With all the features that Halo 3 has to offer, does it actually have anything new that will secure it's place in gaming history or is it all sales figures and hype? I think at least one feature will have changed gaming for now and years to come. Theater anyone?
Odds are that if you are reading this you have either already played Halo 3, or you have read reviews about how awesome it is, so I’m not going to bore you with details on gameplay that you have already experienced or at least heard described. I’ll just say that every good thing that I read about Halo 3 has turned out to be true and then some. Personally, I think this game is awesome, and I do not regret the money I spent to get it and the console. What I would like to delve into is the reason I think that, years from now, Halo 3 will be remembered as an incredibly progressive title that ushered in a new era of video gaming.
I don’t think it will be remembered because of its engaging campaign, storytelling, explosive gameplay, graphical prowess, or even it’s map editing capability. None of these items are really “new” and therefore not groundbreaking or historically significant. Don’t get me wrong, Halo 3 executes all of these items at a very high level and taken together they make the game a true top tier title, but there have been other games, even from the previous generation, that incorporated all of these things just as well. (I’m thinking of Far Cry, but I’m sure you could come up with your own examples) Halo 3 pushes each of these elements forward, but the improvements are incremental rather than revolutionary.
All that being said, I do think that Halo 3 will be remembered as a landmark moment in gaming long after the graphics start to look dated and the story has gone stale. The feature responsible for this historical importance is what Bungie is calling the “Theater”. It may seem like being able to watch your games and move the camera around is just kind of “cool” or “neat”, but that doesn’t even begin to describe how this feature could change the face of video gaming.
Before I go any farther I have to rewind a bit to last year. I was intrigued when DirecTV announced that they were going to be televising a gaming championship series, particularly because they were going to include Halo 2. I set up my TiVo to make sure I didn’t miss the broadcast (which turned out to be unneeded because they reran that program for months) and then later sat down with a good cold drink and some snacks to watch the carnage. I was thinking “this is going to be AWESOME!”, but alas it wasn’t. It was boring as all hell. I love video games, and I love Halo 2. Why wasn’t it fun to watch them on TV? It didn’t take long for me to develop a theory on this and expound it at length to a buddy of mine here on 2old2play. Here is the *condensed* version:
Televised video gaming is a lame duck that will never fly so long as watching people play is less compelling that ACTUALLY PLAYING YOURSELF. Think about it: you are already sitting in front of your TV, would you rather watch some goober play or would you rather flick a switch and get your own game on. The TV coverage would have to be damned compelling to keep you from doing that and currently, watching other people play is extremely boring. I believe the main reason for this is that there is no way to tell from watching the action why one player or team is beating another. This is largely a problem of perspective. You can’t tell what is going on in a Halo match from the first person perspective. Think about trying to watch an entire football game using ONLY helmet cameras. Even if they cut between the QB view and the receiver view and the DB view, you STILL wouldn’t be able to get a true picture of what is happening on the field. Knowing what happened isn’t nearly as important to entertainment as being able to see why it happened. You have to have an independent camera that can give you wide shots, reverse angles, slow-mo, instant replay, etc. in order to make enjoying the game accessible to a wide audience. Maybe if you actually spent years playing football you would be able to interpret a first-person only perspective, but that audience is rather small and wouldn’t be able to support the multi-billion dollar football industry.
So, obviously Halo 3 has began to solved this problem in a new and interesting way. Every game is recorded and can be played back, analyzed, paused, and viewed from absolutely ANY angle. I damn near wet myself when I discovered that I could freeze the action and still swing the camera around "matrix-style". The camera controls go far beyond anything that is possible in “real life”, as well they should. In the real world a camera man is a genuine physical obstacle that can interfere with the game, and you can only have so many cameras running at one time. The virtual world has no such barriers and you can put your camera anywhere, at any angle without changing the match at all. And this is what is going to put and keep Halo 3 on television, and soon.
I have likened the coming Halo 3 televised gaming revolution to what happened with poker a few years ago. I’m willing to bet that 10 years ago very few people in this country had ever watched a televised poker game, and most of them wouldn’t have had a clue how to play Texas Hold’em. But now everybody has seen it, and damn near everybody could at least tell you the rules. What happened? Poker is not new by any means. The “World Series of Poker” has been around for decades, and many of the tourneys were actually recorded, but outside of a relatively small group of poker fanatics, nobody gave a rip, so nobody watched. The change came with the use of the lipstick camera.
Small cameras were mounted in the edge of the poker tables so that every hand that was dealt was recorded and could be analyzed later. This made poker much more interesting to watch. Before this single, simple improvement there was very little way for anyone to know what was happening. On many hands you would see cards dealt out, then bids were made and then people folded and one guy collected the chips, but you hardly ever saw what the cards were. There aren’t nearly as many “show downs” as you might think, so most hands were just a complete mystery. Poker players didn’t talk about their hands after a game because they either couldn’t remember what they had and when, or they simply didn’t want to give away any of their secrets. The cameras changed all of that. Once all of the cards being dealt out were known, the coverage became much more engaging. You could know who was bluffing and who had the nuts. Commentators could discuss the odds and tell you what cards were needed for each player to secure victory. Poker became accessible to non-poker-players and that is a major part of what made it the huge industry it is today.
I believe that Halo 3 is on the verge of a similar break out moment, and once again it will be because of the cameras. When you are able to show a match from the third person perspective and add insightful commentary about the strategies and tactics involved, you can create a televised package that will grab the interest of more casual gamers and even non-gamers. As evidence, I submit my wife’s recent observation of my Halo 3 gaming. While I was playing the match from first-person perspective she kept saying things like “I don’t know how you can play this” and “How do you know what is going on?” But then I jumped into a Banshee on Sandpit and the perspective shifted to third-person. I flew up to where she could see the whole map and she was stunned. “Wow, that does look a lot better.” She could see my buddies BatmanKM and Ledbetter fighting it out far below on brute choppers and actually tell what was going on. Now, I don’t believe that my wife would actually watch televised video gaming, but her reaction indicates to me that my theory on the perspective thing isn’t complete bullshit.
I don’t think you are going to see live coverage of Halo 3 matches. I really think it is going to be just like poker. The games will take place, all of the action will be recorded, and then commentary will be added later after the matches have been analyzed and the film edited to best convey the action. All of the fluff will be trimmed out and you will just see the greatest hits and most important moments, cut together for maximum impact. I’ve already seen some good Halo 3 videos from the amateur community and I can only imagine what professional video editors will be able to do with infinite camera angles. Add in some thumping music, microphones on the players to pick up communication, and expert color commentary from respected Halo gamers (not from the lame ass morons that DirecTV was using) and you have the makings of something that is highly watchable.
At first there may be some backlash among some of the pro players to displaying their strategies on the world stage. Right now on Halo 3, if you play a match and get completely destroyed you can immediately play it back and check out the opposing team’s strategy. You can see exactly where every single person went, what weapons they used, where they were sniping you from, etc. This was never possible before, and no doubt some players are going to feel like their secret tactics are no longer safe. Again, this already happened in the poker world and certainly in football and other major sports. For decades the only way for someone to know what cards you had was to call you out. Now your opponents can just turn on the TV and study your every move. No more secrets. But the initial pushback on recording cards was dropped once the prize money started to go through the roof because of the game’s increased popularity. I’m pretty sure the same thing will happen with Halo 3. Once tourneys start getting big TV coverage and large dollar amounts start getting tossed around, nobody is going to care who looks at their game footage. After all, it’s the same for everyone who plays and that makes it fair. Well… kinda.
It's is possible that the recorded game feature will cause some of the Halo 3 pro players to stop playing games with strangers outside of tournament settings, or at the very least they will play with alternate gamer tags that hide their identities. If you want to work up secret strategies that will crush your competition you will have to practice only with your teammates or make sure your opponents don’t know who you are. Otherwise they might pull a Bill Belichick on you and all of your moves will be known before the match begins. Matchmaking is no longer the place to practice your tournament tactics.
So there you have it: my take on why Halo 3 will be remembered for decades after this. It just may be the vehicle that brings televised video gaming to the masses. And that is going to start putting money into Microsoft’s coffers in a whole new way. In the future, top tier games will have to be developed with TV coverage in mind if they really want to pull in the big bucks. The potential for huge revenues in that arena just can’t be ignored. The merchandising, the broadcast rights, the product tie-ins and advertising, all of that stuff is big, big, big money and will turn great games like Halo 3 from multi-million dollar properties into multi-billion dollar monoliths. And it will all be because the visionaries at Bungie added a truly “next-gen” feature to a game that was already a must-buy title without it. The folks running that game house are some smart cookies, and they are going for the brass ring. I have no doubt that when they were developing the Theater feature that they were envisioning everything I have laid out here and more.
It won’t happen overnight of course, but it is going to happen soon. One day you are going to turn on your television and see “Monday Night Halo”. It may be Halo 4 or 5 by that time, but mark my words, that day is no longer a possibility, it is a stone cold certainty.
You just watch.
I know I will.
