P as in Pterodactyl

The Walking Dead

thatstacey — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:46:00 -0400

I’ve only read the first few issues of Robert Kirkman’s original comic books, but I have a strange fascination with the television incarnation of The Walking Dead. It’s a bit like watching a train wreck; I just can’t wrap my head around how a show can be as beautifully shot as it is and, you know, about zombies, but still be as mirthless and relentlessly terrible as it continues to be. And it is a terrible show to be sure—what with its nonexistent characters and conflicts in what is purported to be an ensemble drama. Even so, I schedule time every Sunday to catch a new episode. Partially it’s that strange fascination with how the show continues to drown in its own mythology (or lack thereof) that brings me back, but I also return to The Walking Dead week after week with a little hope that maybe this week will finally click. Maybe—just maybe—the next episode will finally get it and dig the series out of its hole. It is with this mindset that I enter TellTale Games’ The Walking Dead, an episodic adventure game based on the same source material. The first episode is currently available for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC with the promise of four subsequent episodes over as many months. (I’ll be playing the series on my MacBook with my trackpad and keyboard. Aw yeah.) The game, like the show, looks beautiful with a compelling, comic book-esque aesthetic that is anchored by fantastic facial animations. Also like the show, the game features a lot of talking—not all of it necessary. The real test of quality, then, becomes whether or not the rest of its components—especially the writing and core mechanics—can measure up to its slick art direction.

In The Walking Dead players take on the role of Lee Everett. Despite not appearing in the comics or the television series, Lee will be familiar to most players as what is becoming an archetype for horror game protagonists: the sympathetic convict who may-or-may-not have committed a violent crime against a family member (and if he did, he probably had Reasons with a capital ‘R;’ as my iteration of Lee explained to one character, “it’s complicated.”). This seems to have become the go-to hero in western-produced, mainstream horror games because it comes prepackaged with both the intrinsic horror of the beast in the boudoir and the more practical excuse for its requisite everyman hero to handle weaponry. To its credit, TellTale makes good use of this archetype both in character-building conversations and combat. In the case of the former, there’s a great, playable dramatic moment early in the game in which a fellow survivor asks Lee if he has killed anyone. The other survivor is expecting a zombie story, but Lee and the player know that he has killed someone (or at least been convicted of killing someone) long before the zombie epidemic started. Egged on by the quickly draining timer, the player is forced to choose between two zombie stories—one that corroborates the lie he’s concocted about his identity, one that might contradict it—and a confession to his actual crimes. This exchange underlines the game’s biggest potential strength, though it has yet to be seen how it will payoff in the overarching narrative. Fortunately, this aspect of Lee’s character is reinforced by the smart and sparse encounters with the eponymous walking dead.

Another strength of the game is the way in which it carefully paces its combat—both in its measured distribution of encounters throughout the game and in the actual frenetic action. For its part, combat is a combination of quick-time-event keyboard cues and aiming with the mouse (or, in my case, a trackpad that calls for some Olympics-grade finger gymnastics). The game paces its combat out well, using narrative-appropriate visual distortions—like blurring the picture after Lee hits his head—to create great moments of suspense and even genuine panic without it ever feeling tired. Although convicted of a horrible crime, a trained killer Lee is not; however, the combat does provide for moments of vicious ingenuity like when Lee and the player repurpose a pillow as a silencer for a handgun. This bit of quick and brutal problem solving provides a peek at the beast—a wonderful glimpse into something much more sinister under (my) Lee’s concerned and affectionate exterior. This is something I hope will be explored in future installments as (my) Lee becomes more invested in protecting his fellow survivors.

For now, the narrative backbone of The Walking Dead is the relationship between Lee and Clementine—a young girl he happens upon in his search for help. The dialogue-based format creates the perfect platform for exploring the relationship between protector and charge without bogging the game down with frustrating escort missions—gaming’s unfortunate go-to mechanic when it comes to communicating responsibility. Instead, suspense is allocated to the player’s performance in the aforementioned timed conversations in which the player must quickly choose the best option for either gaining Clementine’s trust or gaining the trust of other characters to ensure Lee and Clementine’s survival. It is mostly through these conversations that the player shapes Lee’s character and to which the game supposedly adapts.

Before I’m even allowed to start my game, The Walking Dead promises/warns me that it will adapt to my choices. It’s a warning that lacks the delightfully b-movie menace of the similar message found before Konami’s Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (“this game plays you as much as you play it.”), and I’m not convinced by this claim. However, it is an interesting prospect. More so than the usual rhetoric surrounding “choice” in games—which is to say, empty PR buzz that has little bearing on the actions players take—I read this as a chance to fix the main problem I have with the show. Namely, the videogame adaptation of The Walking Dead provides the tools to create and maintain the consistent, complex central character and interesting conflicts with which the writers of the show can’t be bothered. From this standpoint, the real pleasure of The Walking Dead comes from its conversation and decision making mechanic. The player spends a majority of the game watching conversations between characters before the reigns are handed to her at a pivotal point in the dialogue. When this occurs in a game like Mass Effect, the player is given as much time as necessary to mull over the possible ramifications of her choice. By contrast, the decision points in The Walking Dead’s conversations are timed—a fact the player is reminded of by the rapidly draining progress bar below her options. This underlines the immediacy of the current crisis; in other words, it reconfigures the Mass Effect-esque question of “how will my actions come back to bite me later?” to “how can I stay alive right now?” Although the timer makes it a little more difficult to carefully craft my dream The Walking Dead character, the result is a palpable sense of urgency that fits the horror genre well. However, once the decision is made, its payoff is not immediately clear nor is it especially satisfying.

Playing the “standard” version The Walking Dead—which includes more textual and visual cues for the player than its “minimal” mode—offers some form of immediate payoff for player decisions. These come in the form of a nondiegetic box that appears in the top left corner of the screen, explaining how your decision immediately affects the dynamics of the group. For example, early in the game, I decided to lie to some survivors by telling them Lee was Clementine’s babysitter (it just seemed easier); after making this decision, text appeared letting me know that these characters now believed that Lee was the babysitter. This is potentially helpful in teaching players the ways in which they can shape Lee’s story. However, as my game went on, I found myself wishing to turn the feature off so that I could discover the repercussions for myself. Once having started a new game without the prompts—in The Walking Dead’s “minimal” mode—I found that these cues were necessary because the actual repercussions in the game were not always clear—if they were accounted for at all. Even when making drastically different decisions between both of my playthroughs, I often got similar dialogue trees with no discernable difference. Although I wasn’t surprised by this revelation, it was still fairly discouraging.

For a game that is pitched to players as one that adapts to their choices, the writing surrounding such choices is not consistent enough to clue the player into how she’s affecting the world. Some appear small, like when a supporting character repeatedly refers to Clementine as Lee’s daughter even after being told she was not. Small changes in dialogue are seemingly inoffensive, but when the player uses them gauge her influence over the game world, even the smallest of slips becomes a problem when it fails to acknowledge her actions. An especially sloppy example occurs in a section late in the game during which Clementine discovers Lee’s criminal past. More accurately, while exploring a room with Clementine, no less than three conversations occur that tip Clementine off to his dishonesty—one involving an object being where it shouldn’t be, one in which he is accused in front of her, and another in which she asks about his family. Despite taking place virtually back-to-back, each of these conversations seems to occur completely independent of one another with no consideration for what came before or will come after. The resulting dialogue—even with adequate voice acting and accompanied by that great animation—is stilted and affectless; it does nothing to shape or expand the player’s understanding of game world or its characters. However, while I am focusing on the writing, this is a problem in which the writing and the design are equally at fault. The developers faced a challenge that many an RPG developer has faced before them: how to take into account that the player could encounter these three conversations in any order. More importantly, many an RPG developer (though not all) has solved this problem on much larger projects with many more variables. This makes the fact that TellTale was unable to resolve it in such a short episode a bit disconcerting. If the quick decision making in respect to the formulation of Lee’s character is one of The Walking Dead’s greatest potential strengths, then surely it its inability to create or otherwise communicate consequences to players that is its greatest weakness.

In this regard, TellTale Games’ The Walking Dead suffers from some of the same pitfalls as its television counterpart. Namely, its characters mostly talk past each other, never actually clashing nor agreeing with meaningful consequences. It certainly doesn’t help The Walking Dead’s case that its conflicts feel as though they are measured not by their established stakes (or lack there of), but by the number of times—and increasingly creative ways—characters use the word “fuck.” This becomes especially obvious when the game attempts to establish some kind of rudimentary conflict between Lee and another character towards the end of the episode. After all of the yelling, swearing, threats, and attempts on Lee’s life, I can say that I have no idea what that conflict is. Relying on naughty language feels cheap and offers little in the way of stakes or consequences. By the end of the game, I still don’t know who most of the other survivors are, which becomes a problem as the game asks me to help shape Lee’s status among them—even going so far as to demand that I choose which characters live and die. As compelling as some of the choices presented to Lee are, they ultimately mean nothing if they occur in a vacuum.

But, like the show, there is always the promise that the next episode will be better. There are a lot of good ideas kicking around in The Walking Dead—enough to make me want to play the next episode whenever it becomes available. I just hope it can straighten all of those ideas out in a compelling way instead of waiting to trip all over them in the series finale. (But hey, I’ve been burned before.)

Mass Effect and Choice (or something like it. Pt 2/2)

thatstacey — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:44:00 -0400

This is something of a sequel to my previous post, ”Mass Effect and Choice (or something like it. Pt 1/2)” I promise this one is shorter.

At this point, I think I’ve finally progressed from anger over the awfulness of Mass Effect’s ending to “next time Bioware mentions its ‘artistic integrity’ EVERYBODY TAKES A DRINK,” which I suppose is the closest I’ll ever come to acceptance. That said, there’s still something I’d like to address. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the controversy over Mass Effect 3’s aforementioned artistic integrity and authorship.

Go ahead and grab a bottle. I’ll wait.

On “real art”

Taylor Clark offers an assessment for The New Yorker that is predictably heavy with hyperbole and misrepresentation of fan concerns—including comparing the Take Back Mass Effect movement to Kathy Bates’ sadistic fan in Stephen King’s Misery. However, it does introduce an especially interesting concept: the idea that by “stick[ing] to its guns” in the face of fan outcry, Mass Effect 3 could transcend into “real art.” The reason I dredge up Clark’s editorial—as dismissive and inflammatory as it is in its extremes—is because the concept of an immovable “real art” seems to be reflected in the gaming press as well. Even Bioware’s own have come to the defense of Mass Effect 3’s ending with its “artistic integrity” on the front line. For example, shortly after the fan outcry started to gain momentum, studio co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka released a statement acknowledging fan feedback and foregrounding the challenge of preserving the team’s “artistic integrity;” similarly, the new “Extended Cut” DLC was announced with the assurance that Bioware still believed in its team’s “artistic vision.” So what does it mean to stick to one’s guns in Clark’s coveted art world?

One example of commercial art “stick[ing] to its guns” that Clark presents is The Sopranos’ controversial series finale. While many viewers were bewildered—if not angered—by it, Clark notes that there were no serious demands for a reshoot. He attributes this to the comparative sophistication of not just The Sopranos viewers, but to television audiences as a whole in comparison to those who play videogames. Where Mass Effect players demanded “bigger guns, bouncier boobs, and more facile storylines” (wait, what?), viewers of The Sopranos solemnly accepted the fate of their favorite show. For Clark, an audiences’ sophistication is marked by its ability to “understand that while they might hate any given plot decision, they ultimately have to respect the creative wishes of those who made the thing great in the first place.” More importantly, it is this respect of one’s artistic vision that “gives the medium integrity.” Of course there are examples to the contrary, many of which are listed by Becky Chambers in her assessment of the ME3 controversy over at The Mary Sue. In fact, she uses the fan efforts to rescue television series like Firefly and Community as evidence to the inherent malleability of art. Though I suppose that Clark would dismiss these as examples that fall short of being “real art,” it certainly says something for the medium’s alleged integrity.

Forbes’ David Thier counters Clark’s argument directly by pointing out what should be obvious: television shows and videogames are not the same thing. As such, they lend themselves to different kinds of audience engagement. Therefore, their respective reactions to fan outcry should not be attributed to an alleged lack of sophistication, but to fundamental differences in the implicit agreement between author/artist and audience.

….to compare games to movies and television, you need to acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between a passive experience like a movie and an interactive experience like Mass Effect. You didn’t have this kind of outcry over The Sopranos because the viewers never wrote their own story of Tony Soprano.

The New Yorker is right – games will never get the respect they deserve unless they can own up to being the kind of art that they are. But the mistake is in thinking that when they come out of the wash and emerge as art, they will look just like the other art forms we’ve grown accustomed to. This is something new, and the Mass Effect debate is about figuring out what it is.

While Thier’s send-off is fantastic—videogames need to establish themselves as their own art form, not bend to the rules of another medium—I’m not convinced that Mass Effect 3’s issue is one of authorial control. In my previous post, I said that removing the element of player choice from Mass Effect’s narrative trajectory would only underline the final 10 minutes’ shortcomings as a proper conclusion. In other words, if complete authorial control were afforded to Bioware—much like it was afforded to David Chase and his crew on The Sopranos—ending Shepard’s story with the acceptance of logic that runs contrary to all of her personal experience would put up a red flag. It should say to any reader or editor that the ending makes no sense; it should say that the ending does not belong to this story. In other words, the problem with Mass Effect 3’s ending isn’t an inadequate number of big guns or bigger tits to sate the “core gamer” (to borrow Clark’s term and derisive scare quotes), rather it’s simply a bad ending that doesn’t cohere with all that came before (thematically and otherwise). As obvious as it should be, this red flag signifying “NOTHING MAKES SENSE” was notably absent from most professional reviews of the game. Some critics and journalists who did mention the ending even applauded it as brave. Specifically, they noted that instead of a normal videogame ending, it was “artistic.” This certainly feeds into that problematic loop Thier mentioned—that “videogame” and “art” are seen as mutually exclusive terms. In this view, videogames must bend to the rules of other mediums to be accepted as “art.” But why is being “art” so important in the first place? Why did “artistic integrity” become Bioware’s first line of defense?

What all this really means

The common thread here seems to be a view that “art”—or at least Clark’s “real art”—is the untouchable apex of media production and consumption. Once something is labeled “art,” it is immune to critique and the artists’ choices must be respected. In the case of Mass Effect 3, by subverting videogame conventions—like not having a final boss—and providing players with abstract choices, Mass Effect 3 is deemed “artistic.” On the other hand, this creates the strange, false dilemma that in order to criticize it, one must first declare Mass Effect 3 not to be art and therefore subject to being torn apart for its failings. These views are equally problematic; bad art exists, and even artwork that is canonically “good” is subject to critique. This is especially true of commercial art for which criticism is not only easily accessible by the audience, but internal review is an integral part of the creative process in bringing a text to print or screen. I’m not sure where this notion of “artistic integrity” as a get-out-of-jail-free card came from in the videogame industry, but it’s a big hurdle it needs to get over.

More than anything, I think the strange separation of “game” and “art” in ME3 reviews points to the current system’s inadequacy to address the ending’s problems. This inadequacy takes the form of a double whammy with the absence of both a vocabulary to articulate the reviewer’s feelings and expectation that the ending will be discussed at all. We can see this in reviews like Sal Basile’s for UGO in which he vaguely explains that he “liked the themes present” before finally settling on a comparison to The Matrix: Revolutions while still managing to say nothing at all—“it explored spiritual themes of a greater power and self-sacrifice, but not in a way you’ll likely be thinking.” (what does that mean?) On the other hand, a disproportionate amount of Basile’s review, like many other reviews, is occupied with what players will do the game—how they will fight enemies, collect War Assets—without any consideration for how these activities are made meaningful by Mass Effect’s overarching narrative. Almost all reviews make a point to emphasize the finality of Shepard’s final outing, but they don’t address how player action necessarily contributes—or doesn’t contribute—to that sense of finality. This is a problem. Specifically, his review—like many—is set up to fail by this by-the-books adherence to the precedent set by other game reviewers of other games. This is to say that Mass Effect 3—despite how important the narrative trappings are to its enjoyment—is still treated primarily as a ludic, largely technical artifact first, and any narrative or textual trappings exist on the periphery. The ludic and technical aspects are what fundamentally set videogames apart from other mediums, but its the interplay between the technical and the textual that makes a game like Mass Effect 3 possible, let alone pleasurable. I think a little more consideration for the textual—in reference to the technical—would give reviewers the tools to address some of ME3’s biggest accomplishments and failings.

It is for this reasons that I find the rhetoric about player authorship and the developer’s “artistic integrity” a bit of a strawman. Perhaps instead of questioning whether or not Bioware or the players deserves the right to exercise authorial control—the “dangerous precedent” Bioware and EA could set by bowing to the (perceived) whims of their fans—we should instead examine why the onus is on the fans alone to hold Bioware and EA accountable for the quality of their story. More so than the questions of authorship, the controversy over Mass Effect 3 is indicative of the inadequacy of the current industry to both issue and respond to textual criticisms. Fan outcry exists and is responded to not because Mass Effect isn’t art or is somehow less sophisticated, but—at least in part—because fan outcry is the only accessible platform through which these criticisms can be voiced. I realize that this is a large, blanket accusation; however, I think it’s a discussion worth starting. This is all part of the growing pains of an art form, right?

…Ok, maybe it’s a conversation worth starting when you’re sober. Tequila Se’lai.

Stacey

Quick Notes: Radeya on “Mass Effect and Choice”

gabnation — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:12:00 -0400

I don’t know what happened in the last few moments of development for ME3 – writer Patrick Weekes left a post online that might give a little insight, but things can only be left to speculation. But I certainly know this – BioWare could have done better. They did such a marvellous job with the rest of the game that it’s simply inconceivable that they could have messed up that badly and completely forgotten how to tell a story in the last ten minutes.

For me, what caused me to feel so grievously betrayed was the fact that my choice in the ending didn’t matter. Yes, the half-assed explanation of the existence of the Reapers and the Catalyst pissed me off, and so did the three choices that I was forced to pick. I did go “but I… but I… but I reconciled the Quarians and the Geth!” and wished deeply that my Shepard could have pulled a Renegade and called out that damn little boy on his circular logic, but I acquiesced. The strength of the individual missions pre-ending had given me enough closure for the choices that I had made in the series – they weren’t reflected in the ending, yes, and I do wish there was greater consequence to your choices, but I was emotionally satisfied enough to forgive those flaws and suspend my disbelief for just a little longer.

But only till the mass relays blew up. That was the tipping point that took me over the edge.

Experienced Points writer Shamus Young explains very concisely that there are three things that audiences usually look for in an ending – affirmation, explanation and/or closure.

I was looking for closure. I certainly wasn’t expecting a good old fashioned happy ending. While it does pain me to see my Shepard die after all that trouble, I really appreciate finally being able to see her show some vulnerability at the end. The woman who cheated death and single-handedly brought down a Reaper is… just like the rest of us. Vulnerable. Perishable. Human. That moment when she was pulling herself towards the console on the Citadel, bleeding, I felt an overwhelming sense of love for this character and a flooding of admiration for her tremendous resolve and selflessness. It would have been nice to survive, but sacrificing one’s life for a greater cause makes for a more poetic and poignant ending, doesn’t it?

Well, theoretically. Think about this – what was the point of Mass Effect? What was its main theme? Everyone’s experience of the game will be different, and different things will be of varying levels of importance to different people. But I think I can safely say that one of the most important themes of ME is friendship. Like Stacey said, interacting with other characters and building relationships with your squadmates is one of the key pleasures of the game. Friendship is an important element in the Mass Effect experience – the game certainly encourages players to make friends – you get rewarded with war assets for strong relationships, and the game makes you look like a heartless homicidal jackass (with less war assets) if you choose to kill a member of your squad.

For me, the reason why I wanted to destroy the Reapers was personal – it was so that Wrex can live out the future he’s always dreamed of on Tuchanka, so that Tali can retire on Rannoch and finally be free from the imprisonment of her suit… you know, all those dreams of your friends that have become very important to you over the course of the three games. I was fighting for their futures, more than I was fighting for mine. So I made the biggest sacrifice you can ever make in a game for their sakes – I chose to give up my life, definitively ending my ability to play the game for good.

But it was all for nothing. Why? Because my friends were all on Earth and my choice resulted in the destruction of the mass relays, their very means of getting home. And it didn’t matter which choice you picked – the same events will happen with little variation. BioWare’s decision to have the event occur no matter what – just the sheer finality of it – is the thing that made me livid. It undoes everything that I have worked so hard for in all three games, and makes everything meaningless. I protected thousands of lives, but not the ones that mattered to me.

And to add insult to the injury, the game didn’t think that I deserved any kind of closure after the immediate events of the Citadel. I didn’t know who among my friends survived (Joker doesn’t really count), or what happened to them in the years after. I didn’t get to know what happened on Earth or to any of the alien planets. Basically, I was not told if my efforts, if my sacrifice, made any difference at all. It would have sufficed, although just barely, to have a couple of lines of text telling me what happened after.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that BioWare missed the point of the game. They certainly understood the emotional significance of your friends by having the flashback of them near the end. But their genuine surprise at the scale of the uproar from fans suggests that they underestimated the emotional attachment players have developed for the world they have created and their need for an emotionally satisfying pay-off. Maybe that’s where they went wrong.

I don’t condone a complete re-write. The ending was what BioWare chose to tell and so, okay. But I am expecting a more complete ending in the extended cut to the one that was originally given to us, broken mass relays and all.

-Radeya

Mass Effect and Choice (or something like it. Part 1/2)

thatstacey — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:45:00 -0400

UPDATE June 02, 2012: Good news, everyone! It looks like Shepard will have more dialogue in Mass Effect 3’s “Extended Cut” DLC after all. Whether or not this addresses any of the endings many, many problems has yet to be seen, but this seems like a step in the right direction.

Major spoilers for the Mass Effect series below!

Now that it’s been several weeks since Mass Effect 3’s release—decades in Internet Years—there have been plenty entries in plenty mediums explaining exactly what is wrong with the game’s final 10 minutes. And it really does take plenty of entries in plenty of mediums to explain—there’s a lot wrong with those final 10 minutes. I won’t go into the specific plot holes here because they’re big—big enough to drive a whole space ship through while it deserts the biggest battle in human history to go… somewhere with a crew that should either be on the ground with me or vaporized. However, there’s one particular problem with the ending that has niggled at me since my first playthrough. This angry little itch has only gotten worse now that I’m approaching the ME3 hat trick and the game critic community continues to chew on the same problem. My main beef with ME3 boils down to the apparent lack of choice in the eleventh hour and whether we as players in Mass Effect’s vast sandbox really had any choice to begin with (and contending with the occasional addendum of “we didn’t have any so stop whining, losers”).

So how does Mass Effect 3 end? Mass Effect 3 was certainly under a lot of pressure to resolve some of the series’ biggest conflicts, arguably the biggest of which being the galaxy’s impending war with the Reapers. The return of the Reapers—giant, sentient space crafts capable of wiping out whole civilizations—is a threat that hangs over the events of the first two Mass Effect games, and it finally comes to fruition in Mass Effect 3. Instead of recruiting new characters for their motley crew of do-gooders, Shepard and the player are now tasked with recruiting assets for a galactic war—technology, politicians, armies, and scientists. Their progress can be tracked through both a console on Shepard’s ship and conversations with Admiral Hackett, who is building an ancient super weapon called the Crucible. A driving force of the narrative in the second and third act is discovering the final piece to the Crucible’s puzzle—something ham-fistedly codenamed the Catalyst.

The final 10 minutes of Mass Effect 3 turn this plot thread on its head by revealing that the Catalyst is actually an entirely new character—represented by a hologram of a little boy. This new character explains that it created the Reapers in order to reign in the chaos inherent of organic evolution—specifically, the inevitability that all organics would eventually evolve to create their own synthetic servants, and that these synthetics would inevitably rise against and kill their organic masters. The Reapers, then, serve to preen the organic hedge—to ensure that advanced civilizations do not even have the opportunity to complete their self-destructive cycle. With his explanation, the Catalyst leaves Shepard and the player with three final choices: destroy all synthetic life (friends and foes alike), control the Reapers and die in the process, or sacrifice Shepard to enable the final step of evolution in which everyone is part synthetic, part organic. Put another way, Shepard and the player can choose to commit Space Genocide, Space Indoctrination of an entire race, or participate in some horrifying exercise in Space Eugenics. Once phrased this way, I would hope that it is clear why I dispute these choices from an ethical standpoint, but it’s not really about me, is it? It’s about Shepard and whether or not she would dispute these choices—ethically or otherwise. This is the epicenter of my problems with the ending and why I believe Mass Effect 3 ultimately ignores my choices and—in doing so—denies me closure.

The good news is Bioware and EA are seemingly receptive of fan criticisms in so far as they’re willing to release the upcoming free “Extended Cut” DLC to patch its ending. The bad news, of course, is that Bioware and EA don’t seem to actually listen to any of the fan criticisms, because this DLC addresses exactly none of them. “The Extended Cut” was announced with the promise of additional scenes that would “provide additional clarity and closure.” Closure is a big deal for me, but clarity? The fact that the ending needs clarified at all should be sending up some red flags at Bioware and EA; as Youtube user MrBtongue succinctly put it in his analysis, “Mass Effect 3’s ending is broken;” the game doesn’t need to be clarified, it needs to be fixed. Given that Commander Shepard’s voice actor Jennifer Hale has not been asked to be record new dialogue, you can bet these clarifying cut-scenes won’t address the biggest issue I have with the ending, which is how it completely ignores my choices in creating this character and shaping galactic events. Therefore, allow me to clarify what I mean when I say the endgame ignores choices and thus (since the two are intrinsically linked) denies me closure.

But first, let’s talk about choice

Talking about “choice” in videogames is always tricky; it usually comes across in a “do what I mean, not what I say” sort of way. This is because we don’t usually make choices in videogames. As James Portnow and Daniel Floyd’s pre-Extra Credits video, “Video Games and Choice,” explains, most choices we encounter in videogames are either patently false—an extended but ultimately circular dialogue tree—or cleverly disguised problem solving—determining which cool-looking sword will get the player the best stats. In the case of the latter, the numbers running under the hood are given a slick narrative sheen in hopes of making it meaningful to the player, but it still doesn’t significantly change the game’s progression—it just makes it marginally easier or harder depending on the player’s equipment.

While the original Mass Effect especially tasks players with keeping track of all manner of sci-fi equipment for their squad, many of the choices players are purported to make affect the actual trajectory of the narrative—who lives and who dies, etc. For Kris Ligman, as she pointed out in her post about ME3’s ending, these choices are not meaningful because no matter what players do, certain plot points will always occur: a human squad member will always die on Virmire, Shepard will always battle Saren, and Shepard will always end up working for Cerberus in Mass Effect 2—even if she spends 20 of her 60 hours in the original Mass Effect wiping the floor with its soldiers. In other words, the ways in which players can change the trajectory of the story are limited; this is true. The reality, of course, is that every branch of Mass Effect’s story has to be accounted for and designed by Bioware, which makes the number branches finite by necessity. But I don’t think that necessarily makes these decisions meaningless.

Just because the choice isn’t meaningful in the way that completely changes the story’s trajectory doesn’t make it meaningless, especially in a game like Mass Effect. I think it’d be hard to argue that the conversation choices and character interactions aren’t two of the key pleasures to be found in Mass Effect. After all, players spend as much time in the first two Mass Effect game negotiating with other characters as they spend shooting them. Moreover, the developers seem to be aware of these pleasures because they’ve introduced a Story Mode in Mass Effect 3 where these narrative choices—who lives and who dies—make up the core gameplay mechanic. In this situation, it’s difficult for players to differentiate between the narrative sheen and the actual numbers running under the hood whenever a player makes a choice (or “choice” if you want to go all Turian Councillor on it). Sure, players can apply problem solving to their conversations. For example, in Mass Effect 3, they might discover that choosing the most diplomatic option will result in the most amount of War Assets being donated to their cause, resulting in some players mindlessly spinning their dialogue wheels up to the top right option. However, I think it would be remiss to dismiss the influence of that narrative sheen on most players. You can hum and haw about whether games can be narrative all you want, but the point here is that—at the very least—the trappings of narrative are an important aspect of the Mass Effect games. Especially in Story Mode, the story, the characters, and the choices/”choices” players make regarding them are integral to the experience. In this way, a “meaningless” decision like determining which human squad member dies on Virmire all the way back in Mass Effect has the potential to significantly influence the player’s experience in Mass Effect 3. It might not affect the War Assets, and it won’t change the trajectory of Shepard’s journey away from fighting Reapers, but it certainly affects the way in which the player engages with the story—with whom their Shepards are friends, whom they love, and whom they betray. Even if it doesn’t appear that way at the time—what with all those other numbers to keep track of in Mass Effect’s mess of a GUI—this decision becomes more meaningful to the player as they progress through the series.

In this way, I’d say Bioware made good on its promise to make sure our choices mattered—and that’s the heart of all of this, isn’t it? These choices are meaningful in part because we are told their outcomes will be meaningful; they are committed under both the assumption and the assurance that they will matter. Even if it was hard to tell in the heat of the moment during Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2, there is always the promise that a decision could come back in a big way in future games—either to your rescue or to bite you in the ass. That also becomes part of the pleasure—part of the thrill—of playing a Mass Effect game—how will tweaking this decision in my next playthrough come back to haunt me down the road? This, of course, is the same thing fans have been saying for weeks now: we were promised our choices would matter and they don’t. On the other hand, the opposition says we didn’t have choice to begin with. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, now that we’ve established what I mean by choices in Mass Effect, let me explain what I mean when I say Mass Effect 3’s ending ignores my choices (for real this time).

Ignoring my choices

In his defense of Mass Effect 3’s conclusion, Penny Arcade’s Ben Kuchera conflated players unsatisfied with the ending with those who were unsatisfied with the game itself—or otherwise somehow missed all of the choices they made along the way—and dismissed the whole lot as “insane.” Instead of focusing on what he describes as “a five minute movie [that] didn’t pat them on the back for what they’d done,” players should be looking to the entirety of the third game for narrative closure and payoff for their choices throughout the series. Sure enough, the visits to the five major alien homeworlds of the Mass Effect universe each incorporate a myriad of different possible plot threads—considering who lived and who died, what artifacts the player collected, etc—into numerous satisfying conclusions. These conclusions are paced over two acts. Each of these missions can end in the player either siding with one galactic race over another, or—if the player does all of the correct footwork—brokering peace to end centuries-long conflicts. Balancing so many variables is technically impressive; more importantly, the final product is well written, well paced, and immensely pleasurable to play through—especially with multiple Shepards to see all of the possible outcomes. In this way, I would say that Mass Effect 3 is overwhelmingly successful in giving its players a satisfying sense of closure while reflecting the player’s choices along the way. The problem for me is that—while each of the proceeding acts succinctly concludes some of the Mass Effect universe’s greatest conflicts, the final ten minutes undo any sense of closure players gain from tying up all of these loose ends—either by refusing to acknowledge the player’s experiences or introducing new problems that overshadow the player’s solutions. Let’s look at the missions surrounding the Quarian and Geth conflict as an example.

The conflict between the Geth and the Quarians is first established in the original Mass Effect in which the Geth are the primary adversary—or at least the primary cannon fodder. The player’s view of the Geth/Quarian conflict, then, is informed by a combination of the waves of faceless Geth shooting at Shepard and her squad, and exposition from the Quarian squad member Tali. As Tali explains, the Geth exiled her people from their planet to a disgraced, nomadic lifestyle in the far reaches of the galaxy. When the player later learns that the Geth are actually working for a Reaper, Sovereign, in its plan to wipe out all organic species, Mass Effect draws clear, unmistakable battle lines. In a hypothetical war against a synthetic enemy like the Geth or the Reapers, it is a battle of us versus them—good organics versus evil synthetics—thus drumming up sympathy for the Quarians. More importantly here, the war between the Geth and the Quarians as it is first pitched to players in the original Mass Effect is exemplary of the inevitable conflict between synthetic and organic races at the crux of the Catalyst’s logic. However, this cut-and-dry dichotomy—good organics versus evil synthetics—is irreconcilably complicated by the introduction of sympathetic synthetic characters in Mass Effect 2.

In Mass Effect 2, Shepard and the player are introduced to the Normandy’s new AI EDI and, perhaps more importantly here, a Geth EDI names Legion. Legion reveals to the player that the Geth they faced during Mass Effect were “heretics”—a splinter group that followed the Reapers as sort of religious figures—and not reflective of the Geth consensus as a whole. This invariably shakes up the once rigid moral division between synthetics and organics. Brokering trust—or, at the very least, tolerance—between Legion and Tali also becomes a key decision point for players, determining which character is ultimately loyal to Shepard, if not to each other.

Assuming both survived the events of the second game, Shepard is reunited with Tali and Legion in Mass Effect 3. Shepard will be able to complete a number of missions—one with Tali, one with Legion—that will give her and the player a more holistic view of the conflict, allowing them to eventually side with one race over the other or—if they have Legion and Tali’s trust and complete all of the missions to completely understand the conflict—a third option to broker peace emerges. None of these options come without sacrifice—either Legion’s noble self-sacrifice to free the Geth or Tali’s suicide if Shepard is unable to encourage a peaceful outcome—but that goes along with the territory. When making choices—especially choices of the big, intergalactic peace kind—there will always be consequences. Isn’t seeing those consequences play out one of Mass Effect’s pleasures—good or bad?

As these characters’ arcs come to a close over the course of Mass Effect 3, Shepard and the player are repeatedly shown how the Catalyst’s inevitable conflict might not be so—synthetics rebel, but its under the systematic abuses of their creators. Allow the synthetics equal autonomy and Shepard does not just accomplish peace between synthetics and organics, but she sets the stage for a willing cooperation both in the task of rebuilding their shared planet and fighting the Reapers.

Flash-forward a few more hours to the endgame where the catalyst tells my Shepard that the Reapers do their reaping because the organics will always make synthetics that will destroy them. Just like the Quarians and the Geth. Or something.

After helping the Geth and the Quarians, there’s a big, fat, “Yeah, but…” hanging over the entire final 10 minutes. Being told that Shepard must choose her flavor of galactic war crime because synthetics will always try to kill organics otherwise does not leave me agonizing over the fate of the galaxy; it does not make me feel small and insignificant and in awe of the larger space opera; it leaves me stuck at the intellectual hurdle of how my Shepard is even in this situation to begin with—how the choices I made in molding her character and galactic events could lead her to unquestioningly accept the Catalyst’s terms. If anything, Shepard and I repeatedly proved the Catalyst wrong. Where is the fourth, “I reject your circular logic. Now excuse me while I and my united-against-all-odds army go out guns blazing” option? Because that’s the road I thought my Shepard was heading down.

So did I ultimately have any choice in the matter? Well, no, Mass Effet 3’s final 10 minutes made that abundantly clear. You can’t even say that Mass Effect 3’s ending was effective problem solving—the player is not given enough information to make an educated decision one way or the other. However, this does not mean that I never had choice—that I never had any agency in Mass Effect and I somehow “misunder[stood] the developer’s rhetoric,” as Ligman suggests, because I just spent the other 90% of the game seeing my choices pay-off spectacularly. It’s only the last few minutes that completely ignores those choices—that all but inserts an entirely new Shepard in place of my own—and expects me to roll with it. This is a problem—more specifically, this is my problem with Mass Effect 3. In finishing Mass Effect 3, I do not get to experience the ending to my Shepard’s story. Rather, I am shown the ending to someone else’s story. Just as it does not reflect my choices—my Shepard’s experience—the ending does not grant me closure for my Shepard’s story.

If the element of choice (or “choice”) was removed—if this was a movie—and the hero had spent the entire second act successfully ending centuries-old conflicts between synthetics and organics (not to mention repeatedly discussing human nature with her AI squadmate), having her accept that the conflict can only be resolved through either Space Genocide, Space Indoctrination, or Space Eugenics would have been unquestioningly qualified as bad writing. Why are we so eager to give Mass Effect 3 the benefit of the doubt—to attribute to it some sort of meta conversation about choice or somehow blame the audience for misunderstanding PR rhetoric? I think that’s just cracking the surface of a larger, perhaps less popular discussion: why are the fans the only ones questioning Mass Effect 3’s ending?

But that’s a post for another time.

Stacey

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gabnation — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 03:01:00 -0400

Welcome to P as in Pterodactyl folks! We are two girls with opinions* on games, and since we have few friends who share our enthusiasm on such enlightening topics for conversation, we’ve decided to start our own blog.

[*Bold and strong opinions, baby! In case the font stylisation didn’t bring that point across.]

Most of the time, we share similar opinions on a lot of things, but we don’t agree on a lot, too. One of them being Stacey writes in American English, and I in UK. If the flip-flopping between ‘S’ and ‘Z’s and ‘O’ and ‘OU’s gives you a headache, sorry about that. You might succeed at changing someone’s character, but making someone spell ‘colour’ instead of ‘color’ and vice-versa would be near impossible. ;)

So this is our humble blog, and welcome, once again. Given both of us are still playing Mass Effect 3 (yep, even after getting shot in the heart by the ending), the game will be our topic of discussion for the first few posts.

And despite all the uproar and heartache, we shall refrain from complaining about the ending… too much. We’re too intellectual to complain about such petty things, right Stacey? Well, at least we hope so anyway. :) Till the next post!

Signing off with an injured index finger from playing ME3 on insanity,

Radeya