Geek Read: Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved

Title: Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved
Publisher:  Popular Culture and Philosophy

Authors: There's a lot.
Published:  07/06/2011

Page Count: 210 pages

Final Verdict 6.5/10

Let me point out a few things first before I set out on my epic quest of knowledge. The publishers, Popular Culture and Philosophy, create these series of books (with all equally terrible puns for titles) finding philosophy in everything from sports to celebrities to god forsaken Twilight novels. I had gifted my dad the Seinfeld and Philosophy book for his birthday (him and I both being big Seinfeld fans) a few years ago, and completely forgot about it. When I came home toting my new Halo and Philosophy, he ran upstairs into his room and snatched his copy of Seinfeld and Philosophy, opens it about halfway where his bookmark was and tells me "Honey, it took me months to get to this point in a 200-page book until my mind was so blown I had to stop." My father being an incredibly intelligent man with a Masters degree in Mathematics and 30 years of teaching experience had difficulty grasping the subject matter in his book, and I, a n00b, was going to attempt to absorb the knowledge that it was offering?

Challenge Accepted.

 The book starts with a little briefing explaining how these books work and the fact that there are multiple authors involved and the chapters are going to be defined by difficulty level, quite literally, appropriately named Easy, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary. I see what you did there, you witty philosophers, you. This seems like an easy enough system to explain, I mean, any kind of gamer is used to the concept by now. Regardless, this seemed incredibly hard to grasp because of the level of language used and the expressions applied. I understood right then and there it was time to polish my ol' pens and get ready to jot notes down like back in high school. I can tell you now that it's all over that my notebook has 10 filled pages of words, people, events or expressions I had to research to get the full idea of the book. I did so thank the heavens for dictionary.com and wikipedia.org this past week.

But let's get on with it. The first words of warning I will give is that this is not a leisure read for anyone not currently studying philosophy. There are many highly complex concepts that are being thrown at you, and in most cases, in less then user-friendly wording. This book expects you to have a prior knowledge of philosophy and a good understanding of it at that, or research and a second read-through will most likely be necessary. Though philosophical discussions and theories have often intrigued me in the past and peeked my interest, I can't say I went in there with a good understanding of philosophy's history or standards.

This isn't where the brain punishment ends. You must have an open mind to accept the theories and ideas thrown at you. Sometimes it feels far-fetched, stretched, and sometimes you might not see the relation at all, but that's the beauty of it; you don't have to accept anything, it's made simply to make you think. Although this brings me to something I hadn't quite expected. I had never tackled a full blown book about philosophy and I was a little shocked at the sometimes abruptly-ending chapters, though it makes perfect sense as conclusions can't really be drawn. This forced me to pace myself; Read. Stop. Think. Read on. Rather then marathon read, as I would jump from subject to subject and go "wait, what?".

Though this book brought forth some truly interesting concepts in the world of deep-thought-meets-video-games, some authors did it better then others. Only a few chapters are truly balanced in speaking of the theory and the relation to the game. Some others feel like they are either just speaking of Halo, or just of philosophy rather then how they are involved with each other.

The last bit I'll discuss is the improper use of the "difficulty level" chapters. One of the first essays goes into hardcore philosophical history and theories that I felt weren't introduced properly enough for the average reader to follow along and required from me a fair bit of research to try and keep up, whereas towards the end, in the Heroic and Legendary chapters, the language level was much closer to a college student's and sometimes talked very little of the philosophical contents of their essay and more about how the guns go bang. It felt like a neat idea to be able to follow a learning curve throughout the book but the concept didn't really work out in the end.

Overall, some parts were mind-blowing, others lackluster, and some even managed to tug a little on my heartstrings with nostalgia while others where utterly frustrating and quite possibly made my brain bleed. The book had potential, but due to it's incredibly limited target audience, the inconsistent feel of the quality of the essays and language level, and the botched difficulty scale, this book will have to settle on 6.5 pew pews out of 10 for it's shortcomings.