Suicide Mission: Defending Mass Effect 3's Ending

This blog started out as a school project that I expected to continue even after the class was done and over with.  Several months and zero posts later, I realize that I rather sadly let it fall by the wayside.  But this is something that should not die, and since there’s a big online discussion about something I care about, now is a perfect chance to discuss real game criticism, so it’s time to get this blog going again.

That thing is the ending of Mass Effect 3.  If you’re reading this and somehow know nothing about the internet craziness surrounding Mass Effect 3’s ending, you’re probably reading through backlogs or something.  Because if you’re reading this at all near the time it’s posted, you’d have to be living on the moon to have not heard about it.

While this discussion will necessarily lead to spoilers, several points can be made without them.  I won’t necessarily speak for the sites I reference, but the first three points spoil nothing about the content, only certain conceptual flaws, which some might not want to hear.  And yes, I’m defending the ending.  There are flaws, and I may revisit what I think are the most significant another time, but I think the ending is amazing despite those flaws.

First of all, there’s various theories out there about the ending that are very interesting and would not have happened without such an unusual ending.  In particular, the often mentioned indoctrination theory documented well on the Bioware forums is very interesting.¹  The existence of this and other theories and all the work and thought going into picking apart Mass Effect 3 (and even previous games) is absolutely incredible.  This is the kind of thought that I’ve been talking about and Bioware’s ending inspired this.  If that isn’t praiseworthy, whatever the other flaws may be, you cannot turn around and say video games are art, as this is exactly what we want see if video games are indeed art.

Secondly, Bioware has already announced an “extended cut” on their blog that is meant to address one of the main flaws: the lack of closure.  Whether or not this will fully mitigate that flaw will depend on the future, but we haven’t seen everything there is to see.  Also, if you object to the extended cut itself, note the beginning of the article on their blog mentioning it (linked below)²:

“An official press release went out today announcing how we are re-prioritizing the Mass Effect 3 post release content schedule to provide a more fleshed out experience for our fans.”

(emphasis mine)

Re-prioritizing is not the same as adding to their post release schedule.  This sounds much more as if this was already planned, was considered less important and pushed to the back of the schedule, and then that was re-evaluated.  In that case, it is not in any way reducing their artistic integrity.  Only Bioware knows what their intentions actually are and were, though, but I’d tend towards giving them the benefit of the doubt considering their previous work.

Third.  Disregarding the lack of closure and coherency (the other major flaw in the ending), it is incredibly well put together.  The music, the cinematics, the voice acting all remain just as good as the rest of the game, if not better at some points.  And if you’ve played the game, it goes without saying that the rest of the game was executed extremely well.  Flaws aside, many of the technical aspects are great examples of how the ending should work.

*****   Spoilers for all three games start here   *****

Fourth, what people normally deem “the ending” isn’t what we should be calling “the ending.”  Is the ending of Mass Effect just the stuff after the Saren boss fight (the choice between Anderson and Udina)?  Is the ending of Mass Effect 2 just the final conversation with the Illusive Man and the big rush back to the Normandy?  I’d say no.  If you disregard the latter part of Ilos, the battle around the Citadel, choosing whether or not to save the council, and fighting Saren, Mass Effect’s ending was crap as well.  Same thing if you disregard everything in the suicide mission up to the final rush.

If you’re going to talk about Mass Effect 3’s ending, you should include everything from when the fleet arrives at Earth through the rest of the game.  The entire arrival cinematic was a massive nod to your choices.  The conversations with your various squad mates and the distinct lack of certain people like Mordin, Kaiden/Ashley, and more (possibly a lot more) is the culmination of three games worth of choices.  And all of that is beautifully executed.  But for the sake of argument, let’s even set that aside and focus on the events after Shepard is knocked unconscious by the Reaper.

Fifth, the final sequence is by no means artistically bankrupt.  But since this is already rather long, I’ll leave that for the next post.  That’ll be a full post of in-depth analysis on what the game means if the events are taken at face value.  And even the fact that such can be done demonstrates that the final sequence isn’t artistically bankrupt, and if so, the end has some merit, especially during a time when video games are only just beginning to be recognized as worth the effort it takes to get some meaning out of them.

1. http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/9727423

2. http://blog.bioware.com/2012/04/05/mass-effect-3-extended-cut/

Two Roads Diverge...Or Do They?

In the short past of game criticism, there have been two, typically opposing, approaches: narratology and ludology.  Narratology is the approach that looks at video games through their narrative, much as they’d look at a book or movie’s narrative.  Ludology is literally “the study of games,” and its approach focuses on gameplay as the chief item of intrigue in games.  Since the beginning of these terms and ideas, they’ve been chiefly two different approaches practiced usually by different people, but almost never used at the same time: you either talked about the gameplay or the narrative.  This was how they were first described to me in my very first class on video games: two different ways of approaching game criticism. ¹

In industry, ludology tends to dominate.  There is a very strong sentiment that gameplay is the most important thing in creating a game.  In some books on game design, this idea is offered as "always have more gameplay than story."² This approach was the chief way of making games early on, as you can see by the negligible narrative in most early games (though there are notable exceptions).

On the other hand, narrative tends to be the focus in academia (such as it is for video games).  Most video game scholars today have a theoretical background in literature or film where there isn't even a term to indicate a focus on narrative, since the focus is so prevalent.  So it's easy to see why this focus tends to be more prevalent.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are story-heavy studios in industry and scholars that study the effects of gameplay.

Studios like Bioware have pushed the role of the story in a game well beyond what it was earlier on.  In particular, games like Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age have a very strong focus on narrative, and even their newest game, The Old Republic, is bringing a new emphasis on story into a new genre.

There are also game scholars who study the various effects of gameplay with very little attention given to the nature of the story itself.  Jane McGonigal is a revolutionary author who has studied games through a largely ludological lens.  Her main book is Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World.  The subtitle sums up the content exactly, and the reasons she offers for both parts, making us better people and changing the world for the better, are largely about how the gameplay does so.³  There are occasional nods towards the stories told in games, but especially when she analyses games that go beyond just video games, she’s usually talking about games with virtually no narrative in a traditional sense.

The existence of two vastly different approaches is even seen in most games today.  You have periods of storytelling, often cut-scenes, and periods of gameplay where relatively little takes place in terms of story.   An example of this is when you’ve just finished a fierce boss battle, and rather than dealing the death blow within gameplay, the game seizes control and displays the end of the battle in a cut scene.   Of those games that let you strike the final blow, you often have scenes depicting extended death scenes and exposition directly following the fight.

This division is an interesting way to divide analysis, but there's been a shift away from this in the last few years, particularly among the online crowd of game journalists, reviewers, and critics.  A shift towards understanding games not by looking at just the narrative or just the gameplay, but understanding games by looking at both: how narrative empowers gameplay and how gameplay delivers narrative.  This is something happening more and more all the time, so I’ll stick to just one good example.

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on escapistmagazine.com repeatedly states that he prefers games where story and gameplay merge seamlessly in both his video series and column.  From his biggest praise of Halo: Reach to his main argument for Bioshock’s introduction sequence being the best in gaming history, Yahtzee consistently has high praises for games that mix story and gameplay.⁴  The virtues he describes in doing this ranges from immersion to storytelling depth to allowing the player to express themselves in-game.

While this new approach isn’t something nobody has thought of, using this approach explicitly in discussions and in game design is definitely new.  What do I think of this?  Well, that’s another topic, which I hope to cover next time.

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1. Corrinne Lewis, "Ludology & Narratology Explored," (lecture, Intro to Video Games class, Salt Lake City, UT, Spring 2011).

2. Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design (2nd Edition), (Berkeley: New Riders Press, September 24, 2009).

3. Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, (New York: Penguin Press Group, January 20, 2011).

4. Ben Croshaw, "Extra Punctuation: Interactivity," The Escapist, March 9, 2010, Accessed: November 30, 2011, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/7268-Extra-Punctuation-Interactivity.

Game Talk: Actual Game Criticism

So I've decided that rather than actually doing game criticism here, I'd do the actual criticism in a more immediately available medium: videos.  Thus, I'll continue to talk about game criticism here on my blog, while I instead actually analyze games in a video series on Youtube, Game Talk.

The first episode is on narrative in a game called Bastion developed by Supergiant Games.  Check it out:

I hope you enjoy some actual game criticism.