Right-Wing Values in the Halo Series

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My first experience with Halo was in my pre-teen years, in 2010 or 2011, when I received an Xbox360 for Christmas. I bought Halo: Reach in a Boxing Day sale on the advice of a friend. We played through the entire game in splitscreen. It remains one of my fondest experiences of those years. I was struck by its moral outlook, which was as alien to the Leftist media that I was used to as any of the enemies in the game are to humanity.

This stood in contrast in my young mind with the film Avatar ^[2], which had been released around the same time. Notable only for its enormous budget and flashy digital effects, Avatar drew a massive audience that promptly forgot the main character’s name within a week. This unremarkable epic’s outlook is Leftism at its purest. Humanity colonizes an alien planet in pursuit of rare minerals that is home to a technologically primitive, yet morally pure race of superior indigenes who live in a beautiful state of harmony with nature. To better understand these noble savages, human anthropologists transfer themselves into indigenous bodies that they artificially create. As conflict between the human colonists and the indigenes escalates, the protagonists go entirely native and help drive their own kith and kin from the planet, like those South American Jesuits who led Indios against the Spanish.

The moral universe of Halo: Reach lies to the right of even the most unironic reading of Starship Troopers ^[3]. As a player you control Noble Six, the newest addition to a squad of supersoldiers known as “Spartans” who are raised from childhood and enhanced via gene therapy to fight for humanity’s future. In the first mission, Noble Team discovers that the Covenant, a multicultural alien theocracy bent on humanity’s extermination, has found Reach. You win the next battle and drive the Covenant from a military research base. Dr. Halsey, the leader of military intelligence, explains that the Covenant worship the relics of an ancient, spacefaring civilization. She believes that the relic they are hunting for on Reach could change the course of the war in humanity favor.

You scout a dark zone and discover that an entire invasion force has already landed. Human forces counterattack and successfully disable the Covenant’s forcefield to open the way for an orbital bombardment, but the human spaceship fires only a single shot before a massive Covenant ship warps in and destroys it. Demoralized but undeterred, two members of Noble Team land on the enemy ship with a bomb, but its timer fails. Your comrade hands you his dog tags, tells you to “make it count,” activates the bomb manually, and destroys the ship as you escape. Victory seems at hand for a brief few seconds — before an entire Covenant fleet warps into view.

Back on the surface, the inevitability of defeat sets in. You arrive in a metropolis under attack. The aliens slaughter soldiers and civilians indiscriminately. You fight your way through the city to missile batteries in order to hold off an enemy ship long enough for an evacuation. You then reunite with Noble Team and destroy jammers throughout the city, and come to terms with the destruction and loss. Your commander wishes that he had been the one who detonated the bomb on the Covenant ship, so that he could have died thinking that he had saved the planet. The Covenant destroys the city and a sniper kills a second team member as you flee into a bunker.

You emerge days later, and a burning city greets you. New orders send you back to the military research base where you first fought off the Covenant, apparently to scuttle it. Dr. Halsey again greets you there and orders you to defend her lab. She has found the wonder weapon that she had hoped for. You hold off the enemy long enough for her to make the device portable, and reveals a holographic artificial intelligence girl. This is the only hope to turn the tide, and is the true reason behind the defense of Reach. The planet could never have held otherwise; it was all to buy time for this.

The AI chooses you to carry it, and you have to fight one final mission in order to reach the evacuation ship. One Noble Team soldier escorts Dr. Halsey, while the remaining three take an aircraft to the space dock. Covenant fighters force you to take the rest of the journey on foot, while your wounded commander carries out a kamikaze attack to help clear the way. You fight off ground troops at the dock, then take control of an anti-aircraft gun as enemy ships try to stop the evacuation. The only other remaining member of Noble Team dies in a suicidal attack in order to buy you time. As the ship takes off, you throw the AI to the Captain, but refuse to climb aboard, covering the ship’s escape with the AA gun.

The Covenant overrun and then destroy the planet. You kill as many waves of enemies as possible before they overwhelm you. It only took weeks for the Covenant to reduce the lush planet to an uninhabitable dustbowl.

A final cutscene shows your helmet on a green, newly re-terraformed Reach. Dr. Halsey explains that your sacrifice brought her plan to fruition, and humanity eventually overcame the Covenant.

The moral universe of Halo: Reach is that of a kamikaze pilot. Collective survival is all that matters. Life must be won through the individual heroism of literal superhumans. Hundreds of millions, soldiers and civilians alike, must be sacrificed to buy time for a single wonder weapon. Apart from a little diversity, which is inoffensive by today’s standards, Halo: Reach is to the right of Triumph of the Will. At no point are any of these themes subverted or even questioned. Nothing is satirical or ironic. As the story progresses and the situation grows ever direr, the characters respond with ever-greater heroism and sacrifice. Demoralization is answered with suicide attacks. Halo: Reach is therefore the story of how one genius, along with a team of supersoldiers who are willing to die for her plan, save humanity from annihilation.

The mono-species and honorable human forces stand in contrast with the Covenant’s multi-species rabble. Ordinary human soldiers ally with Noble Team and embody the same heroism and determination as the Spartans. The lowest of the Covenant species, a race of mistreated slave soldiers called “grunts,” scream in terror and flee battles for comic relief. The gameplay encourages the player to beat them to death to save ammo. Duplicitous “jackals” — weak, yet agile dinosaurian aliens — cower behind shields. They sometimes expose their hands, and when they are hit they recoil in pain and drop their defenses. Ape-like “brutes” slaughter civilians; they are resilient, but easily outsmarted. Only the agile and martial “elites,” a warrior species at the top of the Covenant hierarchy, and the well-armored and -armed “hunters” earn the player’s respect; the rest are deliberately intended as nothing more than bullet fodder.

Though humanity fights for racial survival, the Covenant likewise stands in ideological contrast with the human authorities. The humans practice species-wide nationalism, and the game’s moral compass always points to whatever is good for humanity. That anything could be more important than the survival of the species is unthinkable. A universalist false religion as well as lies about salvation drive the Covenant, and their appearance and habits reflect this. The “grunts” are nasty little weaklings hopped up on drugs. Covenant weapons cannot be reloaded; they evidently expect their soldiers to die before they run out of ammo. Both sides encourage self-sacrifice, but for contradictory reasons: humanity so that the species might live, the Covenant so that they might reach paradise after death. Humanity’s secular, monistic outlook leads them to embrace gene therapy and seek strength through technology, while the dualistic Covenant sees the human supersoldiers as demons and treats technology with superstitious reverence.

Halo: Reach is a prequel, and I only played the previously-released installments in the series a decade later, after the remastered versions came out on Steam. They never fully embody Halo: Reach’s kamikaze mindset, and their stories are more complicated, but they expand on other themes. A sickly species of worm-tongued priests called “prophets” lead the Covenant, again contrasting with humanity’s survival-based morality and accompanying values of health and strength. The “prophets” purge the “elites” in the second game, fearful that their virtues make them too difficult to control, and replace them with the more slavish “brutes.” The ancient artifacts that they worship and believe will deliver them to paradise are in truth a mechanism for the galactic-wide genocide of all intelligent life, which was used as a last resort in ancient times against a plague. The Covenant is thus a suicide cult. The feeble “prophets” seek salvation due of their resentment of the universe, while a muscular humanity revels in the world and its struggles. The subtext of the Halo series, conveyed more through the gameplay than words, is thus that to kill aliens is great fun, and at a deeper level that there is meaning and purpose in struggle.

Halo Infinite is the best of the series since Halo: Reach. I remember almost nothing of Halo 4 and have not played Halo 5. The open world beats Far Cry at its own formula, and the co-op is a blast. The freshly-zoomerised gameplay, complete with a zipline, agrees with my attention deficit disorder far more than the slow-paced combat of the old games. But the story feels like a downgrade.

Halo: Reach aside, the stories are always a bit complicated. The narration is excellent, and is easily followed in-game, but defies a pithy synopsis. Halo Infinite is often difficult to follow, though superficially straightforward. Master Chief, the player’s supersoldier, crashes on a ringworld alongside other human forces and must fight to save them from a group of ex-Covenant mercenaries called the Banished and their powerful ally, a mysterious alien woman from a previously unknown species called “the Harbinger.” Her people are trapped in the ringworld, and she is seeking to free them. Everything beyond this confused me. Who are the Banished? Why are they fighting humanity? What are their intentions with the ringworld? Why aren’t the Harbinger’s species free? Where are the other human forces? I went to the wiki for answers and concluded that one would have to study Halo lore as though it were an academic discipline in order to understand it. Halo: Reach was never so confusing, and everything makes sense even for a player who has never heard of Halo before. Halo Infinite’s gameplay is for zoomers, but the story will confuse them even more than I.

More tedious than the plot is the melodrama. Halo never lacked pathos, but the destruction we usually see portrayed in science fiction nowadays is so over the top that perhaps scenes of cities vaporized and turned into glass and fallen heroes no longer cut it; we should rather feel sorry for ourselves. Master Chief has a new sidekick, an everyman civilian contractor pilot who spends most of the game whining and wallowing in self-pity. In half of the cutscenes, Master Chief gives him emotional support.

The worldview of Halo nevertheless remains heroic. The civilian pilot eventually learns the error of his ways and comes to share Master Chief’s embrace of danger. I still prefer the older Halo, however. Halo: Reach had a story that could only be told back when video games slipped under the radar of our cultural hall monitors. No sensitivity reader would ever allow something so out of synch with orthodoxy to pass nowadays. I doubt that there is a single studio that could, or would, tell a story like this today. Only heroism with the hard edges sanded down by melodrama gets through. And that is a shame.

Halo: Reach is memorable, far more so than Avatar or any other contemporary Leftist slop. It certainly impacted my young mind. My last playthrough was a few years ago, yet I still remember the lines by heart. A good story stands the test of time. I doubt that any game from our present era will.