On Halo

Contains spoilers for Halo: Reach For me, the world of Halo came to life on the playground. I had never played the game series—I didn’t even know they were games. Halo was a conjuration of a friend, a new space for imaginative free play in the wide, wet field of recess. I learned about the parasitic Flood with their misshapen bodies and desire to consume the whole galaxy. I discovered the Library, a vast Forerunner megalith with the life-saving Index at its core. I was introduced to the Warthog, a futuristic military jeep with a mounted chaingun, big enough and fast enough for me and my friends to outrun the Flood. I didn’t play my first Halo video game until years later. It was love at first sight. Now I had images and sounds that I could tie into my previous conceptions of elites, hunters, and banshees. In high school, I blitzed my way through every Halo novel (far more than you think at the time). I won’t lie, some of them were very bad, but I found stories within those pages that…