Something kept nagging at me as I played through the first few levels of Halo 3 but for the life of me I couldn't remember what. Then Lord Hood popped on the view screen in the underground bunker where I was holed up with Commander Keyes and I remembered. Ron Pearlman (the voice of Lord Hood) is the coolest.

For those who don't know, Ron Pearlman played Hellboy, was Reinhardt in Blade II, Johner in Alien: Resurrection, the Reman Viceroy in Star Trek: Nemisis and Koulikov in Enemy at the Gates ( the guy who got sniped by Ed Harris as he was jumping a gap in a bombed out building). He even stared in a French film called La Cite de enfants perdus without knowing any French! He memorized all his lines phonetically and delivered them perfectly. Oh yeah, he also won a Golden Globe for his performance in Beauty and the Beast, won two Q Awards, one Godlen Apple, and has been nominated for two Emmies and one Genie.

This is a guy who's been trained as an actor in the old school vein, stared in award winning foreing films, Hollywood blockbusters and who's been the narrator for all of the Fallout games (including the upcomimg one), voiced Lord Hood in Halo 2 and has lent his voice to numerous other video games and animated tv shows and movies. How freakin' cool is that?

While he may not be a big name actor he's still a mainstream actor with, in my opinion, more talent than most of those who ARE considered big names in the business. Sean Penn and Russel Crow I'm calling you out. He's accomplished all of this and he's still cool enough to dabble in video game and cartoon voice acting. How many talented mainstream Hollywood actors can that be said about?

So, I guess the point I'm trying to get at, besides the fact that Ron Pearlman is frickin' cool and was one of the best parts of Halo 3, is that more Hollywood stars need to be as versatile and down to earth as Pealrman. Most actors come off as snobbish asses who can only play one type of character, are more conserned about starring in Academy award winning artsy fartsy movies and who they're going to throw a phone at next. Pearlman is one of the few actors who seems like someone who would be likable as an actual person. Plus he's never starred in a movie that sounds like an S&M porn epic.

For the majority of human existence violence has been a major and vital part of our existence. One could argue, and I do make the argument, that our immense capacity for violence is one of the main reasons we as a species have lasted so long.

Back in the day when we hunted and gathered humanity was not at the top of the food chain. We hunted and were hunted by big cats, wolves and other natural predators. All of which were stronger, faster, and who were around millenia before humanity made its first tentative step as a people. When we came into conflict with other tribes of humans and could not reconcile peaceably we had to fight. Much like death, humanity has walked side by side with violence since we became a species.

The inception of civilization in the fertile crescent did not diminish the need for violent tendencies. Territorial disputes, border skirmishes and all out wars followed us down the centuries; fine tuning this atavistic trait. Knowledge, philosophy, discipline, and religion while important landmarks in the evolution and progression of humanity as a whole, would have meant nothing if we did not have the capacity to defend these institutions through violent means.

Up until the middle of the 20th century, practically everyone knew violence and recognized the necessity to be able to meet such a threat in kind. Whether it was living under the rule of a tyrannical king, carving out a home in a hostile territory, or fighting a world war; humanity knew the bite of violence and how and when to dish it out.

But now (Western) society has progressed to a point where very few people feel such a threat. We live in suburbs with gated communities and home security systems; there's a grocery store or two just down the road in practically every town; those of us who live in big city apartments notice regular police patrols and a visible police presence on virtually every street corner; we travel to work in metal boxes with air bags and crumple zones or ride in steal cages called trains; we go to work in air conditioned office buildings were we spend 8-10 hours a day in cubicles or offices hunched over a keyboard.

Human society has become docile, boring, and for the most part safe. But while our society has changed and is becoming increasingly quick to change, human nature is not so easy or quick to do the same. We are still animals with violent animalistic traits. And just as domesticated animals sometimes attack without warning or apparent reason or lions raised in captivity who have no previous history of violence suddenly maul one of their handlers; you cannot take the beast out of humanity.

Yes, we are more highly evolved than most species. We have reason, compassion, and love but these more noble aspects of our nature did not forge the path that humanity has walked and that stretches out before us still. They tempered it to be sure but without our propensity for violence we would have died out as a species eons ago.

We need violence, we need to see violence and to experience it, if only as a spectator, in order to satiate that darker aspect of our psyche. This is why boxing was so big in the twentieth century, why we watch football and hockey, this is the reason the UFC has exploded so quickly as a sport and this is why movies like 300 and Hostel are so popular.

But where this satisfies us passively, video games give us a more active role in the violence. When playing Gears of War or God of War we can actively take part in the blood and gore and mayhem. We can direct the way and means in which the character, our proxy, maims, disables and kills our opponents. Violent games enable us to exhaust all of our aggression and our pent of frustration's until we have reached a state of catharsis.

This is why ever increasingly violent video games, FPS in particular, have become so popular in the last decade. Whether knowingly or not people are seeking them to satisfy this base need within them.

Many disagree with my opinion including my father. We have had many discussions over this topic and despite the fact that he loves to watch boxing, cheers when he see's a particularly hard hit during a football game, and openly laughed when he discovered the chainsaw for the first time in DOOM, I can't get him to see this need we as humans have for violence. I can understand his desire however; the want and need to see humanity as a peaceful and socially evolved creature who has moved beyond our baser instincts.

I can understand it, I just don't share it. We are what we have always been. Animals. Clever animals but animals none the less.

It's taken me nearly 16 years of gaming to come to a fairly obvious and simple realization: video games unify people. They bridge the gap between age, gender, race and nationality in ways only books, television, and tragedies seem able to do. I came to this mind numbingly obvious conclusion last night while fragging and getting fragged by my 42 year old brother ( said brother is 18 years older than me) in a Halo match. This realization struck me so suddenly that I played on auto-pilot for the rest of the match as I thought about; and as a result died a whole lot. Though, really I don't know why this surprised me so much.

Back in the day when NES was cutting edge my dad would take time out of his 60-70 hour work week to play Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Mission Impossible, and other games with me; my older brother would come home for the holidays when I was younger and we'd fire up whatever system I had at the time and play into the early hours of the morning; raising hell as children my friends and I would go over to whoever's house was closets and play Zelda or Final Fantasy-insert roman numeral here- and sip capri sun after we'd exhausted ourselves outside; one of my fondest memories of my adolescent's was when my father fired up Doom for the first time on his brand new Micron computer, discovered the chainsaw and laughed as he proceeded to lay into demon after demon; since I entered the work-force at sixteen only 2 of my bosses haven't gamed ( one of my current bosses plays Halo and Call of Duty and I take way to much satisfaction when I kill him on-line); I met a chick at Starbucks who was quite possibly the biggest Halo and Kingdom Hearts fan I've ever seen; my last girlfriend, along with introducing me to foreing films, loved to cozy up with me on the couch on rainy days and play Super Smash Brothers and Mario Golf. And then there's the hundreds of people I've played, talked to, and generally had a great time with on-line from all over the globe. Many of whom would probably have nothing to do with me in the real world. It doesn't even matter what type of game you play, they all have the same end result. Unity.

It all makes me wonder if only our leaders would just sit down and play a game, any game, would they solve more of the important problems in the world instead of bickering along party lines?