Hey, Anyone Wanna Play Some Halo? The Story Behind the Game Consuming Student Lives
By Karthik Kasaraneni ‘07
Soldiers in colored suits of armor run around shooting machine guns and plasma pistols, while madly swinging energy swords at each other. Some snipe from high ledges while others charge towards opponents with the blunt butt end of a shotgun through a hail of bullets. Purple banshees swarm around in the air shooting furiously down at those stuck on land. The objective: kill anyone and everyone as fast as you can.
This rush of madness known as Halo has consumed the life of many Choate students. The video game, now in its second iteration, is played on Microsoft’s Xbox console, which allows people to play it across a local area network (LAN) such as the one at Choate, with up to four people playing on each connected console.
This year has seen much growth in the size of Choate’s Halo community as more and more students picked up a controller with each successive term. The number of students playing the game has exploded from around eight in the late fall. Currently, there is a solid core of at least forty students who play the game on a regular basis on campus and there is almost always a game up on the school’s network.
However, according to various veteran Halo players from the fall term, a lot of the fun and dorm rivalry that used to be an integral part of the game, particularly between the Memorial House prefects and the residents of Spencer House, has been replaced with nothing more than petty grudges and trash talking.
Each student typically has his or her own Halo name by which they can be easily recognized by other players on campus.
“Actually knowing who you are playing against is what really differentiates campus Halo from other online gaming experiences in which you are playing with people you don’t know at all. It’s great when you know you’ve just stuck Stewie with a plasma grenade,” said Spizence (Spencer Trooboff ’06).
This aspect of campus Halo allows the game to bring students closer together rather than isolating them from society, as video games are so often accused of doing.
Franchize Boi (Ryan Stewart ’06) proclaimed, “[Halo] brings Choate students together in a nice, organized fashion.”
In reality, Halo can become quite disorganized. The game can be played in a variety of settings and with an even larger variety of weapons, rules, and game types. On top of this, the multiplayer game can be played in team mode or in a free-for-all mode. This wide array of choice keeps the game fresh, and new tactics are always being discovered by the most devoted players to keep their opponents on their toes.
In addition to gathering with friends to play the game on the same Xbox, many kids have headsets, which they can use to talk to each other during game play via VoIP technology.
As Slayre (Jamie Sayre ’06) explained, “After hearing [Omid’s] sweet Arabian voice singing ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ over the LAN and observing his classy displays of sportsmanship, I knew I needed to be friends with him.”
Halo is definitely a fun game that can keep one’s mind off of school, for better or for worse.
“Halo is fun because it is an interactive game with our friends and it is always fun to win,” said Franchize Boi.
“Its nice being able to beat boys at something,” commented Vanessa Surgeon ’06, arguably the best, and definitely the most serious, of the few female halo players on campus.
Some of the most intense and gifted Halo players at the school, including Spizence, Franchize Boi, Slayre, Prince of Persia (Omid Nasser-Bigdelli ’08), mikey mikey (Mike Morrill ’06), Womens Intuition (Chris Danner ’06), and V (Carr Lanphier ’06) can be found playing for 10-15 hours each week and can be absolutely dominant in game.
But all this play sometimes comes at a price.
Spizence explained that even though the fighting is not physical, it can still take a physical toll on a person’s body. “mikey mikey logged at least 15-20 hours of Halo a week earlier in the year to become one of the school’s best, but it had taken a visible toll on his body,” he said.
Halo has also taken non-physical tolls on many students’ lives, including their hours of outdoor time, not to mention their grades.
Slayre admitted, “So yeah, I guess it has taken over my life, but that is the beauty of senior spring.”
