Halo 3 ODST: The Return of the Narrative

So I finally sat down and worked through Halo 3: ODST on friday night in co-op mode. The ODST stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troops and it is the latest in the Halo series of games. I’ve been playing the Halo series since Halo: Combat evolved came out for the xBox in 2001. Bungie Studios created the game and they had always been one of my favourite studios before they were purchased by Microsoft. I was eager to see what they had created. I wasn’t disappointed with the original game but I’ve been less than impressed with the sequels. ODST tried to do a few things a bit differently though. There was an attempt to weave a side-story into the gameplay in  a way that hasn’t been done in previous games. It seemed to be an attempt to bring in outside narratives that were developed through the Halo book series and the ARG ilovebees, done for the release of Halo 2.

Anyone not familiar with the ad campaign or the ODST game itself can see the live action promotion that builds the back story for one of the main characters in the game.

Using real characters and a cinematic styles similar to Saving Private Ryan was perhaps an attempt to move towards a more realistic game that was less like the Hollywood-style science fiction of the first games in the series. It was certainly a departure from the previous marketing done for the Halo franchise.

The gameplay begins in the year 2552, in the Kenyan city of New Mombasa. The main goal is to fight your way through the city which is full of The Covenant, an alien race who have invaded Earth. You play the role of a rookie soldier who moves through the city, finding fragments of the story of his squad-mates left behind in their equipment. He has become separated from them during the drop from orbit and the flashes of video he finds tells their story in the now deserted landscape of the city.

Another character in the game is the AI that controls the entire city. This AI has been damaged in the attack but still attempts to help the character in two ways. It provides clues and hints that are communicated through traffic signals and signs. It also provides pieces of a side story about a young woman, named Sadie, who is trying to get out of the city before the attack begins. These segments of story come through telephone booths around the city. They contain voice clips, traffic camera and security camera footage. The AI is trying to tell the story so it can explain why The Covenant have come to earth, specifically the Rift Valley part of eastern Africa. This clip shows the AI going through the attack and coming back to life as the ODST drop into the city.

It might seem that a side story within a game is nothing special but ODST has some interesting DNA. There were six novels written in the Halo universe that provide a greater level of depth to the universe and the characters in the game. These novels have received enough critical acclaim and sales that they continue to be published. The other interesting bit of history is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) ilovebees that was created to promote Halo 2 before its release. The story in ilovebees revolved around a shipboard AI that had been damaged and was trying to re-integrate itself. It communicated through hacked websites and telephone lines as it tried to figure out why it had been damaged and why The Covenant was headed to earth. The ilovebees story begins to identify an artifact, buried on Earth, that The Covenant is trying to recover. The story ends with the realization that the artifact is designed to activate the Halo ring worlds located throughout the galaxy. If these are activated they will kill every sentient creature within the galaxy. The end of this story is where the game Halo 2 begins.

This apparently was no accident as Curtis Creamer, the executive producer on Halo 3: ODST tells that they were on a very tight development schedule (article). They were looking for story elements and they thought they could scavenge their earlier efforts in ilovebees to provide a vehicle for that story.

What is interesting is the tension between a game like Halo trying to be an epic and complex science fiction narrative and a fast moving first person shooter/ twitch game at the same time. The reviews so far would indicate that the side story has been received as an hour long distraction that slowed down players from moving through the game even faster. Most regard it as weak story that doesn’t add much to the game play. I think it is likely that most players really haven’t engaged in the Halo franchise for the story. The first copy of Halo sold over 10 million copies while only 100,000 copies of the first novel were sold. The ARG ilovebees was a complex and challenging game that involved solving very difficult puzzles and figuring out the sequence of hundreds of fragments of a radio play before the real story could be put together. It would seem that neither the novel or the ilovebees ARG really appealed to the hardcore gamers that were just looking to engage in another first person shooter that they could dominate and finish as quickly as possible.

This recent attempt by ODST to add in ARG-like elements into the game and build on the larger narrative on the novels was a great idea. I think what was missing was some way to allow those elements to remain separate from actual game play. They essentially forced the game player to deal with those elements even if they weren’t interested. It was critical to actually get through to the end of the game. Perhaps with the time and effort to build these side stories it was considered necessary to force the players to actually consume them. The design decisions may some day come out with a postmortem from the Microsoft development team. Regardless, I hope this will be the start of some consideration to allowing a more in-depth kind of experience to come out of a first-person shooter. If book sales are any indication, that might appeal to only 1% of the players of this kind of game. This might seem like a good argument to never even attempt this kind of design. It might also be a argument that the kinds of players who are interested in more in-depth narrative might actually be attracted to first person shooters rather than just dismissing them as linear, shallow experiences that quickly grow boring.

Whatever does happen next in the Halo franchise it will be interesting to see how much experimentation they are willing to allow. They are driven by profit like any other company but hopefully there will be some room to allow for some of the interactive elements of narrative to grow. The advances in physics engines and graphics rendering have overshadowed most game development so it is time for some of that creative energy to be channeled into creating an interactive narrative that goes beyond the typical cut scenes. Halo 3: ODST has tried and I’d like to see these kinds of attempts at new design approaches continue. Having a full ARG integrated into a first person shooter would be be one of those experiments. Obviously some people at Microsoft are thinking this way or ODST would have been the same disappointing re-mix of Halo that showed up in Halo 2 and Halo 3. A creative approach might take games like Halo 3:ODST to a memorable place where the story holds the player beyond the four hours it apparently takes them to blast through the entire experience.

The New Audience

The Audience

A considerable amount of time and effort are put into understanding the audience of any film. For any commercial film, this is critical to the future survival of a writer, studio and production staff as the ticket sales from the audience will determine its level of success or failure. For a film that is more focused on impacting an audience than the financial returns from ticket sales, there is still a need to engage their audience so the narrative or exposition will actually reach them.

The filmmaker often thinks about their audience in terms of demographic. Their age, their spoken language, their gender, their culture, the multiple factors that define that amorphous group of the potential audience. The new options for presenting a narrative to the audience have added another dimension, engagement.

Measuring the Audience

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), cross-media narratives and trans-media are all names given to very similar kinds of storytelling. All of these design approaches allow a story to be presented across many different types of media (see ARGs). One of the important elements that make them so different is the audience that actively engages in the story as it unravels. This audience needs to be constantly looking for new pieces of the story, solving puzzles and mysteries as they make their way through to the end. When writing and creating these kinds of stories there are some new aspects of this audience that need to be considered. I came across a marketing report that was trying to understand a similar kind of problem (Marketing’s new metric: engagement-Report). The marketing industry is dealing with a serious issue, passive viewers of their marketing messages are becoming increasingly adept at completely ignoring the message entirely.

They came up with three categories of potential customers for brands based on levels on engagement. The categories work well for ARGs as well and are worth considering as you both write and implement any form of narrative where engagement is a component of the production. The three categories are: Passive Participant, Semiactive Participant and Brand Zealot. These categories relate to the level of interaction the audience has with the production you have created. Each of the categories has four attributes: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence. These are all different kinds of audience members that may or may not become part of your production. It depends entirely on the type of story you have created and the way you have designed your production. These categories all have their own consideration.

Passive Participant

Their level of involvement is low, they might only visit a website once or twice a month. The level of interaction is low, they will usually only view any content that is obviously available and they will read comments, made by others, about the ARG production. They are not a huge fan of the ARG but there is enough interest to bring them back to the production. Their level of influence is low, it is unlikely to be bringing others into the storyline. They are not likely to have ever signed-up for any part of the ARG and are likely lurking through the easily accessible content and open discussions forums.

Semiactive Participant

You get to be called semiactive when you actually start engaging in the ARG production. This means you’ve signed up for any lists to get current information and you’ve been active in the player forums.  More than just leaving a few comments, this type of player has actively engaged in the dialogue about how to decipher existing clues, pieces of media or to try to determine what is coming next in the narrative.

Brand Zealot (or, in this case, the Harcore Gamer)

There are going to be avid fans of your ARG (hopefully). These are the ones who will be waiting for each new clue or media fragment and quickly move through the content that you thought would take a week…in about eight hours. They are your more valuable audience member as they will not only be active in moving your narrative forward for the community but they will be recruiting their peers to join in the experience. These types of audience members will often expect extremely challenging puzzles to solve that will move the story forward to the next turning point. They will often report back to a larger community about whether or not the challenges are sufficient to actual warrant more hardcore gamers from getting involved.

The Problem

You can target your narrative and ARG towards any of these groups and hope to gather other groups in on the periphery. The problem is that building an experience for one type of audience will only attract a small number of other types. The hardcore gamers might appreciate the extremely difficult challenges you put in place for them but you will lose almost all of the casual players and most of the semiactive ones.

The Solution

The solution then seems to be a narrative that is complex, multi-layered and can provide a meaningful experience for all audience members. You want to be able to provide a path that will give every potential player an entry point into the story that will encourage them to go all the way to the end. It will be very much like having three different cuts of a film, all aimed at pleasing a different type of audience. More than just footage, an ARG will also need to understand different types of interactivity and challenge as well. There isn’t going to be a director’s bible on how to do this, each new story is going to have to explore how this is going to work.