Ok, so this isn't my post for the class assignment (I'll get to that a little later into the weekend), but I know I want to say this. When thinking about to whom I wanted to talk about this with, I remembered this blog. I first worried it wouldn't be a good idea because it's the class assignment blog, but then I said, "hey, the goal of this blog is to get us to experience blogging, so why not."
So I was playing Halo Anniversary – a remake of the original Halo game – and I noticed something that made me think. For those of you unfamiliar with the original Halo trilogy, there are three major groups: the humans (which you play as a part of), the covenant (a collection of religious alien species that want humans destroyed), and the flood (a parasitic creature that consumes sentient beings), all of which end up fighting each other. There's a few parts in the original (and maybe in the later games; I haven't played them all) where all three fight at the same time, with you being the human side. I ended up in a situation with me, an elite (one of the more powerful species in the covenant), and a flood zombie when I was playing. The elite and the flood zombie were fighting it out when I got there. I shot the flood zombie with my shotgun, saving the elite, and while I was reloading, the elite started shooting at me. This took me out of the game a little bit, because that wouldn't happen in real life. If we were to say that this situation happened with three real people from different warring nations, let's say, I do not think someone would start shooting at someone who saved their life and wasn't immediately threatening them. I would think the party saved would have mixed feelings about attacking him and would wait to see what the party that did the saving would do next. When mentioning this to my roommate, he said, "Well, the covenant think of Master Chief as the devil." An interesting point, but I think having your life saved throws any preconceptions out the window.
What do you think? Please leave a comment saying what you think.
Well Louis I don't think the comparison between Halo and warring nations is a fair one. The covenant are aliens and they hold no love for humans. Furthermore the elite may have been able to kill the flood himself, and therefor not felt like he owed you anything. Lastly, reloading your weapon is definitely threatening to anybody on opposing sides of war. I can see why the elite was still trying to kill you.
ReplyDeleteThoughtful comment, David. I was going to write something similar, but you captured it well when you write "The covenant are aliens and they hold no love for humans."
ReplyDeleteIn a lot of science fiction and such, we often project human feelings onto alien characters. We make the possible mistake of thinking "what would I do if I were in his shoes?" Of course, that would be if you, a human, were in the place of an alien. But aliens may be completely different in every way and we may be entirely unable of imagining what it would be like to be in an alien's shoes. For starters, they may "hold no love for humans."
I'm glad that Halo gets you thinking about these things, and I'm happy to see you making use of the blog, Lewis.
Interesting response, but I would say my biggest disagreement is that I think it would be completely possible to put ourselves in to the alien's shoes. In the story, it is made abundantly clear that all of the covenant species are sentient, and some even learn english throughout the series. Even if we were to assume that not all aliens would be able to think like us, the ability for us to understand each other (even if we're just talking in the military sense of deciphering commands) shows a level of understanding strong enough for empathy.
DeleteI think the best argument against my claim so far was about the demonization of the humans by the covenant (similar to the allied feelings towards the Nazis during WWII), but even so, I would think that it can only go so far. The biggest problem with comparing it to real-life wars like WWII is that there really aren't any good examples of a three-way war. Even in WWII, where we were not allies with Russia going into the war, we made a temporary alliance to prevent a three-way battle, and quickly broke it up right after with the cold war.