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I just don't really get this. The Master Chief is a main battle tank shrunk to size and wrapped around a cyborg trained from war from the age of six. In a novel where he was a viewpoint character, I'd expect his emotions to be readily apparent. Since Halo is a game, there's a lot of interpretation and guesswork involved.
And whatever the people at Bungie say, the Master Chief never struck me as a blank slate. It's subtle, but he emotes through body language in Halo: Combat Evolved. You see him tense up in the Control Room when he realizes that something is wrong with 343 Guilty Spark. Contrast that with how he first entered the control room; relaxed but alert. Halo 3 finished off the blank-slatedness by bringing up his origins during the Cortana flashes and the tender moment when he reaches Cortana in High Charity.
To me, a blank slate leaves the character's emotional reactions to the world around them to the player's imagination. The Security Officer in Marathon is a blank slate. The Rookie is a blank slate. Noble Six is a blank slate with no emotional connection to the team. The characters in Borderlands are barely more than blank slates, and then only because of their verbal boasting whenever they kill badass enemies.