The setting: Blood Gulch, one of the multiplayer maps in Halo. The characters: two Master Chiefs, one red, one gold. “You ever wonder why we’re here?” asks Red. Gold replies: “It’s one of life’s great mysteries, isn’t it? Are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything, you know, with a plan for us and stuff? I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.” “What?” splutters Red. “I mean why are we *here*, in this canyon?”

The war against the Covenant is over, but the Red and Blue teams are stuck forever in a totally enclosed box canyon, with nothing to do but spy on the other side and bicker. This is the wonderful Red Vs Blue series of comic short films (www.redvsblue.com), made using Halo. They are an example of machinima: the use of videogame engines to make conventional films, with editing and dialogue.

Although all the character models are Master Chiefs, the writers have imposed a military hierarchy: some are infantry grunts, some are captains. The characters argue, joke, and lament their posting in the middle of nowhere. It’s like Seinfeld in space. It also aims at a real metaphysical poignancy, and in many episodes Red vs Blue achieves the status of existential comedy, a sort of videogame Waiting for Godot. And in this context the representational limitations of the Halo-engine medium become strengths. Because we never see the faces of the soldiers behind their helmets, they remain generalised emblems of the human condition. Each Master Chief model is Everyman - is, in fact, you. In the sense that each of us experiences a troubled, vertiginous relationship with the universe, each of us is trapped in our very own Blood Gulch, from which there is no escape.

Arguably, indeed, the Red vs Blue writers have noticed, and very creatively elaborated, something, some spark of absurdist melancholy, that was latent in the game in the first place. What does it mean to have a self-contained space that is designed purely for fighting? What good does it do you to capture a base in a place that has no communication with the wider universe? And what can you do in such a place if there is, in fact, no fighting to be done for long periods of time?

You can indeed read into many videogames an existential subtext - the notion that human existence is absurd and there is nothing external to ourselves, after the much-announced death of God, that we can grab on to in order to give it meaning. There has always been something inherently absurdist about gaming’s cycles of cheap death and rebirth, failure condemning us to repetition and success eventually condemning us to nonexistence at the end of the game. But the more complexly representational videogame worlds become, the more strongly this feeling may assert itself. Does not the necessity to wander miles of identical corridors in some way mirror the meaningless urban rat-race that most of us live day to day?

Whether the scriptwriters and designers have deliberately put these ideas into the games or not is beside the point, because videogames, like everything else, are cultural artefacts that reflect, if they do not engage with, the prevailing philosophy of the age. This is one reason why, indeed, so many games these days are built around structures that basically mimic earning a wage and shopping - gain enough credits for your next gadget or biomod - because consumerism is what has replaced God as a defence against the absurd in modern Western society.

In videogames, things used to be simple. It used to be the case that games would offer you at least a comfortingly uncomplicated mission-based command structure, so that your superior officer in effect becomes God, and your existence in the gameworld is meaningful to the extent that you successfully carry out his instructions. Now this simple scheme is becoming problematised. The defence “I was just following orders” is increasingly unavailable as games bring a more sophisticated strategy to the table that invites you to consider the consequences of your actions.

I was especially impressed by two instances of this idea in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. The first comes if you kill a harmless informant cowering in a lab. Your commander explodes in incredulous rage, and Sam Fisher responds sarcastically: “Fine. I won’t kill him next time.” That line works two ways: it expresses the near-psychotic functionalism of Fisher’s personality, implying the retort: “Why are we even arguing about this? It’s already done; get over it.” But, of course, it also refers to the fact that, if you reload your checkpoint, there *will* be a next time, and you can choose not to kill your victim. The second example comes when your commander suddenly orders you to kill a defenceless woman standing in front of you. The fact that he is played by Dennis Haysbert, who is the incorruptible President Palmer from TV’s 24, makes this injunction to cold-blooded murder all the more shocking.

It sounds as though I am coming perilously close to the argument that story matters in videogames. In fact it’s a slightly different point. I still don’t care about the overarching plot of Pandora Tomorrow, of what kind of terrorist threat needs to be neutralised, of how the world will be saved.

It’s about scenario instead of story. Story is a sequence of events that makes up a narrative progression from one state of affairs to another, and we are driven along the story by a desire to know what happens next. Scenario, on the other hand, is just one state of affairs, one situation, within which we are able to experiment with different actions and observe the consequences. Pandora Tomorrow, like other videogames, glues together scenarios with an overarching linear story. A scenario can be something purely spatio-mechanical, such as a room with guards patrolling in distinct patterns and a certain arrangement of lighting and shadowy alcoves. Or it can, increasingly, be a more dramatised situation, such as the one when you are suddenly ordered to murder a character.

It is in such scenarios that videogames have just begun to explicitly investigate existential questions such as man’s freedom to act, and his relationship with time and the cosmos. These are still tiny baby steps. I am not claiming that Splinter Cell is worthy to stand alongside the work of Jean-Paul Sartre in this regard. But there is something in the nature of the interactive form, I think, that gives it a unique way to present such issues, to force us to think about them. A much-repeated criticism of videogames these days by those who want to deny its potential as an artform is that, for all their flash and wonder, they don’t tell us anything about the human condition. But I suggest that, in a quiet way, some of them already do, and the future potential may be limited only by the philosophical imagination of designers.

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