Baldur's Gate > Mass Effect > The Ending of Mass Effect > Your Mom

So I have a ton of video game blogs/news sites on my RSS feed. And the vast majority of them have been inundated with articles and editorials about the so-called Mass Effect 3 "controversy" lately. Now, I haven't played any of the Mass Effects on account of having old, slow computers and no disposable income. But I have been a Bioware fan since the 90s and have recently gone back to Baldur's Gate for my first playthrough in over a decade. In the process, I've run across some things that have caused me to have a rather strong opinion on the whole Mass Effect ending thing. Granted, as I said, I haven't seen that ending, so maybe that invalidates my opinion completely. But then again, we are on the internet, where opinions are even more like assholes than usual. Or something.

Oh, 2005.

So let's start here, because this is an especially good place to start. That article gives a good summary of the controversy so I don't have to, and it does so without coming down strongly on one side or the other.

Now, here's the deal. Games do not tell stories. At least, not in the traditional sense of what we understand a story to be. To paraphrase Tadhg Kelly's blog post that I'm currently too lazy to quote directly, traditional stories operate on dramatic tension (generally speaking: there can be comedic drama, "serious" drama, etc.). This tension is generated by the audience's lack of agency: sitting back and waiting for the dumb cheerleader to get butchered by the insane, zombie scarecrow while you scream "TURN AROUND, OH GOD, TURN AROUND!" is dramatic. If you were able to enter the movie and make the cheerleader leave the room, get in her car, hotwire it when the key refused to turn in the ignition, and then drive to the police station, the movie would cease to be dramatic. Being in direct control of the cheerleader's escape might be exciting in its own right, but it would not be dramatic, even if that's sort of what it would feel like. Drama requires a lack of agency, and that lack of agency is what makes a story worth hearing, or seeing.

So you see how video games break this system, right?

Hint: it's with this.

What videogames do instead is make you an active part of the story. Mario is you, to a degree. Commander Shepard is you, arguably to an even greater degree. The choices you make in the playing of a game make that playing -- your story -- unique to you. Even though many players play the same game, which is always ordered by the same code, their experiences are all going to be, to a degree, unique. Even if you and I are just playing Tetris, the "story" of each of our play sessions is going to be a bit different. If both of us play Mass Effect, the differences are more pronounced, and most likely more emotionally and personally significant. The way we each play the game is what creates that difference.

"Back in 1991, your grandpa turned the L-shaped block twice, and then he stacked the box block on top of that, and then he dropped the long block next to that...it was awesome."

But that's not all that's going on. There's also the code. The code makes the world. It defines the limits of the player's avatar's abilities to interact with that world. It defines how quickly the Tetris blocks fall. It ultimately decides when the game ends. The player (as opposed to the audience) gets to take part in telling the story of a video game, but the game's rules -- as designed and coded by the developers -- play an equal part. It is within the tension between the player's desires and the limits the devs have put on the player's expression of those desires that the fun, pleasure, excitement, angst, hatred, malice, screaming, etc. of playing a video game comes into being. It's what makes games games.

Well that, and a healthy dose of online racism, misogyny, and other assorted bigotries.

But both sides -- player and devs/rules -- are necessary. And that's what's seemed to go over the heads of the Mass Effect fanboy/girl nation. Mass Effect is not "your" game. Shepard is not "your" Shepard. The results of all of the choices you make were always preprogrammed into the games by the devs, and your personal journey through the Mass Effect universe was always, technically, reducible to a particular arrangement of assigned variables and series of conversation trees. To pretend, then, that there is no difference between choosing from a series of previously dictated options and getting to write your own ending to Mass Effect's universe is just silly. It's like picking up a Choose Your Own Adventure book, working your way to the very end, and then being angry that it's not just a blank page that allows you to scribble your own ending. If you want to write a story that goes exactly the way you want it to go, it's easy: I do it every day, and all it costs is the price of a pen and a pad of paper. But that's not what a video game is. A video game is a conversation between the player and the rules/devs/code, and you don't get to just deny the outcome of that conversation when it isn't to your liking. That breaks the entire tacit agreement that makes games fun in the first place. Of course, as I understand it, Mass Effect hasn't ever been particularly about player choice anyway; rather, it's been more about creating a huge, dramatic space opera and letting the player choose -- again, just like CYOA -- which direction the story might go next at predetermined intervals. In this way, I'd actually argue that Bioware's game-stories are less about player choice now than they once were.

I've really been enjoying Baldur's Gate lately, and a lot of it has to do with how little things are scripted, as compared to most contemporary RPGs and RPG-type games. In the post that I linked to above, I shared an incident that happened in-game recently, wherein I lost two of my party members simply because they couldn't stomach the thought of me defending a drow priestess, a member of what they perceived as an inferior race. Well, a few nights back, after some 20-odd hours of adventuring in my party, the same drow priestess suddenly left, with no real explanation other than insults about my intelligence, disappearing into the woods, never to be seen again.

Ungrateful trollop.

Similarly, I found myself in a position last night wherein I couldn't escape a claustrophobic mine tunnel choked at both ends with hobgoblins while keeping my entire party alive. The result? A headlong charge to freedom that resulted in an elf ranger that I had had in my party since nearly the beginning of the game -- some 30 hours before -- being killed in the middle of a random, nondescript battle, one of hundreds that I'd engaged in throughout the game thus far. These episodes, as I said, weren't scripted. Of course, I know that they weren't random and actually came about through some calculation within the internal logic of BG's main program (that's how software works, after all)...but there was something very powerful about the illusion of randomness that the lack of obvious scripting provided. I had no warning that the drow was going to leave. When she did, there was no fanfare, no big cutscene. I wasn't forced to swallow prerendered sentiment. She just left, leaving me to wonder what I had said, done, or not done in the last 20 hours of play time to make her do so, when I wanted to keep her in the party. Similarly, the elf's death was no grand, heroic spectacle. He died like most soldiers do: anonymously, unheroically, and that realism was all the more affective for its randomness. As I said, on some level this was still me making choices that led to a scripted, programmed result, but unlike in Mass Effect and many more recent games, that scripting was unobvious, and in that BG, for me, is the more interesting and engaging game type. I don't always know what the results of my choices will be. I often don't even know when I'm making choices. There is never any illusion of control, and thus I never expect to control my destiny. I can only hope that when I reach the end of the game, the conclusion will feel like a fair result of all of my choices, and if it doesn't, well, the game itself has taught me over and over again that we don't always get what we want, in no uncertain terms.

It makes me wonder how Mass Effect has (apparently) slowly indoctrinated masses of players into thinking the complete opposite. If frustration abounds because of the game's ending, maybe that's a sign that it's supposedly "realistic" and "dark" conclusion was not presaged by 100 hours of similar realism, at least in terms of how player choice was treated. If that's the case, then I guess I can understand a little cognitive dissonance on the part of the player when the end comes...but still, guys and girls, just chill out. You're only part of the game-playing process. If you got to make all of the decisions, it wouldn't be a game...it would just be you pretending with no consequences, and it would be boring. And then you'd probably complain about that, too.

If you want a game with a lot of player choice, a game where you can just be you, and the world that the devs have created just exists to empower your own possibly demented, possibly angelic fantasies, play Minecraft. Seriously. In a game like Minecraft, the story is almost entirely yours to write. But more on that later. I'm tired of typing.

Seriously.