AlienShagger wrote...
Yea, I think the jury is still out on that on my side. First, I agree they could have pulled all the fans in, but instead you and I are having a debate... I don't know man, seems like a win on our side. Giving people an artificial high in the privacy of their secluded living room is the antithesis to social cohesion.
Second, I agree that it's against their profit interest, but I am really tired of the profit economy in the first place. Any diviation is welcome. I was born in 1977, I don't mind Star Wars and my friends soil their pants at every new peep out of that money machine and that's all well and good, but I am not familiar with whether it added to or substracted attention from the attrocity that was the Nicaraguan contra in 1979. If it added - by all means go crazy and BioWare should follow their example 
That's where my mind's at with these things, I'm afraid.
Well, what I was saying is that I don't think entertainment as I've explained it is going to take people totally away from their problems or problems of the day, but I do think it is an outlet to do that for a set period of time-
ie, when watching the movie or playing the game.
And there is much social cohesion as you put it to be gained from a game that could have had things that the devs said it would have at the end. The conversation just might be different. When I was playing Demon's Souls, the wiki forum had very vibrant discussions and debate. It was also the place for people to go to talk to others about what it meant and to get help. There were fun discussion started and it was exceedingly popular. People loved everything about the game.
What you have with this game is often inane discussion and it may well be that both sides participate in it, but I've seen it skew more to one side than the other. They indicate that there are people out there that will disagree with anything said, merely to disagree.
2 cases in point:
In this thread there's one person that continually returns in order to apparently give some one line zingers that often make little sense, are not even necessarily directed at any specific post, and are insulting in nature. But, he insists he's never insulted anyone and just given his opinion. We all know that you can have the opinion that someone stupid, but that saying it is insulting.
In another thread when trying to say the star kid is a bad guy and I don't believe a person just automatically buys what a bad guy is selling, a poster kept asserting that the word always meant eventually, when the star kid said the created will always rebel against the creator. Yet, I repeatedly said this doesn't even matter. The kid still had been turning people into goo. Then he felt it should matter if the kid even if he was crazy, thought he was doing so for good reasons. The point; we weren't having a discussion. I can't relate to someone that somehow believes that a person should allow someone to point a gun at their head if they think it's for a good reason and that then may well be giving me an even bigger gun to kill everyone else. They have every right to their opinion, but I just don't see it as well, rational.
And, even though we've had our differences, I fully see where you are coming from. It's just that I don't see things as so dystopic. I may well agree with you on many points about some things that are going on currently, but I don't see the radically different "2 sides" here as coming together in any kind of cohesive way. In fact, I offer that had the ending been what was promised both sides would have been having discussions about what was the right choice and why in curing the genophage, in the geth/quarian debate, and so on. Those do exist now, but one group often opts out because "we" are still left hanging somewhere on the citadel or laying in a pile of rubble on Earth.
Just to be clear, I've never asserted that some happy sappy ending is the only valid one and I do think that thoughty could have been a part of it along with heartfelt. This ending might well lead some to believe that it engaged their brains (I assert it's in order to make sense of what doesn't), but it failed to do what the rest of the game did; it left my heart somewhere far behind, sitting squashed in a corner. And, in a business sense that is plain stupid. People always spend more money when they let their hearts do the buying. People don't buy new iPads simply because the new one is way betterer than the last (sometimes maybe they are). They buy them because they love shiny and new. I don't want to debate the value of an Apple product over some other-it's just an example of why fans buy the things they do.
I was in college in 1977. I've told you, I lived through a lot of the -isms that people put on us to scare us into voting a certain way. Remember what I said about people buying with their hearts-they vote that way, too. Scare them enough and their brains disengage. Make them love a product and the same thing can happen. But it didn't happen with this game. There are pieces of each game that people allow themselves to forget because of the love they have for other parts. But that love goes out the window with the ending and in a way you are right. It fully wakes up the brain. But not for the reasons you state. It cuts off the blood supply to your heart, so your brain better do something. And for most of us here, what it does is recoils in horror. I will again assert that most of us here, do not want to ever see any of the 3 endings again (or 6, or 7, or 16 that are really one somewhat altered cutscene), we don't want to see the star kid again. My brain doesn't want to be engaged in the ending. It wants to excise it.
But, back to the point-yes there is one. What was expected (and we can debate till the cows come home about whether we should always get what we expect) is an ending that was what they said it would be. For me because of the way I played what I figured would be my first of many Shepards, was my ending might possibly have the chance to be a clear cut victory where Shepard might live and might be with friends and my war assets and the crucible would kick butt. And then I'd play another jerk Shepard that messed everything up and got people killed, left an opening for the reapers and everybody started cursing about. Or a Shepard that tried to do good, but failed and lived only to see the reapers were winning. And all kinds of other things.
I actually do want games to give me an artificial high as you call it. They are artificial things. They may talk about real life issues (genocide), but I don't want them to make me live them. These things exist in reality. I don't want them to be real in my entertainment as well. I do want my entertainment and in particular an interactive game to give me the chance at a heartfelt win or bittersweet win or sad loss or whatever.
Social cohesion does not come from everyone yelling at each other, and that is what exists here just as it has in real life. Personally, that's not what I want to have happen in the wake of a game. One side has been convinced that we complain because we are just entitlement whiners. And no matter what intellect is used to refute this they won't see things any differently. You have stated why you like the ending. That is far more than many of them often do. Many of them don't even like the ending all that much, and say it's ok, has flaws, but I'm ok with it. And that is real enthusiasm. You cannot have a debate then.
Understand that the discussion I'd rather be having is not this one. I, and others have said it before. In order to discuss the ending and have some sort of rational debate about it, one side must make up what is not there and so the ending is a lot of maybes. The other side has to discuss something they don't want to even think about because they just hate it so much. Cohesion exists in this game when people talk about what happened to Mordin and someone says they laughed and cried (depending upon what they did) and another person says they did too. And then you find out that one person saying this is a man from Germany and the other is a woman from Brazil.
Again, I'm not saying that Star Wars changed society at all. I'm not saying it had any responsibility to do so. I'm saying that people who may have felt bad going into the movie, felt good coming out. And that matters. The fact that it was extremely profitable was good for business and spurred all kinds of satellite companies and created new inventions, tech, industries, and so on. I don't want everything to be Star Wars, but there's a lesson to be learned from it. Most entertainment is escapism. And, even if I buy your idea of what the ME3 ending is and all, it isn't in and of itself going to change anything either. But it's doing it in a much poorer and way more negative way than Star Wars. People loved SW. People hate the ME3 ending and by extension hate the games now (some really do) and by extension hate EA and Bioware. The ME franchise is known for an awful ending. You can ask someone who doesn't play video games if they've heard of ME and many will say, "oh yeah. That's the game everyone hates."
I for one don't think hate is the feeling one wants to get from a video game.
If this causes people to become more consumer-minded when buying games then it may well be a good thing, but the sense out there is that things are already beyond all control. Game companies aren't listening and are working ever harder to squeeze all the spare change they can from us. I'm sure you've heard of planned obsolescence. Products are made to break. Well, perhaps there will be a new term coined for what game companies are now doing-making fans pay for endings to games (not supposed to be so for EC), for things needed in game just to finish the game (MP, which they've calculated will get you to spend more money), day one DLC, and so on. There may be a term already. EA calls one thing a micro transaction and they will be using it as the force for profit when they change SWTOR into a free to play game-it will be interesting and horrifying to see what they will want people to pay for.
I think we may well be like Shepard - the tip of the spear. I think we need to say enough is enough. Look at the trends that came before. COD games have some good, but incredibly short SP campaigns. They are more like glorified tutorials to get you into playing MP and then buying map packs. Some are now selling map pack subscriptions. And often DLC costs way more than the game originally did. Some games are also being sold as chapters. And the cost of newly released games never goes down.
Compare this to DVDs. Originally, they were very expensive. I remember seeing them listed for $79. What do they cost now? $20 or less. 360 and PS3 games are what? $60USD. They do drop off in price, but only after they either "fail" or have been out awhile. And DLC can add at least $100 to the price. We really have to start being smart and to speak up more. If ME changes that, then yes we have thrown off indoctrination. But, judging from those that say Bioware shouldn't change this ending that even they don't think is great, and give into whiners and babies and the entitlement crowd, EA and Bioware have the audience they want waiting in the wings. They don't mind losing the rest of us that already had our brains engaged.
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