Most people look at Halo 2 and see a killing field littered with high tech weapons and prowled by lethal opponents. Chris Burke sees the setting for his talk show, This Spartan Life.
Burke, a Brooklyn-based sound designer, produces the show in his living room using six networked Xboxes. Think of it as a mash-up of The Charlie Rose Show and Doom.
Burke hatched the idea for the show when he found himself spending more time gawking at Halo's scenery than racking up kills. "My favorite part is exploring the map as if it's a real landscape," he says. "So I started thinking of Xbox Live as a social space and what I could do with it."
He invited real-world guests into the game. The freewheeling conversations were split between highbrow theory and glitch-driven slapstick, peppered with armed ambushes by other players. More than 12 segments later, TSL has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and it's easy to see why. When was the last time you saw Letterman come under small-arms fire during his monologue?
The threat of violence means the show's in-game production staff usually has to lay down cover fire for Burke during interviews. But tonight we're offline, in the Xbox version of a closed set. Burke has pacified the area so his guest, art and fashion impresario Malcolm McLaren, can hold forth uninterrupted by fragmentation grenades. Burke wants his talk with the irrepressible raconteur to take place as an actionless walkabout.
McLaren arrives at Burke's apartment in a rumpled sweater, looking more like a doddering Oxford don than the former manager of the Sex Pistols - until he opens his mouth. "That's kinda groovy," he purrs as he designs his in-game avatar. Controlling it, though, is another matter. After 20 minutes of coaching, McLaren still doesn't have the hang of moving around the game; he's twirling like a dizzy toddler.
Finally the interview begins. Burke and McLaren send their avatars sauntering out of a bunker into a sunny meadow. For 10 seconds, everything's perfect - then McLaren loses control of his character and breaks away in a sidestepping gallop. So much for actionless.
Otherwise, the interview proceeds as expected; McLaren touches on everything from Situationists to Graham Greene to opium to karaoke. There's a boom microphone in the apartment capturing what has now turned into a soliloquy. Unable to get a word in, Burke silently mimics his guest's loopy movements like an armor-clad Harpo Marx. Not Emmy material, perhaps, yet still entertaining as hell.
But not as entertaining as it could be. I've been watching the interview from inside the game, and I stumble across a Needler. I snatch up the gun and skulk toward the rocky ridge where Burke is wrapping things up with McLaren. In This Spartan Life, most interviews end with a kill. "And I'll be damned," I murmur, as I train the targeting reticule on my dear host's head, "damned if this Spartan is gonna let the viewers down."
John Pavlus (xjparker@gmail.com) is a writer and filmmaker in New York.
Halo 2
credit Corbis
Malcolm McLaren can be interviewed inside Halo 2, but he can smoke only in real life.
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