Halo to Appear Tonight, 12:01 AM
The biggest thing happening in Monroe on Tuesday will be at 12:01 AM. Hundreds of people, most of them young men, will be lining up at Game Stop in the mid-evening. They will be in line to pick up their pre-ordered X-Box 360 game, Halo. Hundreds of cars will then hustle home where they’ll play, minimally, for hours, and some for days. Halo is an addiction. Halo is life. Halo is a very cool game. If a new version of Halo came out every day it would single-handedly rescue the American economy. At the crack of Tuesday 2.5 million people will finally clutch the long-awaited thing.
The cover story in Saturday’s freep.com said this: “You can make a case that 12:01 a.m. Tuesday marks another pivotal moment in American entertainment.”
The Free Press quotes Wayne State University “professor and pop culture expert Jerry Herron. “But what we’re seeing with ‘Halo 3′ is something fundamental about this country — loving setting new standards and needing frontiers to exceed.
“We are desperately uninterested in the past, and we demolish anything that reminds us of what we used to be,” Herron said. “Electronic gaming does what people used to do with Conestoga wagons — gather up everything and start a new existence. It’s very much frontier-like living in this new virtual world.”"
Here in Monroe hundreds and hundreds of our teen-and-twenties young men live 25% of their waking existence in a virtual world. Communities are formed. Friends and adversaries are defined. Drama is experienced, vicariously. Night passes. The sun rises, again. The Halo players sleep into the afternoon, waking up to a real life which is mundane.
“Halo” is, in truth, a relatively meaningless event. Real-life drama is happening as I now write. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is speaking at Columbia University. The front page of The New York Daily News announces “The Evil Has Landed.” Our state legislators are working to save a failing Michigan economy. We have global climate issues. Americans are pursuing the vacuous dream of building their own little kingdoms. Marriages are failing at record rates. An aura of purposelessness envelops our culture. People just want to be “happy.” And in the midst of it all the Kingdom of God moves, inexorably, like a seed growing secretly, like a fishing net capturing people swimming in the ocean of life.
[When “Halo I” came out I remember enjoying challenging my sons in the multiplayer mode, and getting beaten every time.]