Games: Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is not a single game. As its title suggests, it is a collection of games (spoilers throughout this article). They all belong to the first-person shooter genre. Halo: Reach and Halo: ODST do not feature the Master Chief, the protagonist of our story, but they are basically the same kind of game as the rest. All the games in the collection are nice. The controls are solid, the gameplay is engaging, the story is grand, and the music is outstanding.
Halo is set in a science fiction world far into the future. Humanity is warring against space aliens. The original antagonist is a coalition of different species known as the “Covenant”. Though early on we learn about a far greater danger described as the “Flood”. Then, in Halo 4 we are introduced to “The Prometheans” with all the possible conflicts they can make possible.
Humanity is technologically advanced. The culmination of its achievements is a transhumanist programme of supersoldiers known as “Spartans”. They are outfitted with the finest weaponry, their bodies are cybernetically augmented, and they can even have an actual artificial intelligence connected directly to their brain. In short, they are the absolute best warriors among the humans.
Through most of the series we experience in first person the exploits of a certain Spartan known as the Master Chief. We learn that he is not necessarily the greatest of his kind in terms of physical prowess, though he has that intangible quality that lets him rise to the occasion and repeatedly prevail over his enemies.
The Master Chief is a man of few words. Most of the talking is done by his superiors as well as his AI companion known as “Cortana”. As the story unfolds Master Chief and Cortana show signs of mutual feelings of Platonic love. Cortana eventually needs to be rescued and the Master Chief acts accordingly, making for a fine fit to the age-old trope of damsels in distress who are saved by some valiant warrior.
Cortana is not some helpless lass though. She is a strong character with a nuanced story arc. Similarly, the Master Chief gives off the impression of a man who is bitterly defined by the circumstances of his life, has a hardened carapace around his core self, and allows no-one to get emotionally close. These are the kind of people who are empowered by their aloofness and resulting emotional stability, though they also are the ones who do not really relate to anyone. Their strength is their weakness.
Cortana is probably the only one who understands the inner world of the Master Chief, in large part because she is, at times, directly wired to his brain. In a sense, she is less of a robot than the Master Chief because her emotional side is more pronounced. Whereas our hero finds solace in the role of the killing machine that others forced upon him when he was a little boy.
Which brings me to the point of the Spartan programme. It is a clandestine operation of the regime, designed to develop soldiers who can counter any insurgency and keep revolutionaries at bay. The Spartans were not conceived as a noble end to contribute to the betterment of humankind, nor was their unit established in response to the formidable threat initially posed by the Covenant. The Spartans were—and might remain—mere tools in the hands of the bad guys.
Yet herein lies an ancient insight about the world as admixture. Nothing is purely good or bad. It is both good and bad. More importantly, a good deed can have disastrous consequences while even the most horrific event can still produce benign results. We can only understand phenomena in this light when we are not invested in a specific outcome and are thus approaching them dispassionately.
The Spartan programme reflects the unscrupulous nature of the powers that be. It is an abusive project in the service of a nefarious goal. Nevertheless, humanity would not survive the Covenant onslaught without the Spartans, let alone deal with the Flood. Nobody objects to being rescued by the Master Chief, for example, even though he truly is a potential weapon of mass destruction in the hands of tyranny. Each Spartan shall enforce the will of the establishment owning to years of indoctrination. To them it is their duty to protect, even though such is the conditioning of a ruthless apparatus of power.
The state of admixture is everywhere beyond the science fiction setting. It is how our world is. The Iran war, for example, reminds us of the inexhaustible greed of our kind, here expressed through the machinations of the Western empire. Despite its horrors and attendant economic pressures, the ongoing conflict compels us to draw valuable lessons that can help us do something better for our future. If anything, there now is a greater sense of urgency to find solutions to the demand for energy. Those must be genuine alternatives to what worked hitherto. Whatever happens in the Strait of Hormuz, it is not viable that some sovereignist force can hold the rest of the world at ransom.
Understanding the world as admixture does not mean that we offer a blank cheque for abuse, nor that we perform mental gymnastics to beautify—let alone justify—every atrocity imaginable. It simply is a matter of adopting a descriptive outlook, to recognise that one’s normative view of the world is not the world as-is, and then work with the state of affairs as it is made manifest.
Coming back to the Halo universe, the otherwise terrifying prospect of the Flood consuming all life, engenders in members of humanity and the Covenant alike a sense of awareness in each other’s capacity for personhood. The Master Chief is no longer “the demon” in the eyes of his enemies, for example, but a stalwart fighter who epitomises the noble qualities that someone like the Arbiter also represents.
This is not about a mere opportunistic political calculus, where the enemy of my enemy is an ally. It rather is a deeper realisation that the other side of this conflict is, in fact, not mindless and bestial as originally thought. The dynamic between the Master Chief and the Arbiter is one of cautiousness informed by respect. There remains distance due to all the bad blood, yet we can tell how there is hope for reconciliation no matter what has transpired.
Same principle for the transhumanist agenda as such. Many parts of it can make us fearful of technology. I know I do not trust any moneyman with access to my brain and the rest of my body. Though such concerns also inspire us to explore what it means to be human and to become more humanised in the process.
We are forced to look for the positives in our kind beyond the numerous negatives of domestic abuse, murder, serial killing, torture, genocide, and many more. Even if we think of transhumanism as the latent evil of our era, we have to acknowledge how it functions, including inadvertently, as a creative force that at once destroys our negativity about humanity and our romanticised view of humans, while giving us a reason to try our best and to seek the others.
It then follows that we are presented with a mirror, which empowers us to be introspective and honest about our behaviour. It is not some figment of futuristic science that is robotising us, like, say, AI-capable computer chips attached to our body. We have been undergoing robotisation through analog means for decades, if not centuries, through systems of economic coordination that render us little more than cogs in a machine.
Our values have been eroded, as we see everything, including romance, through the prism of money and prestige. The corruption is so deeply rooted that we conflate this with the natural order of things. In the meantime, we have abandoned the lands, extended families, and local communities that served us well for millennia to become mere numbers in the megalopoles of this world, suffering from permanent stress, insecurity, and some elusive dread.
There is so much more to comment on regarding Halo: The Master Chief Collection, but I will leave it here. As you can tell, I am more interested in using the game as a pretext to expound on what I would have written about anyway, than to partake in the fanfare. Make no mistake though, Halo is a remarkable contribution to our culture.