Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play

August 21, 2007 — -- Sitting in an office chair and frowning slightly, Randy Pagulayan peers through a one-way mirror. The scene on the other side looks like the game room in a typical suburban house: There's a large flat-panel TV hooked up to an Xbox 360, and a 34-year-old woman is sprawled in a comfy chair, blasting away at huge Sasquatchian aliens. It's June, and the woman is among the luckier geeks on the planet. She's playing Halo 3, the latest sequel to one of the most innovative and beloved videogames of all time, months before its September 25 release.

The designers at Bungie Studios, creators of the Halo series, have been tweaking this installment for the past three years. Now it's crunch time, and they need to know: Does Halo 3 rock?

"Is the game fun?" whispers Pagulayan, a compact Filipino man with a long goatee and architect-chic glasses, as we watch the player in the adjacent room. "Do people enjoy it, do they get a sense of speed and purpose?" To answer these questions, Pagulayan runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio. The room we're monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player's expressions or see which buttons they're pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.

Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She's butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

"Here's the problem," Pagulayan mutters, motioning to a computer monitor that shows us the game from the player's perspective. He points to a bunch of grenades lying on the ground. She ought to be picking those up and using them, he says, but the grenades aren't visible enough. "There's a million of them, but she just missed them, dammit. She charged right in." He shakes his head. "That's not acceptable."

Pagulayan makes a note of the problem. It is his job to find flaws in Halo 3 that its creators, who know what players should do, might not be able to see. He assesses whether the aliens have gotten too lethal, whether the revamped Needler guns are powerful enough, and — most important — if and when players are getting bored or (as is more often the case) frustrated. Clicking away on his keyboard, Pagulayan brings up video of one of the first fights in the game, in which a Brute wields a ferocious gun. Neophyte players are getting massacred.

"That enemy can kill the player in three shots," he says. "Imagine your mother playing, where she's barely learning how to move around in the game — bam, bam, bam — dead. That's not going to be a fun experience."

All game companies test their products, but generally they just pay people to report any bugs they find — monsters that disappear or places where graphics don't render properly. But because it is owned by Microsoft, which launches dozens of Xbox and PC games every year, Bungie has access to one of the most advanced game-testing facilities ever built. Pagulayan and his team have now analyzed more than 3,000 hours of Halo 3 played by some 600 everyday gamers, tracking everything from favored weapons to how and where — down to the square foot — players most frequently get killed.

Bungie doesn't just test its own games this way. It also buys copies of rival titles and studies those, too, to see how Halo matches up. "I've never seen anything like it," says Ian Bogost, a professor of digital media at Georgia Tech, who toured the testing lab in the fall. "The system they've got is insane."

It might seem like an awfully clinical approach to creating an epic space-war adventure. But Bungie's designers aren't just making a game: They're trying to divine the golden mean of fun. They need to create an experience that is challenging enough to thrill the 15 million existing hardcore fans of Halo — yet appealing enough to lure in millions of new players.

If anyone can pull off this delicate balance, it's Bungie. Released in 2001, the original Halo seamlessly blended riveting gameplay with a cinematic narrative — the fight between humans and a murderous alien race was told through plenty of twitchy, white- knuckled combat. When Halo 2 debuted three years later, it again broke new ground by letting gamers square off against their friends on the fledgling Xbox Live online service. Fans went berserk. They debated the intricate plotlines, bought T-shirts and figurines, read Halo novels that Bungie produced, and crawled into work bleary-eyed after all-night death matches. Halo became a cultural touchstone, a Star Wars for the thumbstick generation.

Now the company has to do it again, only better. This will be the first Halo for the Xbox 360, and it comes at a critical point in the console wars, with Microsoft fighting both Sony's graphically superior PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's unexpected hit, the wrist-twisting Wii. Microsoft needs Halo 3 to be a system seller — a game so good that people buy an Xbox 360 just to play it (the original Xbox's only profitable quarter came during the launch of Halo 2). "I don't see any other game that's going to have as big a blast radius for the Xbox as Halo 3," says Dean Takahashi, author of The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. "They need to sell a lot of consoles for Microsoft."

So Bungie's designers sift through Pagulayan's reports, peer through the one-way mirror, and scrutinize every second of the game. Videogame development involves artistry, obviously. But at Bungie Studios, it's become something of a science as well.

Bungie's office in Kirkland, Washington, houses more than 100 workers in a massive open room covered by a domed roof. It's early June, and the place has an air of quiet, frantic energy. In a far corner, a group of artists work on crafting the swoopy attack movements of the aliens. Along a wall, environment programmers stare intently at screens, fine-tuning scenery in the latest levels. Marty O'Donnell, the company's audio engineer, is holed up in a soundproof studio room, tweaking Halo 3's 34,000-plus lines of combat dialog, to ensure that aliens and marines curse and yell appropriately during battles (Wired's editor in chief, Chris Anderson, voiced a few blood-curdling screams for the game). Near the kitchen area, a programmer naps in a small pile of beanbag chairs.