The Halo 4 Case for Greatness
As Walter Russell Mead noted in a post after Hurricane Sandy, terrible storms swirl just beyond the horizon. Our calm will soon be shattered.
We can protect ourselves from a storm like Sandy by taking proper precautions; at the Mead manor we have candles, firewood and food stocked against the possibility that our power will go out. But one day, dear reader, a storm is coming which neither you nor we can survive. The strongest walls, the sturdiest retirement plans stuffed with stocks and CDs, the best doctors cannot protect us from that final encounter with the force that made and will someday unmake us.
We often forget about the fragility of civilization. He compels us to remember this in order for us to be strong. He writes:
The world needs people who have that kind of strength and confidence. Storms much greater than Sandy are moving through our lives these days: the storms shaking the Middle East, recasting the economy, transforming the political horizons of Asia. It will take strong and grounded people to ride these mighty storms; paradoxically, it is only by coming to terms with our limits and weakness that we can find the strength and the serenity to face what lies ahead.
It’s good, then, to see such a game remind people the meaning of greatness and the importance of ethics — especially since the next stage in the Halo saga is called “the Reclaimer Trilogy.”
Video games have become a more intelligent form of art that movies, books or music in the 21st Century.
This is an interesting comment and deserves further fleshing out. Technology is changing the way we tell stories. In watching the Christopher Reeves Superman II I observed they spent the first third of the story retelling the first movie, correctly at that time thinking their audience had not seen the first movie in a few years. Then came VCRs and the storytelling became further compressed. Now with ubiquitous media storytelling is compressed further still. Watching older movies with my children is almost painful with the slow pace of the story. Even Merlin from 1998 is too slow for them.
Now we interact with the story instead of being passive recipients of the stories.
I would love to read a Rodger Kimball essay on this subject.
I’ve always enjoyed the Halo franchise, even if I can’t play the games at a setting higher than normal.
I’m really interested to see where this Reclaimer Trilogy goes. The Flood was a bad enough threat, but an insane Forerunner like the Didact? This is going to get complicated, I suspect.
Progressivism, communism, socialism fail wherever they’ve been tried. But the Alfred E. Neumann’s currently running the US government aren’t a bit worried. Their true inspiration comes from Europe. But they fail to internalize that its socialism was built on the belief that the US would never allow it to fall into the hands of the hyper-progressives of the USSR. But the Alfred Es—geniuses all—will gut US defense anyway in the belief that the Euros somehow got it wrong and they, the true believers, know better. The real joke in all of this is that the Bamster really seeks to harm the US and take us down a peg or two in the name of world fairness—maybe he’ll get another Nobel for trying.
We’ll survive Obama’s depredations against the US economy. By are Republicans in Congress still not aware that all they will never get from O is the phony bonhomie of a good ole boy pat on the back?