Halo and Game-based Story-telling

Posted by Ken Rufo on
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 11:39 am

September 22nd saw the arrival of Halo 3: ODST, a game that builds on the story of Halo 3 in new and interesting ways.  Unlike the first three games in the franchise, Halo 3: ODST does not feature Master Chief as its main protagonist.  That cybernetically enhanced super soldier instead gives way to “The Rookie”, a silent new recruit to the ranks of the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, those folks who literally drop into the fight from ships in planetary orbit.  They’re “the best of the best,” of course, but they lack the accoutrements that Halo players are used to using – they have no damage-absorbing and renewable shield, they cannot dual wield weapons, and they cannot run as fast or jump as far.  If they take damage they’ll need to find a health pack in order to heal.  In other words, the ODST soldiers are more mundane than good ol’ Master Chief, more normal.

In the world of video games, especially in the worlds depicted in first person shooters like Halo, normal is actually pretty exceptional.

In general, FPS games come in two flavors: 1) you’re an over-the-top hero, with skills and weapons normal plebs can only dream about or 2) you’re a trained military soldier, typically fighting for the Allies in WWII, which is apparently the favorite time period of 80% of all FPS game designers.  The more fantastical the world, the further it deviates from WWII norms, the more powerful the protagonist becomes.  There are some exceptions here and there (Valve’s Half-Life and to a limited extent Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare), but overall the FPS genre is built around superior skills/technology and a rather adolescent fantasy that the fate of the world rests on your shoulders (aliens will destroy Earth, Hitler will win, demons from Hell will flood into our world, etc.).   While the first three Halo games did much to innovate design expectations for the FPS genre, they did not vary much from this basic narrative formula.

This is what makes the release of ODST so exciting for those of us interested in both the potential of video games as an entertainment medium and the power of interactive story-telling.  ODST tells a very different type of story, one far more character-driven and far less all-or-nothing in its scope.  The Rookie is the central character, but his story takes place after most of the events of the game.  A drop gone bad into New Mombasa, a fictional African metropolis, leaves the Rookie unconscious for six hours, while the other characters in the game – Buck, Mickey, Romeo, and so on) go about trying to figure out why they were sent on the drop in the first place and trying to regroup and escape what has become very hostile territory.  The Rookie, by contrast,  wanders the streets of New Mombasa in the dark of night, trying to carefully search the city for clues regarding what happened in the six hours he was unconscious, all the while trying to avoid too open confrontation with the superior alien forces.  As clues are found, the story of what happened before plays out in a quasi-linear fashion, with the player engaging a playable flashback wherein they step into the shoes of one of the other characters in the story.  The daytime action is more frenetic and intense, more typical of traditional Halo play, and has the rousing and award winning scoring that has made the Halo games famous.  When the flashback ends, the player returns to the night streets of New Mombasa, back in the role of the Rookie, where they must search for more clues.  The score here is dominated by lonely jazzy notes, and the contrast between the different story-telling modes is exceptionally gripping.  By the time the Rookie has pieced together what happened over the last six hours, he has caught up to the action and the game proceeds to its final bits of exploration and a few climactic battles.

In addition, another fascinating detail has been woven into the story.  New Mombasa is run by an AI named Virgil whose coder/curator is father to a girl named Sadie.  As the player explores the streets, they can come across kiosks that store audio and photo files taken by Virgil’s surveillance equipment that tell the story of Sadie’s struggle to survive during the advent of the alien attack.  The story is strangely compelling, made more so by the piecemeal flashbacks and the fact that the player must actively search for the kiosks, thus producing more affective involvement with the Sadie plot.

ODST isn’t a perfect game, but it is a big leap forward in demonstrating the narrative potential of video games in general, and FPS games in particular.  As such, it is well worth exploring for those in the MCDM interested in new forms of digital story-telling.

Bonus bit: Included in the Venn diagrams of geeky goodness are these three circles: those that love Joss Whedon, those that love Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Serenity, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, Castle), and those that love video games.  I sit securely at the intersection of all three groups, so imagine how happy I was to hear some time back that the character of Buck is voiced by Fillion (who is also a big Halo player, and by all accounts a pretty good one, and who, along with other Firefly alums, did some voice work as random soldiers for Halo 3), and that this character (and his quips) are available for the new multiplayer mode Firefight, where you and your friends fight wave after wave of alien forces to see how long you can survive.  There are few things more satisfying than head-shotting grunts while Fillion exclaims: “How do you like me now? and ” Or my personal favorite, upon the arrival of the heavily armored hunters and their deadly cannons, is Fillion’s voice muttering: “Turn around so I can shoot you in the back.”  Now that’s good gaming.

Ken Rufo can be found on XBL under the handle HankFourteen.