Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (16 page)

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how
Halo
does it.

That’s the basic
Halo
story. It’s not that different from many other blockbuster video games. As veteran game developer Trent Polack puts it, “To look at the majority of games today, one might think that gamers care only about saving the world.” He would know: some of Polack’s previous games have asked players to save the galaxy from malevolent aliens (
Galactic Civilizations II
), save the universe from evil deities (
Demigod
), and save the world from marauding Titans (
Elemental: War of Magic
).

Why
are
so many games about saving the world? In an industry article about the rise of “epic scale” narratives in video games, Polack suggests, “When games give players the epic scope of saving the galaxy, destroying some reawakened ancient evil, or any other classical portrayal of good versus evil on a grand scale, they’re fulfilling gamers’ power fantasies.”
¹³

I agree with Polack, but it’s important that we be clear on exactly what
kind
of power fantasy is being fulfilled by these save-the-world stories.

Any video game that features a slew of high-powered weapons and game-play that consists largely of shooting and blowing things up is, at one level, about the aesthetic pleasures of destruction and the positive feelings we get from exerting control over a situation.
¹⁴
This is true of any shooter game on the market today. But we don’t need an epic story about saving the world to get those pleasures. We can get them quite effectively, and more efficiently, from a simple, plotless game like Atari’s
Breakout
. Games that come with epic, save-the-world narratives are using them to help players get a taste of a different kind of power. It’s the power to act with meaning: to do something that matters in a bigger picture. The story is the bigger picture; the player’s actions are what matters.

As Polack explains, “Story sets the stage for meaning. It frames the player’s actions. We, as designers, are not telling, we’re not showing, we’re informing the
doing
—the actions that players engage in and the feats they undergo.” These feats make up the player’s story, and the story is ultimately what has meaning.

Not every game feels like a larger cause. For a game to feel like a
cause
, two things need to happen. First, the game’s story needs to become a
collective context
for action—shared by other players, not just an individual experience. That’s why truly epic games are always attached to large, online player communities—hundreds of thousands or millions of players acting in the same context together, and talking to each other on forums and wikis about the actions they’re taking. And second, the actions that players take inside the collective context need to feel like
service:
every effort by one player must ultimately benefit all the other players. In other words, every individual act of gameplay has to eventually add up to something bigger.

Halo
is probably the best game in the world at turning a story into a collective context and making personal achievement feel like service.

Like many other blockbuster video games,
Halo
has extensive online community features: discussion forums, wikis, and file sharing (so that players can upload and share videos of their finest gameplay moments). But Bungie and Xbox have taken it much further than these traditional context-building tools. They’ve given players groundbreaking tools for tracking the magnitude of their collective effort and unprecedented opportunities to reflect on the epic scale of their collective service.

Every
Halo
player has their own story of making a difference, and it’s documented online in their “personal service record.” It’s an exhaustive record and analysis of their individual contributions to the
Halo
community and to the Great War effort—or as Bungie calls it, “Your entire
Halo
career.”

The service record is stored on the official Bungie website, and it’s fully viewable by other players. It lists all the campaign levels you’ve completed, the medals you’ve earned, and the achievements you’ve unlocked. It also includes a minute-by-minute, play-by-play breakdown of
every single
Halo
level or match you’ve ever played online
. For many
Halo
players, that means thousands of games over the past six years—ever since the
Halo
series first went online in 2004—all laid out and perfectly documented in one place.

And it’s more than just statistics. There are data visualizations of every possible kind: interactive charts, graphs, heat maps. They help you learn about your own strengths and weaknesses: where you make the most mistakes, and where you consistently score your biggest victories; which weapons you’re most proficient with, and which you’re weakest with; even which teammates help you play better, and which don’t.

Thanks to Bungie’s exhaustive data collection and sharing, everything you do in
Halo
adds up to something bigger: a multiyear history of your own personal service to the Great War.

But it’s not just your history—it’s much bigger than that. You’re contributing to the Great War effort alongside millions of other players, who also have service records online. And
service
really is a crucial concept here. A personal service record isn’t just a profile. It’s a history of a player’s contributions to a larger organization. The fact that your profile is called a “service record” is a constant reminder. When you play
Halo
online, rack up kills, and accomplish your missions, you’re
contributing
. You’re actively creating new moments in the history of the Great War.
¹⁵

The moments all add up. The millions of individual personal service records taken together tell the real story of
Halo
, a collective history of the Great War. They connect all the individual gamers into a community, a network of people fighting for the same cause. And the unprecedented scale of data collected and shared in these service records underscores just how epic the players’ collective story is. Bungie recently announced to players that its personal-service-record servers handled more than 1.4
quadrillion
bytes of data requests from players in the past nine months. That’s 1.4 petabytes in computer science terms.

To put that number in perspective, experts have estimated that the entire written works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, adds up to about 50 petabytes of data.
¹⁶
Halo
players aren’t quite there yet—but it’s not a bad start, considering that they’ve been playing together online for only six short years, compared to all of recorded human history.

One of the best examples of innovative collective context building is the
Halo
Museum of Humanity, an online museum that purports to be from the twenty-seventh century, dedicated to “all who fought bravely in the Great War.” Of course, it’s not a real museum; it was developed by the Xbox marketing group to build a more meaningful context for
Halo 3
.

The museum features a series of videos done in the classic style of Ken Burns’
Civil War
series: interviews with Great War veterans and historians, images from Covenant battles, all set to a hymnal score. As one blogger wrote, “The videos in the
Halo
Museum of Humanity seem like they could have been pulled straight from The History Channel.... It’s nice to see video game lore treated with this kind of reverence.”
¹⁷

Reverence—the expression of profound awe, respect and love, or veneration—is usually an emotion we reserve for very big, very serious things. But that was precisely the point of the
Halo
Museum of Humanity: to acknowledge how seriously
Halo
players take their favorite game, and to inspire the kind of epic emotions that have always been the best part of playing it.

It’s worked. The video series packs a real emotional wallop, despite the fact that, in the words of one player, “it’s meant to honor heroes that never existed.”
¹⁸
Brian Crecente, a leading games journalist, wrote, “It left me with chills.”
¹⁹
And online forums and blogs were full of comments expressing heart-felt emotion. One player put it best when he wrote, “Really poignant. They’ve made something real out of fiction.”
²⁰

It’s not that the museum is such a believable artifact from the future. It’s that the
emotions
it provokes are believable. The online Museum of Humanity is a place to reflect on the extreme scale of the
Halo
experience: the years of service, the millions of players involved. The Great War isn’t real, but you really do feel awe when you think about the scale of the effort so many different people have made to fight it.

In the end, as one player sums it up, “
Halo
proves that you can have a shooter game with a story that really means something. It draws you in and makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger.”
²¹

But
Halo
isn’t just a bigger story. It’s also a bigger environment—and this brings us to our next strategy for connecting players to something bigger: built epic environments, or highly immersive spaces that are intentionally designed to bring out the best in us.

An epic environment is a space that, by virtue of its extreme scale, provokes a profound sense of awe and wonder.

There are plenty of natural epic environments in the world: Mount Everest, the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, the Great Barrier Reef, for example. These spaces humble us; they remind us of the power and grandeur of nature, and make us feel small by comparison.

A
built
epic environment is different: it’s not the work of nature, but rather a feat of design and engineering. It’s a
human
accomplishment. And that makes it both humbling and empowering at the same time. It makes us feel smaller as individuals, but it also makes us feel capable of much bigger things, together. That’s because a built epic environment—like the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, or Machu Picchu—is the result of extreme-scale collaboration. It’s proof of the extraordinary scale of things humans can accomplish together.

Halo 3
is, without a doubt, such an environment.

The game consists of thirty-four different playing environments spanning more than two hundred thousand light-years of virtual space. From one level to the next, you might find yourself traveling from the crowded market city of Voi, Kenya, to the Ark, a desert far, far beyond the limits of our own Milky Way galaxy.

It’s not just how big the
Halo
playing field is; it’s also how diverse and carefully rendered the environments are. As Sam Leith observes, “The building of a game like
Halo 3
is a work of electronic engineering comparable in scale to the building of a medieval cathedral.” It took Bungie three years to craft this gaming cathedral, with a team of more than 250 artists, designers, writers, programmers, and engineers collaborating together. “You get a sense of the scale and intricacy of the task,” Leith continues, “by considering the sound effects alone: The game contains 54,000 pieces of audio and 40,000 lines of dialogue. There are 2,700 different noises for footsteps alone, depending on whose foot is stepping on what.”
²²

And that’s what players are appreciating when they get goose bumps from
Halo
: the unprecedented achievement it represents as a work of computer design and engineering. Gamers aren’t so much in awe of the environment itself as they are in awe of the work and dedication and vision required to create it. In this regard,
Halo
players join a long tradition in human culture of feeling awe, wonder, and gratitude toward the builders of epic environments.

 

 

THE VERY FIRST
epic environments were constructed more than eleven thousand years ago, during the Neolithic period, or the New Stone Age. In other words, six thousand years before humans first used the written word, they were already building physical spaces to inspire awe and cooperation.

The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.

In comparison with other stone houses, tombs, and temples from the same period and location, this building was constructed on an extreme scale: it was much,
much
bigger, taller, and more formidable in its design than anything archaeologists had seen before at the time of its discovery. One archaeologist on the scene described it as “a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity’s first ‘cathedral on a hill.’”
²³

And it wasn’t just the scale of the building—it was its particular winding design. The Gobekli Tepe features an intricate series of passageways that would lead visitors through the dark to a cross-shaped inner sanctum, almost like a labyrinth. This particular architecture seems designed intentionally to trigger interest and curiosity, alongside a kind of trembling wonder. What would be around the next corner? Where would the path take them? They would need to hold on to other visitors for support, feeling their way through the darkness.