That article suggests boycotting Halo 2 because of a quote that the storyline could be read as a "a damning condemnation of the Bush Administration’s adventure in the Middle East." Now, I don't care much for Halo. I don't own an Xbox. I don't like Microsoft. But I encourage anyone who would be interested that said article was written by an asshat and that you should totally buy Halo 2. Not that any Xboxer is going to need further convincing; the Xbox has about five good exclusive games and two of them begin with "Halo."

The crux of the complaint is that Halo 2 turns the first game's concept around and ends up showing the aliens you've been killing as misunderstood... formerly peaceful, and now riled by Earth's unexpected and unwanted military incursion.

Yeah, it does sound familiar.

Because it's been a standard sci-fi plot since the dawn of time. How many stories use that ol' classic turnaround? OMG our enemies are/is/should be our friends! Oh man, there's another Terminator! Sirius Black is actually a good guy! A planet where apes evolved from men!

Start examining the point of all those stories and you'll see why Bush folk are afraid. Because the moral is that things aren't all black and white. That situations are more complicated, more layered than that. What do you know, those ugly violent aliens were actually trying to defend their lifestyle from the human space marines. It's a conflict as old as civilization, and the only way out seems to be to marginalize the "losing" culture... or out-and-out genocide. Be honest: how many Bush voters have you heard state that we should "kill all of 'em"? One guy I know once quoted a Bible passage about the anti-Christ coming from the Middle East, and described large populations of Arab-Americans in the Detroit area as "scary."

I don't know how Halo 2 ends. I sort of doubt it ends with a big happy armistice between the humans and the aliens, because that isn't exactly going to resonate with the power-fantasy-driven young males that flock to games like Halo 2. Unfortunately, that option also doesn't resonate with much of America either.

Now for the pulled quote, because I love pulled quotes:

It begs the question: Why would a gamer or the parent of a gamer pay $50 to play a game that will force the player to shoot hundreds of "bad aliens" for hours to advance in the game and then at the end of it admonish the player for shooting the bad aliens? "These aliens weren’t really "bad"—they were just misunderstood and we awful human beings had no business ever leaving our little corner of the universe. You, and all humans like you, are violent and bad but the aliens are more highly-evolved, peaceful, caring beings that we should have respected and loved rather than murdered."

Because it's a plot (albeit not an extremely original one.) Because the Halo developers probably felt a need to prove that shooters can and should have plots worthy of movies and adventure games. If you think video games haven't progessed past Space Invaders, then I could see confusion resulting from Halo 2's storyline. Imagine you wipe out that final row of zig-zaggy bugships and then a pixel-text message pops up: "YOU HAVE KILLED ALL THE SPACE INVADERS. THEY WERE PEACEFUL AND MERELY PROTECTING THEIR UNIQUE CULTURE. SCORE: ZERO." That's how the uneducated are conceptualizing Halo 2 right at this moment, just before they mass-email that article to all their friends with young children. Please catch the irony that I said "young children," because Halo 2 is an M-rated game.

That quote at the end underscores a common right wing secret issue: They don't want anybody to be better than they are, certainly not damn dirty aliens. Because those who are "better" get to define policy, and nobody else should define policy but them. Instead of hazarding a guess that both alien and human could come together and combine their respective technologies and wisdom, the supposition (and snide language) is that the aliens are going to be shown as intrinsically better... and the humans did a terrible, thoughtless thing in persecuting them.

You know, if someday we do happen upon an alien culture with big pointy teeth, and we kill them, and we further uncover that they had hospitals and opera and the cure for cancer... well I hope we do feel like shitheads. I would hope that every human being would feel like a shithead. That seems to be the lesson of Halo 2, aside from being able to carry two weapons at once.

I've seen it done both ways in sci-fi stories. I think the best stories feature the former (the cooperation ending) rather than the Big Reveal that the aliens were "far in advance of our own society", because it avoids the trap of thinking in black and white. And the very best stories show both good and evil inside each faction, with proper explanation and examination of the motives for all viewpoints. But we're not going to apply those good writing standards to video games, no sir.

I suspect the real issue isn't based on an out-of-context quote from one guy on the Halo 2 dev team. It's simply another in a long line of knee-jerk reactions to incredible success in a media that older generations don't understand. Nobody has yet to come up with any proof that violent video games cause school shootings or date rape or anything else and they never will... because, again, it just ain't that black and white. So this particular argument is just an end-run to get at video games - and pop culture in general - by recycling the devisive fear-mongering that has become the default in modern politics.