The Ludologist

[Spoilers follow.]

Quite late to the discussion, but I just completed Mass Effect 3 and I liked the ending.

Of course, the ending was massively controversial when the game came out, even described as “soul-crushing”.

So what is the ending like? It is revealed that the Citadel and the Reapers are actually the creation of the child apparition that Shepard has been seeing, all with the goal of preventing organic life from creating synthetics so advanced that they will destroy organics… Therefore advanced organic civilizations are regularly destroyed to prevent organic life from destroying itself.

Depending on your military readiness, you are offered one of three options that amount to:

1. Destruction: Destroy the Reapers and most of Earth too. Mass Relays are destroyed as well.
2. Control: Reapers neutralized, people on the Earth surviving.  Mass Relays are destroyed too.
3. Synthesis: Create a new state of harmony between synthetics and organics (I didn’t get this one).

Shepard dies in nearly all endings. (Overview here.)

What’s not to like? We get to be self-sacrificing heroes, determining the fate of the galaxy, with some high-flying Space Opera metaphysics to boot. It sort of is what I had hoped for.

But here is a typical complaint from a forum poster:

1: characters that died from harbinger show up on the planet the Normandy crashed on after the mass effect relays explode.
2: All the choices from the first two games enhance the players experience in the game but not the ending
3: Every ending has somewhat of the same result
4. No feeling of closure other than saving/destroying the galaxy, I know that sounds like closure but in a incredible story driven game like mass effect its about the characters and not the overall goal or at least for me it is.

I like point 4, “No feeling of closure other than saving/destroying the galaxy”.

As many people have observed, it really is like the ending of Lost: this is an experience that is sufficiently open for people to have attached to it for different reasons. Lost was always veering between Sci-Fi and new-age fantasy stuff, and the new-age feel-good ending was therefore disappointing to those who were into Sci-Fi (count me in here).

For ME3, I think we can distill players’ attachment into a few different types:

1. Action hero: Those who were waiting to kick Reaper A** – and were severely disappointed that they did not actually get the chance.
2. Role-player: Those who were into characters and the long-term repercussions of their game choices. And were disappointed that those choices were barely reflected in the ending. (Long-term repercussions featured more prominently in ME1 and ME2.)
3. Narrative arc fan: Those who desired that comforting feeling of inevitable narrative closure. Which they got.

And writing this I realize that I belong to category 3. I was playing Mass Effect for the pre-written story, and hence I did not share the disappointment. Don’t tell.

[Update June 10th:]

I am thinking that this should be broken down a bit. In some way, it is not that I was playing for the story as such, as much as I was playing for the part of the story that contained the solution to the mystery of the Reapers. We would probably usually include the fate of the characters in “the story”, but  for some reason the characters just weren’t that interesting to me.

This goes a bit of a way toward explaining what determines your motivation for playing: If I had found the characters more interesting, I would surely had been more interested in the role-playing angle of witnessing the effect of my actions on the characters’ fates.

I find myself scratching my head over the continued bursts of angry criticism against the Free to Play business model.

Here is Michael Thomsen writing in Kill Screen, “Will Work for Fun“:

The original Super Mario Bros. defined the console blockbuster with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide. After going free-to-play, Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times (though some versions are still sold for 99 cents). The scope and stakes of videogame commerce have irrevocably changed, and, in a way, the value of the medium has degraded as a result. Designers are no longer selling games to people who want to buy them, they are selling their audiences to advertisers. Worse yet, they are using them as an interactive form of muzak, creating a lively backdrop against which the small percentage of people willing to spend money on new quests or in-game trinkets will feel more likely to spend.

The value of the medium has degraded? Really? On a basic level, I still feel that this type of criticism is eerily similar to the kinds of criticisms that people tend to direct at video games in general: commercial, exploitative, devoid of artistic merit etc…

There seems to  an underlying conservatism at play, where we intuitively believe that what we grew up with (games being sold in boxes at fixed price points) is a neutral good, and that everything else is ultimately a perversion. But all business models have a built-in skew: the boxed model skews towards  pretty graphics and a well-designed first-15-minute experience, after which the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive.

On the other hand, when I say this (that all business models and incentive structures have a built-in skew), I can hear myself mimicking my undergraduate university teachers:  “games are always already influenced by business models” (the “always already” part signals that you are part of the clique).

So that also feels like a cheap argument. I was entertaining the thought that it has to do with a basic conception of games (the magic circle if you will) as an egalitarian space where things like money are not supposed to make a difference, and the free to play and microtransactions seem offensive because they make the playing field skewed and unfair. (See the report linked below.)

Again, the default counter-argument would be that this is an illusion – because there never is any pure game space where money does not matter and so on. But this is again too easy: the fundamental fact  is that our conventions of game-playing (and sportspersonship) involve trying to create a type of pure egalitarian space, regardless of the fact that this can never be achieved a 100% (and regardless of what researchers think).

Michael Thomsen discusses free to play and capitalism at length, but ultimately I think we need to acknowledge that money is just one of many different resources (and not the only one worth talking about). I recently  heard an established game developer argue that microtransactions are fair because they level the playing field between him and the people with more time on their hands, and I have entertained the same thought myself. Microtransactions are really a type of “executive summary” for games.

And that is the bottom line for me: no business model is neutral, but it is also true that free to play can  collide with some of our fundamental assumptions about what games should be. And yet … for some games, the more expensive executive summary just is the better deal. (And the task of Free to Play game designers is to make it so, of course.)

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PS. Here is a study of player perceptions of free to play: “Cash Trade Within the Magic Circle”, by Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun.