Newsweek tech guru N’Gai Croal has an excerpt from his interview with Bungie writing guru Joseph Staten posed on his Levl Up blog. You may remember that Joseph Staten was recently involved with a sly reporter’s teasing of the gaming community. Now, he’s involved in another story sure to irritate the gods of gaming.

In the excerpt, Staten reveals that the on-again, off-again Halo movie was to be far less like the games that perhaps many had hoped. How so? Master Chief was to be a supporting character, and not the star of the film. Yes, that’s right, because Halo is so deep with characterization they decided not to waste an entire film on the masked man in green. Instead, the film was to apparently revolve around the characters that, umm, revolve around Master Chief.

Now, before you grab your pitchforks and go after Staten (who seems like a swell guy from interviews), understand that this was most likely the correct decision. Master Chief may be iconic to gamers, but he’s also some nameless (Chief is not a name, folks), faceless, and generally personality-less figure in the games. Sure, he has the occasional one liner, but for the most part it’s those around him who get the real meat and potatoes of personality, even including his AI companion Cortana. So how would one make a movie about a character with no emotion and personality? Cast Keanu Reeves?

All of this underlines one of the most fundamental problem with making video games into movies. Video games are an entirely different medium, and it’s not as simple as recreating the game on film. We’ve known this for years with books, and music albums are even trickier (hello Sergeant Pepper). The best book-to-film adaptations often condense the story, change themes, and even combine characters. With the Halo games there actually is very little character to Master Chief, with his actions speaking much louder than words. One could create a film with a character incapable of emoting, but then Michael Bay would have to direct. More to the point, think of another film with a fairly stoic hero, such as James Cameron’s Terminator 2, and you realize that film worked by surrounding Arnold with emoting actors who were the real stars of the film.

For all of those who’d like to burn Roger Ebert as the witch that denied games art status, they need only look to the heads of the Halo franchise admitting that their games do not equal movies. Halo may indeed by a fun game to play, but it’s hardly even up to Terminator style storytelling yet. Now, how about that Halo: The Cortana Chronicles series on Fox?

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