Inari Vaissi Nagy at the University of Ottawa's Fulcrum wonders if Master Chief isn't a good modern equivalent of ancient epic heroes:

The violence, the big, nasty guns and speeding vehicles, and the brutal competitiveness, are all undoubtedly major attractions to the gaming world--much to the alarm of many from the pre-gamer generation. But is it such a stretch to trace the genealogy of the protagonists of today's "epic" video games to warrior-heroes like Aeneas or the Old English Beowulf, who were revered for carnage and bloodshed? The ancient heroes' ceremonial boasting has been replaced with language that would make a trucker blush, but maybe today's young men (and some women, too) are just taking advantage of new technologies to imagine themselves in another world, accomplishing daring feats in the face of impossible odds.

Here's my reaction: the only ones who don't think that there's a parallel there, who still think that all videogame plots are "shitty" and all videogame characterizations "feeble" to use Nagy's words, are either those who look at these games with preconceived notions of what they are, or those who are simply not paying attention.