HBO and the HBO forum have both provided links to an editorial by "William Usher" at Cinema Blend about how Halo is killing console gaming.

So now that this specious attempt to nab page hits has worked, there can be little further damage that I can do except to examine the author's premise and see if it holds any merit. For the most part, it doesn't.

When you have to start off your article by saying "this isn't Halo bashing" it's not a good sign. Not because Halo doesn't deserve thoughtful criticism. It does. It is not a perfect edifice placed on Earth by some deity for the entertainment of humanity.

Not Bashing Halo-- Really I'm Not

Rather than bashing Halo, the author states he wants to "look at how gamers have allowed it to control their online, console gaming experience." Nice that he includes the word "allowed" there, indicating that whatever popularity Halo has is given to it by fans and not taken by force. As the article proceeds your freewill slowly ebbs away.

He notes that Halo 2 dominated XBL until Gears of War was released, but that "[...] Gears didn't top the charts for too long, as Halo 3 came out and took dominance of the online competition ring."

I'm not sure whose fault that is supposed to be. Epic's for not making a game that became as popular as Halo 2? Or the fault of players, for ultimately preferring Halo 2 (or Halo 3) to Gears?

Now come the unfounded assumptions.

"But the problem is that - like most gamers in the gaming community - there's always a penchant for wanting to play other games online, which seem to receive little or no fanfare."

The author has now directly contradicted himself, and we haven't gotten out of the second paragraph yet. We have Gears coming out and briefly unseating the Halo franchise-- yet people always want to play other games, games that get no fanfare. Apparently the author believes that Halo players want to play something else, would prefer to play something else, but just don't know what it is. Nevermind that at least there's Gears. If the author wanted to make a point that XBL is dominated by shooters and that the shooters are dominated by the Halo franchise, then I'm right with him. He seems to be trying to say that people really would rather play something other than Halo, but they are being prevented by some mystical force. What could this be?

"Yes, Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War are also always on the list too, but you're never going to find an empty multiplayer channel of Halo."

COD4 has been on top of the 360 title list as often as not since its release, so dismissing it out of hand seems downright rude. The phrase "empty multiplayer channel" makes me wonder if the author even plays Halo online on a console. In fact that, and the many references elsewhere in the article, makes me think he's primarily a PC gamer that owns an Xbox and knows you can play Halo on it, but that's about it.

In fact, his use of the word channel, rather than the terms Bungie uses like hopper and playlist, tells me he's unfamiliar with all the effort Bungie has put into addressing exactly the problem he is citing, although on a different scale. More on that in a bit.

"Finding multiplayer competition for titles like Blacksite: Area 51, 007: From Russia With Love, The Outfit, or Fatal Inertia (just to name a few), is almost tougher to do than finding a Republican who doesn't support the NRA. However, there's never a shortage of players hounding Halo 2 and Halo 3, even if they aren't actually playing."

I'm sure the lack of players for those games is somehow related to Microsoft and its evil hype machine and has nothing whatsoever to do with those other games. After all, it must be so. People want to play other games! These games ARE other games! Something nefarious must be preventing people from playing these other games, and the most obvious target is the game they are playing. Even though the author asserts that they are playing even when they aren't playing. I have no idea what he means by that.

Making People Play Nice

The author goes on to assert that Halo 2 and Halo 3 dominates the tunneling services that cater to those who can't get XBL, don't want XBL, or have been kicked off XBL: Xlink Kai, XBConnect, and Leaf. I'm not even sure what influence Microsoft or Bungie are supposed to influence over these services that they can't control and that they would probably prefer didn't exist, as they take customers away from XBL.

"The problem isn’t that a lot of people are playing Halo 2 and Halo 3, the problem is that everyone who goes on any service that offers these games are playing them, and pretty much little of anything else. You can bet that nearly everything else that isn’t Halo 2, Halo 3, Call of Duty or Gears of War is going to see sparse activity, if none at all."

Here is the real problem, the one that (within the context of Halo, anyway) Bungie has labored endlessly to address, the one that is inherent to a game that is dependent on online multiplayer as opposed to one that is built primarily or solely on a solo experience. The problem is that the value of a multiplayer game increases in a nonlinear fashion with the number of players who play it. There is no utility in a multiplayer game you cannot play. Splitting Halo 3's playerbase equally amongst a dozen or so other deserving and fun multiplayer titles would greatly reduce the utility of the Halo title to its owners, as they would find the game that always had a player population now has a scarcity, and the population split amongst the other games would not give any of them a critical mass large enough to significantly improve their status.

People are only willing to pay a fee for a service like XBL when it enables what they want to do when they want to do it. When a block of time opens up in their busy lives for a chance to play a game, they want to sit down and play it, not wait for the system to find people to play with. The fewer people are interested in a particular game, the more time you need to wait. People play Halo because other people play Halo-- not because of hype and not because Bungie and MS are somehow ramming it down anyone's throats, and not because people aren't aware of the existence of other games.

What this comes down to is that some gamers, like the author, would like to play other games sometimes, but not enough people want to play those games when he wants to play them to make it convenient.

This is the problem that Bungie's playlist hoppers solve. By taking away from the player the complete freedom of choice in matchmaking to determine the map, the game type, and weapon spawns, Halo attempts to please the largest number of players for the largest amount of time while at the same time promoting variety.

"It sometimes makes you question what happened to everyone who bought other online-supported games from the retail shelves? I’m assuming these are the same people who keep their games in the original packaging, never to open or play them."

Here are a few items of note for the author: Most game players do not play online. Most. Until MS created the Silver accounts, there were more Xboxes not on Live than on Live. Even now MS does not release figures of how many Gold and Silver accounts they have, but even so, the number of 360s on Live is less than the number of consoles sold.

So not everybody who owns a console is online, and not every online console owner plays online. While the number of simultaneous players on Halo 3 is indeed staggering it is still relatively small compared to the actual number of copies of Halo sold and the entire Xbox 360 installed base. Those people aren't keeping their games in the original packaging. They are playing campaign, which is the real reason people buy games. Multiplayer is an extra. Multiplayer gets all the hype because the people who play online also write online and read online and the squeakiest wheels get all the grease.

However, let's not split hairs here. Bioshock was a pretty darn good game that had good sales and fantastic reviews, yet has no multiplayer features whatsoever. Shadowrun was a decent game with ho-hum reviews and so-so sales, and has multiplayer only, no campaign whatsoever. In other words, if you have multiplayer but nothing else, you're very likely to fail. However, if you do things well, you can completely ignore multiplayer and still succeed.

Mark that. Multiplayer is important. Multiplayer is a differentiator. Multiplayer is where the leading edge of console gaming is, and it is undeniably the future. It is, however, at this very moment, not the main attraction. Of the three current generation consoles the clear leader is the weakest in terms of online functionality.

"The media hype surrounding Halo keeps gamers playing Halo, but it doesn’t really help expand online console gaming beyond that. Server hosts should start changing things up a bit; offering more incentives to lesser known, or lesser played games."

This paragraph again makes me wonder if the author has any idea what Xbox Live is or how it works. Xbox Live has no server hosts. Microsoft administrates the backend that does authentication and billing and handles your Friends list so you can see what other people are playing. They have absolutely no control whatsoever on what people choose to play, beyond promoting games in Marketplace, which they do-- plenty of games that aren't Halo or Halo-related, including a bunch of downloadable Xbox Originals, Xbox Live Arcade games, and Xbox 360 game dmeos.

Who are these "server hosts" who are supposed to "change things up a bit" on Xbox Live?

That's right-- they are you and me, the ordinary guys who pay to use XBL and want to sit down and have fun when we have time to play.

In fact, Micrsoft does do a good job of trying to mix things up and spread the wealth, hosting weekly events that promote other games.

Here's a solution for you, and one that I am sure plenty of people will hate just as much as some people hate Bungie's hoppers for not allowing them to use the matchmaking engine to generate them an endless stream of their favorite gametype (team slayer) on their favorite map (High Ground or other). Let's apply Bungie's hopper system to the whole of XBL. Let's make the system so you can party up in the dashboard and then enter a playlist that chooses not from a selection of Halo maps and gametypes, but from the library of installed games available on all the consoles of the party members. That'd mix things up a bit.

Perhaps only a bit, though. Because I can guarantee you that they'd still be playing a lot of Halo, and that's nobody's fault. If you want to play something else, play something else. If you don't have others to play with, tell your friends to buy the games you want to play and then play them. If they won't, then build your friends list from people who want to play the game you want to play. Your XBL friends list does not have to be a list of all the guys from work or your buds at uni. It's supposed to be to help you find people to play games with. If you don't want to play Halo and your entire friends list does, then make room on your friends list, look at the Xbox.com forums, and try to find people who want to play those games, and put them on your friends list.

For developers: maybe more people would play your games if the online experience was as rich and smooth as Halo's. Don't give everyone total control. Don't slap a PC style server browser on your game and expect big numbers from XBL multiplayer (Gears, I'm looking at you).

Otherwise, the money publishers complain about losing when their title ends up in the used-game bargain-bin, is partially to blame on no one having a reason to play it anymore, especially if everyone is playing the latest Halo game.

There are no "server hosts" here to blame, as the author does. Server hosts are ordinary players like you and me. If the game ends up in the bargain bin and nobody plays it, it is the fault of the publisher and the developer and no one else.

Halo isn't killing console multiplayer. It is keeping it on life support. The sooner that developers and network operators look at its model and embrace it, the sooner multiplayer becomes the main event and not just a checklist item.