No Story for You!
Halo 3 for the Xbox360 comes out in about two weeks, and it will come out to much fanfare. Not only is it the continuation of a series that basically defined the Xbox itself, but it promises further innovation in both the first-person shooter genre (previously the bread and butter of PC gaming) and online co-op play.
But here’s the part I find really interesting. Halo 1 and 2 tell a continuing story, and part two ended with the video game equivalent of a television season finale cliffhanger. This actually pissed off a lot of people at the time, because A.) games rarely do this, tending to be fairly complete narrative experiences and B.) unlike a television season which will be back in eight or nine months, it can take years to develop the next game installment. But since Halo 2 game and went, the Xbox has died and been replaced by the graphical powerhouse and price tag buster that is the Xbox 360. Many people have not made the leap to the next gen system, I’d suspect mainly because of the huge price tag (this has lead in part to the current domination of the lower priced Wii).
So we have a situation where the millions left hanging at the end of Halo 2 many years ago will not get to see or experience the next part of the story. Sure games in a series make the leap to the next iteration of the game system all the time. But usually each game is self-contained, so it’s not a big deal. Halo 2 had a narrative cliffhanger. Halo 2 wanted you to come back to finish the story. And a good chunk of those people won’t be coming back (for now, at least).
I am hard pressed to think of any other genre or narrative experience is so directly affected by access issues. It’s like if all the Harry Potter books had come out in traditional, book form, but then the final chapter is printed solely on golden paper that only a few people would be willing to shell out for.
Of course, there’s a reason behind it all. Xbox360 sales will certainly spike when Halo3 comes out in a few weeks. Still, I think this is all very interesting from the perspective of video games as a narrative genre.
Comments
Interesting, yes, but I don't know...
about the price thing- I did some research (Wikipedia, which is about as much as I'm going to invest in a blog post) and found that both the Xbox and the Xbox core debuted at $300. I'm not going to check out the price shifts since then, but I have a few thoughts to dispute the idea that access questions are so simple (I know you've thought of these too, but since we've assumed roles in this discussion I'll proceed as my role dictates):
Proceeding with My Role Too :)
Wikipedia is our friend, don't ever forget it. Yes, good point that the Xbox 1 was certainly the high-end system price wise, so it does seem likely that the people who've played Halo 1 & 2 are more likely to have the expendable cash to buy the Xbox360. Touche (and lord was i pissed about needing to buy the DVD remote seperately for like . . . I think 20 bucks).
I do take issue with the idea of the Xbox360 being comparively affordable when placed up against the PS3. Just because there's a system out there that is more expensive does not necessarily make the Xbox 360 a beacon of affordability. Say they changed English 106 to have 200 students, like some of the other general ed classes (a nightmare, yes.) The administration sees the error of its ways and lowers the max student cap to 100. Yes, I'm glad to not be reading 200 student papers anymore . . . but I'm still reading 100!
And no, video games have never been a level playing field, which is important for us to remember. Although it's interesting, per our class talk on day one, that more lower economic families will dish out for a game system over a home computer. They might not see any long term use for the computer, while the game system will shut up the kids instantly and potentially for a long time. Although the unlevel field is interesting, I'm more interested in this from a narrative perspctive (someone with better class and race credientials than me can take up the cause of access on this one). My point was that no other medium's users would even tolerate the potential that they might not get to experience the next sequential part of a narrative. The fact that many people who'd lilke to experience Halo 3 will still not get to has some interesting ramifications for how we think about and define sequential narrative.
But still...
nothing is ever really free- even kids who want to read the Harry Potter books (speaking of the next sequential part of the narrative) and can't afford the hardcover have to wait for paperback (just as Halo fans have to wait for the 360 to lower in price) or the library to carry it (which might take forever).
You know what's funny, though, is how the "no free lunch" operates in spheres of our lives that we don't think about. It may seem unique to Halo 3, how the next chapter will exist but is not accessible to all, or is accessible but only with sacrifices, but really all the things that bring us joy have conditions that bring them into possibility. Think about the conditionality of alcohol (which, bizarrely, is what comes to mind when I think of video game accessibility): when you decide whether to drink or not, you might consider whether the intoxication will lead to bad judgement calls. That's a gamble. But then, it's not even that simple, because it might not lead to bad judgement calls tonight, but what about being hung over tomorrow? And then the chemicals stay in your system for weeks, so how should that affect your choice? Those things are complicated enough, and might constitute the analogous "sequential narrative" level of alcohol, but it's not even THAT simple- you have to be able to GET the alcohol, and know how it will affect your system; will tonight be a drunk-too-quick night, where the right mix of buzzing is only attained for, like, ten minutes and then you're ready to be sick? Or will you never have enough to get drunk in the first place? Or...
It's clear from this that I'm both an alcoholic and someone interested in the conditionality of fun. Because that's what it is, really: what do we do to have fun and how consistently can we do it? What if Halo 3 sucks? Will the narrative be disrupted?