The first glimpse of it is breathtaking.

Hanging there in space, the massive ring seems so eerie and fragile, hovering perilously close to an unknown planet.

The next time you see it, your escape pod is speeding toward it. It seems to grow larger and larger as you approach, and its immense size makes your craft seem like a toy. On the approach, you begin to see that the interior of the massive structure contains an entire alien world.

You brace for landing.

It’s an incredible image, and it’s one of the first that players saw after beginning Halo: Combat Evolved, the first video game in Bungie’s much-heralded trilogy.

But as English professor John Kessel and many other science fiction fans can attest, this grand design is nothing new. It appeared most notably in the 1970 science-fiction novel Ringworld by Larry Niven. The concept of the “forerunners,” the mysterious race that built the halo structures in the video game, also draws parallels to the book’s equally mythical engineers who constructed the ringworld.

“A lot of new stuff filters up from books,” Kessel, an author of science fiction, said. “With any art form, a lot of what is done is recycling.”

But that doesn’t make the game any less legitimate.

Even George Lucas, the creative mind behind Star Wars, does a bit of borrowing. Kessel said the idea behind the Coruscant, the planet covered in one giant cityscape, was first imagined by science-fiction author Isaac Asimov in The Foundation Trilogy.

“I sort of wish George Lucas had put a note at the end saying, ‘thanks, Isaac Asimov.’ Because he stole it,” Kessel said with a laugh.

Although science fiction long ago expanded from literature to film, the genre is continuing to develop in a new medium — video games.

Gaming has been around for decades. But senior in English Kevin Liles said its evolution has brought it into a form of art.

“You have all these games that in the earlier days were very linear. Now you have these complex, moral dilemmas,” Liles said.

And he should know. As an intern for Icarus Studios in Cary, Liles is writing dialogue for the upcoming game Fallen Earth, a massive-multiplayer online role-playing game.

“It’s basically a really strange form of scripting,” Liles said. “The weird part of doing my job is keeping the programmer in mind.”

He said his job is basically to fill in the gaps between gameplay — giving nonplayable characters personalities and filling in backstories, themes and moods for the game’s elements. As games continue to evolve, he said, the plot is becoming more and more important.

“You can’t have a game anymore without a story,” Liles said. “Gamers are so entrenched now in good graphics and a good story.”

Not all critics are ready to accept video games as a new medium for storytelling. Liles pointed out that even film aficionado Roger Ebert has criticized the gaming industry as too young and infantile to be an art form.

But as Liles points out, literature buffs used a similar argument when film began to arrive on the scene.

“Now obviously, movies are seen as art,” he said. “Video games are in the same boat.”

Devin Orgeron, a professor in film studies who teaches a science-fiction film course, couldn’t agree more. He said film scholars who are savvy are beginning to see video games as intertwined with the future of the profession.

“I see it as kind of a fusion of two different entertainment technologies,” Orgeron said. “It truly is a cyborg.”

In places like Scandinavia, he said, scholars are already studying video games. Although he said it will take an “academic ground swell” before video games become a serious part of any humanities curriculum, he said film studies once had a similar problem.

“The more video games respond to things around them, the more academics will have to open up and bring theses items into their classroom,” Orgeron said. “The wave of graduate students [now] is probably the wave that will go on to teach visual culture in a broader sense.”

Orgeron said video games, especially those in the science fiction genre, allow players to manipulate the narrative in new ways that have a broad appeal.

“There’s that real tactile involvement that the player has experienced on a cognitive level in the cinema,” he said. “While the cinema asks the viewer to identify mentally, video games ask you to identify through mediation — through a joystick or a controller — physically.”

But no matter how different the experience of playing a video game may be, and no matter how much the technology in this new form of storytelling progresses, Kessel said video games will always be influenced by science-fiction classics — novels like War of the Worlds and Ender’s Game.

“I’ll bet you these game designers have read those books,” Kessel said.