Clive Thompson looks at the weird marriage between video games and books over at Wired. From the piece:

You're supposed to probe the internal lives of your characters. And this is where these books become really fascinating: They're like the Us Weekly of the gaming universe.

Most adroitly, Thompson points at the dissonance hearing about Master Chief's fear of combat creates, since we, the gamer, are supposed to be Master Chief. Thompson points out "it's passingly strange to have an author suddenly grab the emotional joystick and explain what the Chief feels what I feel."