Wolf Among Us, which is at least part of why I spent so much more time dreading what would come next in Wolf than I did actually playing it.  In that regard, it did not disappoint: the twists and turns of the final bars of the game were in equal turn satisfying and surprising, and the complex morality of the choices made both by me, through gruff cipher Bigby Wolf and other characters, most notably Nerissa (who may or may not actually be Nerissa) resonated in a way that few stories, let alone game-based stories, do for me nowadays.  While The Wolf Among Us was nowhere near as emotionally taxing for me as The Walking Dead, the stories it told, and the underlying ideas behind those stories, will stick with me for a while.  I'm still unpacking its interpretation of moral absolutism, and its distinctive illustration of how right and wrong can shift dramatically depending on perspective, and how personal morality functions.

But foremost in my mind is how The Wolf Among Us fits into the existing continuity of the Fables comic books, or perhaps, more to the point, how it manages to fit the continuity of the Fables series into the various potential paths that players can take during the game.  The Walking Dead video game manages to fit into the continuity of the comics by setting itself adjacent to the comics themselves, asking players to generate a story that occurs largely in parallel with the other, more familiar narrative that they've had some experience with already.  The Wolf Among Us, on the other hand, is asking players to re-author the history of two characters who already have a complex relationship that, over the course of the narrative frame they already "exist" in, evolves considerably into something quite different from what it begins as.  That this relationship is at the center of The Wolf Among Us is something of a risky choice, at least in the context of The Walking Dead game's relationship with its own fictional progenitor and related context.  After all, there are few nerd sub-groups more effusive and opinionated than comic book nerds, and Fables' internal continuity is already convoluted and fractured, not by authorship but by an evolution which has marked the progress of the series from conceptual framework to fully realized setting.

There are two major potential problems that come to mind with asking players to make significant narrative choices in a prequel attached to an established setting.  The first is that the choices the players will be asked to make may, by necessity, feel insignificant or forced, so as to prevent the narrative players are generating from conflicting with existing canon.  After all, the easiest way to keep players from breaking something is to bolt it down and keep them from messing with it at all.  Bigby can't kill Colin.  Whatever his relationship might be with Colin in your game, by the end of your time together the narrative demands that Colin survive to appear anew in the comics.  Which brings up the second major problem: that player choices conflict directly with the characters they engage within the comics, in explicit or subtextual ways.  The Bigby Wolf of The Wolf Among Us that I crafted was nowhere near the sort of master detective that the Bigby of the first issue of Fables was, and a Fables purist might take issue with such license, or the potential for such license to emerge in the first place.  They might, that is, if The Wolf Among Us didn't do quite such a clever job of working around that problem by selecting its setting so carefully.

See, while the world of Fables is elaborate and wrought, it presents a great deal of wiggle room for both its initial creators, and fan-creators like Telltale, allowing them to uncover new and previously unused mythological figures from fairy tales famed and obscure.  By establishing a pre-comics history spanning decades, or perhaps even centuries depending on the issue and who you ask, there's quite a bit of room for players to operate within an established history while simultaneously building in a buffer that permits characters ample time to adjust to or establish a supporting frame for the actions that occur in The Wolf Among Us.  By setting the game at a turning point in the history of Fabletown, one of many at best referenced in passing in the comics, The Wolf Among Us gives players a great deal of leeway for establishing their own narrative and making their own major choices (like how to resolve the game's climax) without necessarily undermining the future continuity in which these conflicts are not only resolved, but wholly eclipsed in importance by the invasion of the Fable Homeland, and the resolution thereof.  It even lets your actions become a sort of framework for the growth of your character in the future, as even actions and choices that conflict with or countermand the development of the Bigby Wolf seen in the Fables comics.  Your Bigby constitutes a sort of starting point for the Bigby that will appear in narratives to come.  My Bigby's bumbling, humiliating, bloody investigation might've prompted him to blossom into the master detective he would later become.

It's a clever set of narrative tricks, similar to the ones employed by Bioware when they created the Knights of the Old Republic series: players need to feel like they're having a meaningful impact on their world, but, at least in most cases, they don't want to dirty their hands dismantling the narrative framework of a setting they're inhabiting.  In theory, your player base probably loves that narrative framework.  So you're left trying to carve out a space for players to exist in the world of the characters they love without necessarily making them come into conflict with those very entities.  That Wolf does so with a setting far closer to its antecedent texts, and does so with a great deal more narrative choice featured than KOTOR ever did, is what makes it so impressive.

Telltale had already proven to me that they were worth trusting with complex, involved narratives that I wanted to be a part of.  They already showed me that in The Walking Dead.  Most players learned that in Sam and Max.  What they proved here is that they can contribute meaningfully to the history of the worlds they ask players to inhabit, and give players room to make those contributions as well, without destroying the continuity that follows them, indeed while reinforcing that continuity and permitting players to carve it into something simultaneously their own and not their own.  Telltale does more than merely fit their stories into the empty spaces in their narrative worlds: they carve out entirely new spaces, etching into the narratives we've seen already, making them more than they were, something we've had a hand in shaping, something that simultaneously accommodates and ignores the choices we made without making those choices feel insignificant.  If Barthes was alive, he'd likely be writing about this kind of storytelling now, and the manner in which it rewrites the relationship between reader and author.  In these new narrative frames the author is no longer the primary figure of importance, without losing any of the power they have held for generations already, nor is the reader still relegated to the passive reconceptualizer of the ideas the author posits that they have been since the dawn of narrative texts.  Instead their collaboration is something that expands the boundaries of texts beyond convention and time-frame, into a kind of experiential mélange that imbues texts with meaning expanding not only into future narratives, but into narratives that have already occurs, not merely by commenting on them, but by writing the history that surrounds them without altering their actions, recontextualizating texts without retconning them into oblivion.


I recently finished the final act of The Wolf Among Us, a task that took, according to Steam, a mere 12 hours, which actually occupied roughly a year of my life.  This was my second engagement with Telltale's unique hybrid breed of puzzle-conversation gameplay/collaborative narrative development, and the emotional residue from my first engagement with that style of play, in Telltale's The Walking Dead, carried over in force to The Wolf Among Us, which is at least part of why I spent so much more time dreading what would come next in Wolf than I did actually playing it.  In that regard, it did not disappoint: the twists and turns of the final bars of the game were in equal turn satisfying and surprising, and the complex morality of the choices made both by me, through gruff cipher Bigby Wolf and other characters, most notably Nerissa (who may or may not actually be Nerissa) resonated in a way that few stories, let alone game-based stories, do for me nowadays.  While The Wolf Among Us was nowhere near as emotionally taxing for me as The Walking Dead, the stories it told, and the underlying ideas behind those stories, will stick with me for a while.  I'm still unpacking its interpretation of moral absolutism, and its distinctive illustration of how right and wrong can shift dramatically depending on perspective, and how personal morality functions.

But foremost in my mind is how The Wolf Among Us fits into the existing continuity of the Fables comic books, or perhaps, more to the point, how it manages to fit the continuity of the Fables series into the various potential paths that players can take during the game.  The Walking Dead video game manages to fit into the continuity of the comics by setting itself adjacent to the comics themselves, asking players to generate a story that occurs largely in parallel with the other, more familiar narrative that they've had some experience with already.  The Wolf Among Us, on the other hand, is asking players to re-author the history of two characters who already have a complex relationship that, over the course of the narrative frame they already "exist" in, evolves considerably into something quite different from what it begins as.  That this relationship is at the center of The Wolf Among Us is something of a risky choice, at least in the context of The Walking Dead game's relationship with its own fictional progenitor and related context.  After all, there are few nerd sub-groups more effusive and opinionated than comic book nerds, and Fables' internal continuity is already convoluted and fractured, not by authorship but by an evolution which has marked the progress of the series from conceptual framework to fully realized setting.

There are two major potential problems that come to mind with asking players to make significant narrative choices in a prequel attached to an established setting.  The first is that the choices the players will be asked to make may, by necessity, feel insignificant or forced, so as to prevent the narrative players are generating from conflicting with existing canon.  After all, the easiest way to keep players from breaking something is to bolt it down and keep them from messing with it at all.  Bigby can't kill Colin.  Whatever his relationship might be with Colin in your game, by the end of your time together the narrative demands that Colin survive to appear anew in the comics.  Which brings up the second major problem: that player choices conflict directly with the characters they engage within the comics, in explicit or subtextual ways.  The Bigby Wolf of The Wolf Among Us that I crafted was nowhere near the sort of master detective that the Bigby of the first issue of Fables was, and a Fables purist might take issue with such license, or the potential for such license to emerge in the first place.  They might, that is, if The Wolf Among Us didn't do quite such a clever job of working around that problem by selecting its setting so carefully.

See, while the world of Fables is elaborate and wrought, it presents a great deal of wiggle room for both its initial creators, and fan-creators like Telltale, allowing them to uncover new and previously unused mythological figures from fairy tales famed and obscure.  By establishing a pre-comics history spanning decades, or perhaps even centuries depending on the issue and who you ask, there's quite a bit of room for players to operate within an established history while simultaneously building in a buffer that permits characters ample time to adjust to or establish a supporting frame for the actions that occur in The Wolf Among Us.  By setting the game at a turning point in the history of Fabletown, one of many at best referenced in passing in the comics, The Wolf Among Us gives players a great deal of leeway for establishing their own narrative and making their own major choices (like how to resolve the game's climax) without necessarily undermining the future continuity in which these conflicts are not only resolved, but wholly eclipsed in importance by the invasion of the Fable Homeland, and the resolution thereof.  It even lets your actions become a sort of framework for the growth of your character in the future, as even actions and choices that conflict with or countermand the development of the Bigby Wolf seen in the Fables comics.  Your Bigby constitutes a sort of starting point for the Bigby that will appear in narratives to come.  My Bigby's bumbling, humiliating, bloody investigation might've prompted him to blossom into the master detective he would later become.

It's a clever set of narrative tricks, similar to the ones employed by Bioware when they created the Knights of the Old Republic series: players need to feel like they're having a meaningful impact on their world, but, at least in most cases, they don't want to dirty their hands dismantling the narrative framework of a setting they're inhabiting.  In theory, your player base probably loves that narrative framework.  So you're left trying to carve out a space for players to exist in the world of the characters they love without necessarily making them come into conflict with those very entities.  That Wolf does so with a setting far closer to its antecedent texts, and does so with a great deal more narrative choice featured than KOTOR ever did, is what makes it so impressive.

Telltale had already proven to me that they were worth trusting with complex, involved narratives that I wanted to be a part of.  They already showed me that in The Walking Dead.  Most players learned that in Sam and Max.  What they proved here is that they can contribute meaningfully to the history of the worlds they ask players to inhabit, and give players room to make those contributions as well, without destroying the continuity that follows them, indeed while reinforcing that continuity and permitting players to carve it into something simultaneously their own and not their own.  Telltale does more than merely fit their stories into the empty spaces in their narrative worlds: they carve out entirely new spaces, etching into the narratives we've seen already, making them more than they were, something we've had a hand in shaping, something that simultaneously accommodates and ignores the choices we made without making those choices feel insignificant.  If Barthes was alive, he'd likely be writing about this kind of storytelling now, and the manner in which it rewrites the relationship between reader and author.  In these new narrative frames the author is no longer the primary figure of importance, without losing any of the power they have held for generations already, nor is the reader still relegated to the passive reconceptualizer of the ideas the author posits that they have been since the dawn of narrative texts.  Instead their collaboration is something that expands the boundaries of texts beyond convention and time-frame, into a kind of experiential mélange that imbues texts with meaning expanding not only into future narratives, but into narratives that have already occurs, not merely by commenting on them, but by writing the history that surrounds them without altering their actions, recontextualizating texts without retconning them into oblivion.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Sun Sets on Pillars of Eternity!

I finally finished Pillars of Eternity after nearly a month of hemming and hawing at the edge of completion.  I spent most of that time working to finish off the last of the side quests, specifically the staggeringly challenging boss battle that concludes the side quest set inside of the keep you capture in the first half of the game.  Pillar's conclusion was everything I'd hoped for, resplendent with the kind of context-sensitive closure that classic CRPGs have always provided.  Character specific and town-by-town "future history" breakdowns emerging from a storyline that adjusted to decisions made in the context of the game served as a button to the entire experience. These buttons emerge along with a set of in-story decisions that establish large portions of the lost history of the world of Pillars, which made me feel like I was doing more than just divining the path my characters would travel in the future; I was shaping the world that they'd come of age in. These features, and many, many more, recalled all the things I loved about old-school RPGs, all of the things Pillars of Eternity reminded me I was missing.

It's bittersweet to be finished at last for a few reasons, among them the fact that, with Pillars in my rearview, I've now got a series of emotionally draining adventure games lined up to play.  But there's also a certain totality in completing a game like Pillars, a sort of "completeness" that unfurls in how the game's sprawling set of interests engage with your own interactions with the world and characters around you that, in a sense, "kills" future narrative in the framework of the game by eliminating or completing possibilities in favor of leaving the narrative frame open ended.  It's something that Pillars does exceptionally well, creating a cast of characters I genuinely care about with relatively little effort, and helping me get to know them better as they insert their already-bursting personalities into each interaction that the game permits them to poke their heads into.  Pillars so deftly winds these characters into its world, and uses them to bestow an already bursting narrative landscape with a very real pulse, that the closure it provides in its finishing bars is feels like closure rendered upon its entire fictional universe, as if I'm not just finishing a book, but instead watching a set of friends live out the rest of their lives in fast-motion.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing: that Pillars made me feel so invested in the first place is, in and of itself, a staggering achievement.  I'm one jaded motherfucker, and making me feel for characters is no mean feat.  That I wanted to see every single character in Pillars, even that weird little Orlan dude who didn't seem to have a developed side-quest, find the peace they were looking for is saying something.  Feeling loss at the departure of a cast of characters you love deeply isn't a negative: it means that you felt some sort of connection to the world you were inhabiting, some connection to the people within it.

What's more disconcerting is that this feeling is so rare, so exceptional in this age of CRPGs.

Or rather, it was until recently.  Even well crafted open world RPGs from the last market-cycle of games, RPGs like say, Skyrim, were fairly weak-tea in the character development department.  When I reflect on Skyrim, I have trouble thinking of characters as having distinct personalities.  But when I look at the last year  and a half, stretching back to Wasteland 2, I find myself tripping over well-crafted games whose worlds I'm missing post-completion.  There's something of a classic-gaming renaissance hitting the scene, a phenomena which seems to owe itself to equal parts market-flux (Dragon Age: Inquisition, after all, was superlative) and the realization of a number of Kickstarter backed games that serve what was perceived as a "niche" audience which, as it turns out, isn't so niche after all.  Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, and the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera all found their backing on Kickstarter, and they're all superlative examples of world crafting that can hold their own with classics as venerable as any Black Isle title of old.

These democratized funding models, which were until quite recently all but inconceivable, are producing some pretty rousing successes.  Many of the biggest critical successes in recent memory are the product of Kickstarter funding, while many of the bigger disappointments and flops are stemming from large studios.  That isn't to say that large studios aren't killing it themselves: Fallout 4 looks superlative, and appears to be interested in the same kind of relationship-building that Fallout: New Vegas so aptly engaged in.  But these games are still exceptions: in the world of CRPGs, you're less likely to hear about that cool character interaction that spun out of your gameplay experience, and far more likely to hear about a given set piece, or series of set-pieces, that players had a chance to interact with.  The shift away from "characters" to "things" is demonstrative of an overarching trend towards spectacle, one that's dominated many games, and game franchises, in recent history.  Consider the Call of Duty series, which spent itself in a single title creating characters that players found memorable, and then stretched the spectacle of their series out over a dozen or two games, constantly upping the stakes for each new title, demanding that players invest themselves in a series of explosions devoid from any context, beyond that drawn with the broadest of strokes.  Even games like the Borderlands series, bursting at the seams with personality, often don't give players space to form meaningful connections with various characters.  When I think about Borderlands 2, which was stuffed to the brim with interesting characters, I don't really reflect on the way those characters changed or engaged with the world in new and interesting ways during our time together.  I don't fondly recall the connection I felt to, say, Lilith, or Roland.  Instead, I find myself thinking of the cool things they did, and then puzzle at how they changed or developed after the closing bars of the game.

It's not that spectacle is bad, or that a spectacle of characters is bad.  It's that there's something to be said for a small number of meaningful character interactions, and that the native space for that, the light-tactical story centric RPG, has been relatively uncurated in recent gaming history.  Now, as these spaces re-emerge, it's clear that the market for these experiences, left largely fallow by Interplay's bankruptcy, never really went away.  It was just separated from its various consumers, hungry, and clamoring for more game.  Now that there's finally a way for these people to communicate directly with the people who make these games, to communicate directly with these people and collectively back them in a heretofore unheard of kind of direct communication, it's only natural that a renaissance of character could emerge.  For these titles, these small-party RPGs, rely almost entirely on their characters to drive their stories forward.  Their struggles become our struggles, and, as such, their departures remove connections that we've forged from our own lives.  Let us hope, then, that the loss of these connections is merely temporary, as it was in the old days, the heydays of the CRPG that we are just now beginning to see a return to.

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.