I was a bit of a gaming geek many, many, many years ago before career & children & meeting mortgage payments took over. Was addicted to King’s Quest and one of the biggest thrills during my stint in Seattle was meeting Sierra On-line co-founder Ken Williams, husband of KQ pioneer Roberta, when he launched a now-defunct Internet radio talk show network based in Bellevue, WA, called TalkSpot.

Anyway, just thought that personal background would explain my interest in Halo2, which the gaming world is going ga-ga over at the moment. Seems that some conservatives took umbrage at comments by Halo 2 writer Joe Staten, who was quoted in Entertainment Weekly as follows:

“You could look at it,” Staten says of his Halo 2 storyline “as a damning condemnation of the Bush Administration’s adventure in the Middle East.”

Staten cleared things up by posting a note on Free Republic. An excerpt:

Let me be really clear about this: there is no intentional political message in Halo2, anti-Bush or otherwise.

While I tried to be mindful of folks’ sensitivities as I wrote its story, I knew that the game was going to scrutinized by a large, diverse audience, and would, therefore, be interpreted (or mis-interpreted, as the case may be) any number of different ways.

The EW journalist chose to include one of my examples of possible misinterpretation in the article, but not all of them. Most importantly, the journalist left out my closing statement: “Look, you can read anything into the story that you like - call a damning condemnation of the Bush Admnistration’s adventure in the Middle-East, for example. But you’d be wrong.”

In retrospect, It would have been best to give no example at all, but hindsight is 20-20…

Halo2’s story is non-partisan. Any meaning you ascribe to it is yours alone.

And remember, at the end of the day, whatever some journalist says I said really doesn’t matter. The proof is in the pudding. Play the game, and I think you’ll see it’s just that: a fun game with a good story.

Crafty bit of biased media editing of Staten’s remarks, don’t you think? At any rate, his response was very cool. Unfortunately, I probably won’t get to play Halo2, or any other video game, until sometime after both kids have graduated from high school. Sigh. Can’t wait for 2022!

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