The Art of Fake War

[October 17th, 2007]

Not to brag, but I’ve done a little fragging in my day. No, I’m not talking about getting lucky with the ladies (though I’ve found my video-game skills are an aphrodisiac): “Fragging” is nerdspeak for killing an opponent in a first-person shooter (meaning you see the game world from the perspective of your character and his or her big gun). Like sex, you never forget your first frag. And like sex, your first frag is usually sloppy, confusing and traumatizing.

For me, it happened in 1995. After explaining to my mom, like, five times that she shouldn’t pick up the phone when it rang, an unpopular classmate and I hooked up via direct dial-up (14.4 kpbs-style) for a game of Doom , the bloody, trend-setting shooter game. It didn’t matter that, after battling CPU-controlled Nazis and aliens, shooting a fellow space marine seemed ethically questionable. I had my orders—to hell with ethics. So when I saw his pixilated green body appear in that courtyard, I took aim, clicked the left mouse button and braced for the recoil. When my shotgun fired two seconds later (bad connection), the buckshot hit a nearby exploding barrel, fragging us both. Double kill! I was hooked.

Fast-forward 12 years to the launch of Halo 3 . Halo is the franchise that put Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console on the map. The third installment, available only on the Xbox 360, has generated more than $300 million in sales since its release Sept. 25. In its first 24 hours, Halo 3 outsold entertainment behemoths like the last Harry Potter book and Spider-man 3 . The game is straightforward: You point your gun and kill everything in front of it. Sure, there’s a story line concerning English-speaking aliens and human space soldiers in an epic battle, but basically, it’s about fragging. Halo 3 doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it refines and sets a new benchmark for its genre. The real fun doesn’t start until Halo 3 is played with friends at home or up to 16 gamers online with Xbox Live—Microsoft’s broadband gaming network. It is a near-perfect symphony of violence. Armored bodies fly like rag dolls through the air, gigantic tanks lumber through sand, ridiculous guns fill the screen with blinding white light. Killing an opponent in Halo 3 is as satisfying a video game moment as one is likely to find anywhere.

So, naturally, when I heard that Michael Evans, who was in charge of building the multiplayer mode for the original Halo and was a lead developer of Halo 2 , lived in Portland, I knew what I must do. Though he hadn’t worked on Halo 3 , Evans had played the first two games incessantly before their releases in 2001 and 2004, tweaking them in the process. He knew the intimacies of Halo ’s various multiplayer modes and held trade secrets from his time working at Bungie, the studio that developed the series (and recently announced its split with its parent company, Microsoft). No simple interview would do. I had to frag him. I had to frag him hard and often. I had to frag him like he’d never been fragged before.

Casey Jarman attempts to interview Halo Developer Michael Evans during a Halo 3 deathmatch.

Download audio file (gamin2_electricboogaloo.mp3)

Evans, who moved to Portland about a year ago from Seattle after leaving the gaming biz, accepted my challenge. There was only one problem. Years of music writing had dulled my killer instinct, and I would only get a few short weeks to train. Deadlines, concerts, girlfriend...none of that seemed to matter much now. Only the game could keep my attention. First against my roommates, hapless victims though they were of my mighty gravity hammer and relentless grenade-chucking. When I outgrew the weaklings in my own home, I moved to online competition.

For me, playing Halo 3 online for the first time was like trying to use public transportation in Baghdad: I kind of knew where I wanted to go, but I didn’t speak the language, and I kept getting killed. “What are we trying to do here?” I asked my online teammates via the cheap plastic Xbox headset that lets players talk to each other during Halo multiplayer games. Dead air. Two minutes later, another gamer broke the silence: “I’m dating this girl, and she’s real hot, but she has an Adam’s apple. I thought only dudes had Adam’s apples. Should I be worried about that? Am I dating a dude?”

When my teammates failed to train me, I turned to the oft-quoted “oldest military treatise in the world,” Sun Tzu’s The Art of War . “Ponder and deliberate before you make a move,” the wise author writes. BOOM! “You should occupy the raised and sunny spots, and there wait for [the enemy] to come up.” CRACKALACKALACKA BOOM! “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” This one almost worked. I weaseled my way into the red team’s base and started shooting guys from behind. But I was no match for six dudes with better aim than me. Sun Tzu would have gotten his ass beat in Halo .

Michael Evans knocked on my door about 5:30 pm last Thursday. He was wearing jeans, a hoodie and black-rimmed glasses not unlike my own. He was quiet—probably intimidated by my new, Sun Tzu-inspired (“All warfare is based on deception”) mustache. We got right down to business with a three-player game of Slayer , the most straightforward killfest of the dozen or so multiplayer games under the Halo 3 umbrella. “Have you played this yet, the third one?” I asked Evans as we settled into our first round in my living room. “I have not.” Strike one. “Are you working on another game now?” I ask. “No, I’m actually working on a website [a social networking project called Fyreball].” Strike two. BOO-SHA BOO-SHA BOOM! Strike three, Evans!

My glory was short-lived. In that first game, which we played with my roommate, Evans wound up with a game-winning 25 kills when I was still at 17. The game plays almost identically to previous Halo incarnations, and Evans—who seems understated by nature—didn’t seem overly impressed. “It’s cool,” he said later. “And it’s actually a lot more fun when I didn’t just spend two years working on it.”

After playing a couple more practice rounds, Evans, the roommate and I took the ultimate fight to the ultimate battleground: Vancouver’s slick theater-wine bar complex Cinetopia, which was hosting a diabetes benefit that night featuring 16-player Halo battles on two 50-foot theater screens (as well as a handful of smaller setups). It was my childhood dream come true—and I’m not just saying that: Playing video games on a theater screen was an actual childhood dream that I remember quite vividly.

In the two hours of gaming that ensued, I made it my mission to destroy Michael Evans (or, as his randomly generated code name would have it, “Penguin”). I jumped, I launched rockets, I tried to run him over with my Warthog (that’s a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back). I did everything my training had taught me. And, where the ocean meets the sloping beach on the “High Ground” level, I found my satisfaction. It was a simple kill: a dozen bullets from the trusty assault rifle and a forearm smack to the face. After finding high ground, I looked over at Evans in the theater seat next to me. His eyes were fixed—intent and emotionless—on the huge screen before us. Where I had been hooting, hollering and smack-talking, Evans was still and centered. A true warrior. And when I turned my head back to the screen, there he was, tossing a grenade near my feet. I fumbled for the jump button, but it was too late. My soldier’s green and black body flew into the air, landed lifeless and rolled down a sandy hill. Game over.

I asked Evans on the ride home if there was some great life lesson to be learned from Halo . He laughed a lot. I modified the question. “If some guy went right, he’s probably gonna go left next time,” he told me. Good advice if ever I’d heard it. You always listen when the master speaks. And while I still thirst for Evans’ blood from time to time, I’m reminded of the words of Sun Tzu: “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.” Besides, this shit really makes my eyes hurt.