Why Fight a Losing Battle, and other important questions raised by Halo

Last week, I was gifted with a copy of Halo: Reach, the latest (and, allegedly, final) game in that famous series. I was giving a friend the rundown at Bible study the other night, mostly going on and on about the fantastic gameplay but also setting the scene of the game. Chronologically, it's the first game in the series, ending where the original Halo begins. For those unfamiliar, Halo begins with your character receiving the news that he is the last surviving member of the Spartan army (the Special Forces of the future), the rest of it having been wiped out in a surprise attack on Planet Reach by the evil Covenant forces - in other words, Halo: Reach is about playing through the campaign in which you and all your mates are systematically dispatched by rampaging aliens. And my friend Greg made one of those laughy-frowny expressions and said, "why would anyone want to play a game that you know is going to end in everyone dying?"

Clearly, Greg is not a Halo afficionado. Those people need no story-based reasons to play Halo, and developer Bungie knows it, having introduced (with Reach) daily and weekly challenges over Xbox Live for both single- and multiplayer modes. I highly doubt a game with such a storyline would sell much if it were a stand-alone title, or the first released in the series. There are many excellent and interesting reasons why Halo has attracted a fiercely devoted fan base on an unprecedented scale, which I will not get into at this time as my mother-in-law glazes over every time I talk shop on video games, and she constitutes one-third of my regular readership. And Greg unsuspectingly posed a question that is important on other levels (no pun intended).

The Halo trilogy and its stand-alone offspring, Halo 3: ODST, are all about victory. Throughout the trilogy, even though the Master Chief is the last of his army, there's no real sense of grief or desperation about it. The trilogy's tone isn't "oh crap, I'm the last Spartan and all the Marines (and humanity) are depending on me", but rather "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum." It's a series with a story and atmosphere of victory. Similarly, ODST is about a squad getting stuck behind Covenant lines and escaping, while causing plenty of mayhem to the enemy and retrieving crucial intelligence along the way. You can't pass the game without getting everyone to safety, gaining a high-level Covenant defector, and seeing one of the characters win back his ex-wife. I don't think it's possible for a shooter to be more feel-good-rah-rah-victorious than ODST.

In summary, every Halo game made before Reach is about getting the win, and getting the win isn't just what gamers want, it's what people in general want. I feel safe assuming that sacrificing oneself to ensure someone else's victory is not a common fantasy or daydream. A lot of people don't even like games in which you have to help other characters sacrifice themselves to get the victory, because then you're not the hero - that was the major complaint about the fantastic The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. But that's what Reach is about: upon realizing that the battle is lost, you and your squad go all out and eventually give your lives so that someone else can win the war. Two-thirds of the way through, the story shifts from planetary defense to data retrieval, making sure that a critical computer program gets off-world to safety, and that program turns out to be the one essential for victory at the end of Halo 3. You and your squad give the hope of victory to everyone else. But none of you make it off Reach, dead or alive.

So why play, from a purely story-based POV? Well...I can't rightly say, in a general assumptive sense. There is something very poignant about helping ensure the war is won, rather than winning it myself. Speaking only for myself, I don't mind (and, in fact, rather like) games with goals like Reach and Oblivion, and I suspect a large part of that has to do with theology. The concept of fighting a losing battle is a strange one for a Christian, since an integral idea/truth of Christianity is the hope of the war already won, the irreversible triumph over evil and death incurred by the Resurrection. But there are many battles to be fought along the way, and we don't win them all by a long stretch, and anyways, we are not the heroes of the story. We don't barrel through life slaying all obstacles by the power of our own awesomeness to win the day. We are meant to and pledge to live not as heroes, but as champions. There's nothing poor or bad about playing a supporting role. And the idea of a sacrifice to keep hope alive, like the one you make in Reach, is not necessarily a pleasant idea...but it is beautiful.

So that's why I appreciate stories like Halo: Reach and others, aside from all the glorious technical/gameplay/etc. things that make the Halo series the only shooters I really enjoy. That is why I don't object to taking part in this particular losing battle.