Why Your Kids Should be Playing Halo

when I think of which games had the most profound impact on me as a child few examples are as powerful as the Halo series [Music] while games like Planescape torment or Metal Gear Solid 2 might have had a bigger impact on my character today the Halo series laid the foundation for so much of what I am I used to think it was earthbound but upon thinking about it a bit more I think that the first Halo game was when I really started to think about games as being more than just toys it's a funny thing really because I remember explaining my mom when I was young that playing Halo want to make me into a psychopath because it was just cartoon violence with colourful blood Space Marines and guns that literally go QQQ but because of that approachability as a fun space adventure the game with my young easily bored mind open to the limitless possibilities of space it was when I played halo that I first looked up at the Stars and wondered what was out there which naturally led to the all-important character building questions of religion and why we're here the light-hearted fun of the series serves as the perfect gateway between my imagination and my conscious mind this idea of sparking my young imagination doesn't end at the story in setting either while halo definitely wasn't my first at the s game that would be doom and quake 3 it was a game that was way more approachable to me in no small part due to it being designed for consoles first whereas pc FPS games at least the ones I was playing were way more hardcore and focused on raw skill Halo taught me to think on my toes a bit more and rely on cover and strategy more than those other games did but more than that it taught me to have fun it wasn't really about winning for me it was about driving a warthog off a cliff and jumping out just in time to watch the Marines plummet to their death it was about shooting captain Keyes at the beginning and seeing how long I could survive the Marines counter-attack and trying to stay in the Pelican after I was supposed to leave and start the mission since this essay is aimed at parents I should clarify now that no regardless of my playing games like this at such a young age I've never had any violent tendencies obviously don't let the games do the parenting but don't disregard their ability to expand a young mind either most of these random ideas were just me messing around with no intention of actually doing better but it was this sort of thinking that led to revelations like using handbrake turns to sweep at enemies who are trying to talk my warthog using grenades to flush enemies out of cover so I can attack them when their guard is down and even things as simple as reloading when I know I'm safe sure all of this stuff seems obvious to all you seasoned players watching but you've got to remember I was like eight at the time and while there are definitely early examples in my memory so many of my first genuine memories of constructive thinking problem-solving and independent pas came from playing Halo the possibilities of what you could do in this game just seemed so limitless and the game was happy to sit on the sidelines while I experimented with its systems and mechanics it's this experimenting that led to me understanding how game levels work that if you were somehow able to leave places you weren't meant to play in the world wouldn't just go on forever it would get weird and you could see through walls or randomly die for no reason I learned that if you threw grenades in certain places they would just disappear and that the same applied to rockets and that if you walked out into the sea far enough eventually you couldn't go any farther at the time I didn't know about : brushes skyboxes kill planes or just plain old invisible walls but in my own abstract way I understood what was happening nonetheless this curiosity led to me discovering YouTube I remember I had a friend who had his computer in the main room and his mom didn't really care if I was up all night I didn't even particularly like the kid but this was enough for me and want to sleep over at his house every weekend just so I could stay up all night on his computer watching Halo videos after he went to bed I would watch red vs. blue and RB in the chief over and over I still have some of the jokes from the first few episodes of those shows burned in my mind what are you I are died mom teach you lesson [Music] but even more than that I learned about modding and that if you knew about computers you could do really cool stuff in Halo I had already imported some custom maps and character models into quake three by this point but with Halo I discovered all sorts of other stuff I saw someone used this one program to move the camera during a cutscene and show the world Master Chief's face you'd think this would be a huge disappointment but I was just so excited because I understood why you couldn't see Chiefs face and it made me feel if only for a second like I had what it took to be a game designer I pictured myself in some fancy corporate meeting room discussing how we were going to do this final cutscene and everyone looking impressed with me for suggesting that we had his face so that we don't have to make a new head model for obviously this is all just fantasies of a little kid who didn't realize how obvious this stuff was but thanks to halo the illusion was broken for me for the first time and I finally understood the games are made by normal fallible people not super geniuses with unlimited time I realized that games aren't perfect and this led me to exploring other games to see what I could find I remember finding my very first Easter egg in this quake 3 level one of many dopefish I told my dad who was also a quake 3 fan about it and maybe he didn't know about Easter eggs or maybe he just wanted to spark my young imagination but he told me it was put there by hackers and that just made me even more sure that I could be a game designer someday if I wanted to if these games were so slapped together that some hacker could put a picture of a silly fish in the game then surely I can make something at least as good as quake 3 right well suddenly I was so sure that I had the inside scoop on how games were made and how it all worked maybe I did compared to other kids my age it's hard to say but I remembered one time at school I was alone at lunch I think my best friend was sick that day and I started talking about halo 2 this other kid who I hadn't really talked to you before turns out he had an Xbox 360 whereas I was stuck with just a PC in the first Halo game he could play halo 2 and eventually three I didn't know much about it but I had watched tons of videos about the game and knew that you could dual wield weapons I was a bit of a compulsive liar at the time and because I thought I knew all about game design I figured I could tell a lie about halo 2 to make it seem like I was on the no and impress this cool kid who could play both Halo games whenever he want I told them that if you did a melee attack with the right gun then your left gun and started crouching to the same rhythm the jungle boogie would start playing obviously there isn't a different melee button for each hand and obviously a copyrighted song wouldn't be licensed for the game just for easter egg but I didn't know that and the other kid seemed impressed sure it was a stupid lie but this might just be my earliest memory of consciously reaching out to somebody in becoming their friend I had friends in preschool in elementary school but we just sort of fell into those friendships whereas I actively decided I would be this kid's friend sure enough this led to many many years of staying up all night playing Halo on his xbox and us practically screaming an excitement when a new Halo game came out we finally got to play it I remember almost every day a break time we would hang out at the place at singing this song over and over again I got incredible chills listening to this just now I hadda heard this since I was 12 but that stupid song was such a huge part of the year for me but I still remember some of the lyrics nine years later we'd go on to own our own minecraft server together just a side note I was looking for evidence of this minecraft server and the closest thing I could find was me and my friends old YouTube channel from back in those days as you know hosts a server but a servers been down recently I don't know why baby Jesus a host of the server and her having some difficulties with one point four point five compatibility if you need any further proof that this was me just look at this photo embarrassing stuff anyways along with Minecraft we would play happy wheels ARMA dayz Fistful of rags no more room in hell and so many other games over the years when I started getting too old to want to have sleepovers all the time I was still on a Google Hangouts call with him every single day he was the one that helped me sharpen my counter-strike skills until I was a supreme master first class the second highest rank in the game I never quite made global for the longest time he was my best friend in the world and it's all thanks to halo and its ability to bring out to kids imaginations and make them want to trade war stories if this video were an hour long I still couldn't recount all the memories that halo has brought me over the years both by myself and with that friend the late nights playing co-op the warthog rushes where we actually managed to capture the flag on Blood Gulch all those times were screen at each other and excitement when we barely survived a fight or brought down a scarab or got an awesome stick with a plasma grenade these games made me see so many different sides of the magic of gaming the social aspects the artistry the player expression and when I finally be Halo one on legendary during a car ride home on my dad's laptop the all-important life lesson of not giving up and eventually surpassing a challenge that seemed impossible these games made me curious and they made me want to understand everything I could about the world I remember way back when I was first playing Halo 1 I was halfway through the third level silent cartographer I was stuck on this hunter fight in the middle of the island when it was time to leave and go see a movie with my dad I don't even remember what movie we saw because I was just thinking of Halo the whole time but I remember the drive on the way home I had my cheek pressed against the cold window as I was looking up at the stars and for the first time I asked my dad if he believed in aliens and he told me that with how huge the universe is anything is possible in my head I was picturing that fight against the hunters and suddenly I realized that he was right nothing is truly impossible and a world is huge in timeless Azar's if you can imagine it odds are it exists somewhere out in space and time from that point on sitting alone and quiet thought has never ever been the same for me that was the moment that I went from being a little more than an animal with rudimentary English skills to being a thinking imagining human being and it's all thanks to halo and my dad in the world of FPS games halo has always been sort of the awkward middle child its mechanics put it somewhere between movement shooters such as quake 3 and more tactical cover based shooters like Call of Duty in fact in terms of mechanics it's closer to Unreal Tournament 2004 than any other game I can think of and the Unreal Tournament series also sort of fits that role of the awkward middle child in my book while unreal is a great series the difference between the two is that halo is so much more accessible to a young malleable mind and as a result halo has utterly changed my life in a ton of ways no halo game is even close to making my top 10 list but this series has done so much for me and as little as I think about the games nowadays they played such a huge part in developing my character and my worldview when I was young I won't lie to you about halfway through each of the original Halo games they suddenly start to turn into horror games with the incredibly creepy parasite race the flood turning the bodies of dead aliens and humans alike into zombies the flood is by far the darkest part of a series but even still there one of the best aspects of the game when it comes to sparking a young kids imagination regardless with the entire halo series finally getting ported to PC over these next few years I only hope that some of the world's eight-year-olds become as enamored with it as I was waiting for their parents to go to bed so they can stay up all night playing it and making new friends at school by talking about it having their minds open to the true majesty of our universe learning to think and question and form their own fascinating ideas becoming inspired to create and understand and having a hell of a lot of fun while they do it I just hope that the next generation of gamers can experience that same magic that I did pana it's finished no I think we're just getting started you

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 221,521

Keywords: halo, combat evolved, master, chief, collection, PC, xbox, childhood, memories, analysis, essay, philosophy, imagination, wander, space, sci-fi, magic, fun, warthog, game, design, mechanics, ludology, multiplayer, split, screen, co, op, covenant, CE, reach, ODST, scarab, retro, classic

Id: TGSfoUPPph4

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

good shit, thanks for sharing