You don't tug on Superman's Cape...
you don't spit into the wind, and you surely don't take the helmet off of the Master Chief:
The face of the Master Chief is never revealed. His visor is solid reflective gold, like the faceplates of the Apollo astronauts. Halo's designers see the Master Chief's facelessness as a dramatic device, a way of allowing players to place themselves in the game's leading role, to map their own faces onto that of a blank protagonist. "If he takes off the helmet, he should be you," says Marty O'Donnell, Halo's audio director. "I mean, that's the big deal. Taking off the helmet is unacceptable." Engineering lead Chris Butcher agrees: "It's your experience. You have to be able to pour yourself into that icon." When nongamers look at the Master Chief's helmet, they see a forbidding, anonymous mask. But when gamers look at it, they see a mirror. They see themselves.
The ladies want him, the men want to be him...Master Chief is a stud for the video game era. The article tries a little too hard to look for deeper sociological meaning in Halo, but I still think it's cool that Halo 3 is generating so much interest among the media.