5087 réponses à ce sujet

[CulturalGeekGirl]

Up until the end, until roughly... London-ish, nothing the Reapers do is all that stupid, especially if you make one little change: go back to Draft1 notes and make "the system/planet the citadel is in/near" the price for the Destroy option.

Right now I'm going to just tackle the "why not use the Citadel like normal?" issue. This is based on clues throughout both games and some twitter/interview babble. I believe I've heard references to this particular idea tossed off several times, and it's logically and thematically consistent with the rest of the text, so I treat it with considerably more seriousness than most "someone said this is what happened on twitter" theories.

The Reapers can't do anything with the Citadel other than move it because the Keepers are revolting and the guts of the Citadel where all the most important controls live is keyed to be accessed by Keepers only, to prevent Citadel-using races from finding it and mucking with them. This is the "heresay" explanation, but it makes perfect sense based on the build-up from previous games. Whatever kept the Keepers from doing their job in ME1 has allowed them to regain some measure of volition, as they aren't indoctrinated puppet-servants like the Collectors were, with the ability to ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL built in. They're a bio-engineered slave race rather than an indoctrinated hybrid thing, because their usefulness has to last for hundreds or thousands of cycles. They don't have the drawbacks of indoctrinated slave races (gradual decay in usefulness/ability to act independently), but there are references earlier on to the pros-and-cons of wholly biological servants vs Collector-style puppets.

So the best they can do for now is shut the arms and tow it somewhere they can keep an eye on it until everyone is killed and they can figure out how to "un-key" the Keeper-only areas.

The sad thing is that it would have been incredibly easy to convey this during gameplay, and they didn't.

I'll be back later to talk about how everything that makes the Reapers unaccountably stupid happens during or after Priority: Earth, but before that I have answers to pretty much every "But why didn't they do This?" question, most of which I honed to knife-sharpness on these boards during the ME2 times.

[KitaSaturnyne]

Seijin8 wrote...

Only by the lightning bolts that were trying to send a message.

We're just not ready for their wisdom  

Or they need to learn to respect our personal space. And the fact that they cook us on contact.

I wonder how they would feel about the stereotype that they're needed to make our cars capable of time travel?

[CulturalGeekGirl]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

Seijin8 wrote...

Only by the lightning bolts that were trying to send a message.

We're just not ready for their wisdom  

Or they need to learn to respect our personal space. And the fact that they cook us on contact.

I wonder how they would feel about the stereotype that they're needed to make our cars capable of time travel?

I'm more concerned about the superintelligent shades of blue. What happens when one of them sees themselves declared "unfashionable?" 

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 01 juin 2012 - 08:16 .

[Seijin8]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

Seijin8 wrote...

Only by the lightning bolts that were trying to send a message.

We're just not ready for their wisdom  

Or they need to learn to respect our personal space. And the fact that they cook us on contact.

I wonder how they would feel about the stereotype that they're needed to make our cars capable of time travel?

I'm more concerned about the superintelligent shades of blue. What happens when one of them sees themselves declared "unfashionable?" 

Double rainbow.  The true harbinger of blue's wrath.

[KitaSaturnyne]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

Seijin8 wrote...

Only by the lightning bolts that were trying to send a message.

We're just not ready for their wisdom  

Or they need to learn to respect our personal space. And the fact that they cook us on contact.

I wonder how they would feel about the stereotype that they're needed to make our cars capable of time travel?

I'm more concerned about the superintelligent shades of blue. What happens when one of them sees themselves declared "unfashionable?"

Or some kind of sonic-based life finding itself used in pop music?

[drayfish]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

I'm more concerned about the superintelligent shades of blue. What happens when one of them sees themselves declared "unfashionable?"

Or some kind of sonic-based life finding itself used in pop music?

Finally: something that explains the Eurovision Song Contest. 

...Wait. Was I being probed?

Modifié par drayfish, 01 juin 2012 - 10:24 .

[Tonymac]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

Seijin8 wrote...

Only by the lightning bolts that were trying to send a message.

We're just not ready for their wisdom  

Or they need to learn to respect our personal space. And the fact that they cook us on contact.

I wonder how they would feel about the stereotype that they're needed to make our cars capable of time travel?

I'm more concerned about the superintelligent shades of blue. What happens when one of them sees themselves declared "unfashionable?" 

They become blue wiht envy.

[drayfish]

My brain may be slightly broken right now – I've finally started to shake off a head cold that seems to have disrupted my whole central nervous system – so I will offer yet another of my (signature) apologies if the following spiel is borderline incomprehensible pretentiouspeak, and gladly invite you to ignore it – particularly since it risks derailing the far more interesting discussion of the Reaper's motivations currently underway. Once again, I think I just wanted to get this off my chest for what little use it will be. ...Oh, and yes - sorry about the length also.  Hoo-doggies. This is a long one. If you decide to tackle it you'd better bring some freshwater and a snack.
 
 
As I read back over the past several pages of this thread I have been struck by everyone's marvellous exploration of the structural limitations of Mass Effect 3 – the problematic nature of Shepard's PTSD; the issues with IT; wresting control out of the player's hands, etc. – and it led me to start wondering (almost obsessively in fact), if the reason that I have found the ending so jarring might even stretch beyond the thematic, logical, and character inconsistencies that currently blight the conclusion. I've begun wondering if it sinks deeper into the fabric of the game than I had first supposed, ultimately reaching into the realm of self-reflexivity and the meta-textual. (Yes, that's right: I'm about to let all manner of obnoxious Narratological buzz words of the leash for a moment. So please indulge me as they bark and snap and pee on everything in sight.)
 
I mentioned a few days ago that when I got my hands on the first Mass Effect it was like a revelation. I played through that game several times, with multiple characters, searching out every conceivable landscape and variation it offered. I found the sneaky cow, poured over every word of the flashback on that weird Prothean sphere, and searched (and eventually scraped off my tire with a stick) every annoying Pyjak that sauntered by. A year later I played through the sequel back-to-back three times before I even touched another game. Rarely if ever have a felt such a swirl of emotional investment tie me to a fictional experience; I grieved character deaths with the weight of personal failing, I was emboldened by my band of rascals, who dared to do the impossible as we slowly came to trust and support each other.  Until the last few weeks I have repeatedly gone back to run new characters through both games, still delighted by every scene, even if the surprises are long since dissolved. But after eagerly awaiting the conclusion of this trilogy for years, keen to tease our every permutation of its narrative, I completed Mass Effect 3 once – one time – and find I am unable to touch it again. 
 
And truly, I've tried. A number of times, particularly after reading people's thrilling accounts of their game experiences on this thread, I have tried to return to that world, but (at least for now) I'm unable to get invested again. That mad hunger to hunt out every nook and cranny of the game world no longer spurs me on, and I genuinely sit idle, staring at the paused menu screen, feeling somehow empty when once I overflowed with fervour.
 
But even stranger than this, I've barely turned on any other games either. And I've been trying to rationalise why this is; why the thought of playing this game specifically makes me sad, and why the act of videogame play in itself (for the moment) no longer holds the excitement it once did. Sure, there's the fact that I already know the endpoint of the narrative now (for better or worse), but I've known every narrative beat of the other games, and that didn't stop me. And although people might be rightly saying right now: 'Hey, shut up and walk it off, man', there seems to be something more instinctual than just my distaste for the narrative's conclusion; something more subconscious and pervasive than just fruitless whinging. 
 
Once again, I'm sure this has been said elsewhere, and articulated far more comprehensively, but the more I think about it, the more I start to feel that the ending we have been delivered was in fact a misjudged attempt at making a broad meta-textual statement about the nature of gaming itself – one that, ironically, ultimately damaged the bond between player and game that it was trying to celebrate.
 
I'm sure many are already familiar, but for anyone lucky enough to have not already been subjected to wanky terms like self-reflexivity: meta-textuality, is simply when a text references its own nature as being a text. You see it all the time on television in shows like The Simpsons (back when they were actually good; yeah, I said it): see the Poochie Episode where an inexplicable cousin has somehow joined the cast; or where Bart and Lisa walk past the same background several times at a cheap animation studio. More recently in the exquisite 30 Rock they will call out the conventions of the sitcom form constantly (a character will say, 'What could possible go wrong?' and Liz Lemon will turn, look straight down the barrel of the camera, and raise her eyebrows). It's also frequently a convention of a lot of postmodern literature like Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which begins:
 

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

There are numerous reasons for making this kind of self-referential acknowledgement of the artifice of the text, but in essence it's about just reminding the viewer of the conventions that they have naturally grown accustomed to. Through our familiarity with other examples of the medium we know how narratives function, how the artwork is communicating with us, and these references just find a new means of speaking to us on a different level.  By now we're all fairly aware of how sitcoms work, so you throw Abed from Community into the mix, let him verbalise that savvy audience expectation, and we get to watch how those same predictable mechanics can be subverted or lovingly reaffirmed.
 
And there have been a number of quite brilliant meta-textual references in videogames in the relatively brief span of the medium: the Simpsons game, although lacking fantastic game-play, is filled with them); in Metal Gear Solid, when you fought Psychomantis he would read your memory card and actually speak to you, in game, about how he knew you liked to play Castlevania, and he would force you to change the input slot for your controller to player 2; in Eternal Darkness (mentioned only the other day on this thread), when your character started to go insane, the game would mess with you the player by pretending to lower the volume of the television (even showing this in a volume bar), or telling you that your save game had been corrupted, and that the system needed to be switched off (which would then crash your game if you fell for it and actually did turn it off).
 
The more I unpack Mass Effect 3, the more I come to believe that its creators, in those now-infamous ten minutes, were trying to make a similar meta-textual statement, although one that was received in a profoundly different manner from how it was intended.  Indeed, it might account for all that 'artistic integrity' stuff – perhaps they really did think they were making a comment about the nature of their medium and Mass Effect itself as the culmination this art form's expressive potential. It's just that for some people (including myself) it went completely, spectacularly wrong...
 
Firstly there's the obvious stuff, the design choices intended to make a definitive proclamation about the conclusion of this franchise: the death of Shepard (really no matter what you do Shepard is forced, with some really shonky reasoning, to sacrifice him/herself to the mechanics of the game); then there's the blowing up of the Mass Relays themselves – the symbolic heart of the franchise – boldly declaring that this universe, or at least our time in it, is over. (A message of galactic devastation than many people have justifiably taken literally.)
 
(There's also the more insidious reminders of how meaningless the whole journey proves to be – the 'videogamey' material that cumulatively makes us feel that we had no real impact upon the narrative. For instance, the way in which the EMS score reduces all our decisions to a numerical value that (at least superficially) appears to have little to no effect upon the substance of the narrative. If you do absolutely everything the game has to offer (and agree to participate in multiplayer matches) you are granted nothing more than a few extra seconds to watch your avatar suck a lungful of air in what must be the most excruciating agony of their life. So... happy?)
 
Secondly, I think the most crippling blow comes in the realisation that all of our investment, all of our goal-orientation across the span of play, has been directed toward constructing the Crucible, an object that's central purpose proves to be giving birth to the-Ghost-of-Vicky-from-Small-Wonder.* As the primary driving agents of the story, we are forced to contribute to the narrative device which Star-Burns emerges, giving life to the deeply unsatisfying shift that the game employs in finally altering its stated agenda.
 
And the creature we help create is the definition of a deus ex machina: a literal God from a Machine, come to fundamentally spooky-magicify the narrative; and the reference is so on-the-nose, and such an infamous, decried literary trope, that I struggle to believe the creators did not intend this to be a direct self-aware nod to their fiction. Perhaps they were thinking that such a creature could be forgiven – nay, praised – at this point in the tale, because it would represent a manifestation of our player-investment; we, through our gameplay, have given birth to the creature that will ultimately decide our fate. But instead this potentially bold metaphor for the act of gaming sputters out when we realise it is all just to shoehorn us into three cheap bastardisations of our entire journey's goal.
 
Then, thirdly, there're the Crucible chamber itself.  As edisnooM noted, another thread in this forum has already discussed that this entire room is in fact one gigantic dialogue wheel that we are standing inside – with the blue and red options taking their same places in the roster, and the green, or 'neutral' option added in the middle. Once again, I suspect that the game's creators wanted us to end with an enormous inter-textual manifestation of the symbol that has been at the heart of our engagement with this series: our Shepard literally has to walk along the path that we have chosen for them...**
 
But rather than celebrate this decision-making device, it's manifestation here instead reminds us how many paths had been ignored, obscured or ham-fistedly funnelled down in order to arrive at this final single arbitrary choice. Certainly that's why I feel so disgusted by these moments. In order to get us to this poetically loaded space, our Shepards have had to be hijacked – kidnapped. They have literally had to be beaten down, stripped of their agency and abandoned by their friends – left staggering, shuffling almost wordlessly into complicity with RumpleStarskin's witless moral quandary.

Finally, the Stargazer scene with the kid: a nod not only to the malleable nature of all mythology (this foundational story changes dependent upon the telling of it; both Shepard and Shepard's tale allow for alteration and reformation) but to the multiform nature of the game itself. All of our Shepards are acknowledged in this moment as the Stargazer scene belongs in every permutation of the game, identifying that this narrative was always an adaptive experience that allows for every possibility presented. Again, this is a nice premise in theory – but in practice it further undermines the sense of individuality and accomplishment that one would presume the conclusion of the trilogy was aiming for. 'So ultimately nothing The Shepard did was distinguishable or significant in any way?  It would have all rolled out in this same fashion regardless? And is that kind of fatalism why we walked out into this frozen tundra to die, grandfather? (*cough*)'

While I think the game's creators must have been genuinely calling out to all of the structural conventions that define videogames (and most certainly this series of games) in order to craft a loving homage to the medium with which they chose to communicate their tale, what it instead succeeded in doing was tearing up all of the suspension of disbelief and investment that the series to that moment had achieved. By breaking the fourth wall so egregiously at this pivotal moment, by overtly reminding the audience that they were playing a game – indeed wresting control of that game out of their hands, and telling them that the hours of play into which they have invested themselves was meaningless – they irreparably fractured the bond between storyteller and audience, ultimately hollowing out the whole experience. Indeed, the game screams its artificiality at us so loudly that we cannot help but be shaken out of the experience, leaving us (or me at least) shouting at the screen, 'Well okay, if this is just a game, then why can't I f**king win!?!'
 
When I, feeling suddenly numbed, put down my controller and walked away from the screen, it wasn't solely revulsion at the outcome of the game – though there was most certainly a good portion of that – there was also a sense in which the very act of playing games itself had been called into question – almost mocked, by those who had designed the experience. It seemed like they'd kicked over my sandcastle and were rubbing it in my face. You thought you could make a difference, they seemed to sneer. You went to all that trouble and what did it matter? Your world still blew up, you're dead, a ghost made you do some crazy nonsense, and everyone that you cared about abandoned you. ...Now give me your money for some DLC. You want to keep building your gaming "legend", don't you?
 
Again, I want to stress that I don't think it was in any way Bioware's intent to make such a statement. The sad thing is I really think they were trying to send a love note to the act of gaming in all its myriad forms. But in choosing this particular moment in which to try and play that card, building a franchise to its point of climax only to expose a railroading of narrative that underplayed all player choice and wiped the signature components of this universe from being, they strangled what they sought to embrace.  Like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, they stoked the puppy so hard they ended up killing it.
 
 
* There you go. That might be as obscure a reference as I can possibly go.
 
** If you want to go real deep – almost certainly too deep: Red, Blue and Green are also the colours that go into creating all images on a television screen. And actually, now I look at it: they are the button colours, in order, on my x-box pad! Ahhhh! The rabbit's hole of meta-textuality drags me down! Nooooo! I regret everythiiiiiiiiiiiiiing...)
 

Modifié par drayfish, 01 juin 2012 - 12:54 .

[KitaSaturnyne]

drayfish wrote...

'So ultimately nothing The Shepard did was distinguishable or significant in any way?  It would have all rolled out in this same fashion regardless? And is that kind of fatalism why we walked out into this frozen tundra to die, grandfather? (*cough*)'

As always drayfish, spectacularly said. Songs will be sung about this. I will buy your DLC.

The quote above surely embodies the most major reason I haven't picked up Mass Effect again for my second character. (Though I will for the sake of the EC) After finishing ME3, I wondered about going back to 1 and 2, and the thought that went through my head simply was, "what's the point?"

At first, I really didn't know why I was thinking this way. It was only in recent days that I came to the conclusion above: Despite Mass Effect being touted as a game where every decision we make matters, the ending to Mass Effect 3 cancels all of that. It kills one of the very central themes of the game, and apparently for me, the choice/ consequence, cause/ effect aspect of the game was one of the most important parts of the game. If not, the most important part.

One of the worst things about the ending is that we had to search for answers regarding the ending outside the narrative. The story itself should have told us what happened to the galaxy in the wake of losing the mass relays. It should have told us about who did and didn't live when the Citadel was moved. We should not have had to ask Mac Walters (grr) and Patrick Weakes (sp?) via Twitter what the hell happened at the end of their story.

I also find it alarming that a lot of people's reactions were just outright denial. For me, there was just confusion. I remember thinking that what was there was good, but it needed to explain a lot more than it did and needed to reflect the consequences of our choices made throughout the trilogy. While I still maintain that the scenes themselves are quite compelling, they are only this way if taken out of context with the rest of the Mass Effect narrative. Otherwise, it's just Krusty faking his death: We're left with our mouths hanging open going "WHAAAAAT???"

Now drayfish, I'll help you out of the rabbit hole. But, you have to clean up all this word pee.

[edisnooM]

@drayfish

Excellent post, and I made it through without having to forage for supplies. :-)

On the topic of meta-textuality the ending choices also fit in well with Ctrl-Alt-Del for the PC gamers.

[Sable Phoenix]

So basically, drayfish, what BioWare did with Mass Effect 3 was essentially this:

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym

(Courtesy of xkcd.)

The problem with this approach is that it's comedic.  If the Mass Effect universe had been a comedy, like Red Dwarf or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then our response to such an ending (which would have been approached far less subtly) would have been acceptance, an amused acknowledgement of the in-joke, a thumbs up in response to the wink and a nod the writers were giving us.  That would have worked.

Sadly, the Mass Effect universe is not comedic.  Hence the acronym.

Modifié par Sable Phoenix, 01 juin 2012 - 11:07 .

[drayfish]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...
 
One of the worst things about the ending is that we had to search for answers regarding the ending outside the narrative. The story itself should have told us what happened to the galaxy in the wake of losing the mass relays. It should have told us about who did and didn't live when the Citadel was moved. We should not have had to ask Mac Walters (grr) and Patrick Weakes (sp?) via Twitter what the hell happened at the end of their story.

Yes, I find that particularly troubling also, KitaSaturnyne. A number of people have seen it as liberating (which I presume is what Mass Effect's creators were hoping for): a launching point for unbridled imaginative play. I admire those people a great deal, but I'm not one of them.  I was looking forward to an engaging, conclusive narrative, not a grab bag of suggestions for the improvisation troop in my head.  Perhaps, again, this is why the creators called out the conventions of their form so overtly. 'This game is ending,' they probably meant to say, 'but it will live on forever, however you want it to, in your mind...' A nice sentiment, but not something that I needed them, or wanted them, to force upon me.
 
Bioware has seemed rather intent all around to expand out the way in which they told their story beyond the traditional borders of the game – we had established characters die on Twitter in the lead up to release; we've had comic tie-ins that hope to explain whatever Aria was jabbering about in preparation for DLC; Kai Leng's meme cereal fetish is brought to us by the now infamous novel prequels. In many cases I'm quite happy to have the universe expand out in this way, as long as the games themselves remain self-contained (Emily's Wong's death on Twitter was pretty cold, though...), but to leave the ending inconclusive, with no established avenue to seek out answers, I am surprised Bioware didn't see the fans' negative reaction coming. It's why arguments over synthesis and IT and the Normandy's retreat get so heated, why that unfortunately chosen word 'speculations' now tastes like ashes in our mouths. There's nothing to speculate towards anymore – nothing will be proven or resolved – we are left speculating simply to justify or comprehend what we saw. 
 
 
And @ edisnooM:
 
What's the Alt-Ctrl-Del thing for PC? I don't think I've heard of that one...
 
 
p.s. – And you are all kind, generous people for making it through that previous post. Yee-gads, when I look at that dry wall of text it bores the hell out of me.

Modifié par drayfish, 01 juin 2012 - 11:21 .

[edisnooM]

@drayfish

Because sarcasm can be hard to detect through the internet, and because I'm a techy that likes boring people with computer stuff (What's the difference between GB and GiB?), Ctrl-Alt-Del is a keyboard combination you press in Windows to bring up a menu to get to Task Manager, lock the computer, etc. It is commonly used in situations where all else fails.

However it fits well with the layout of the choices given Control, Alternate, and Delete. :-)

[Seijin8]

Emily Wong isn't dead. Kal'Reegar saved her, they faked their deaths and came to resuscitate Marauder Shields after Shepard passed into the beam.

If Shepard can't be the ultimate hero, maybe those three can.

@drayfish

Beautifully written. I hadn't considered the "so meta" concept before, and... well, if it is true (and you make a great argument for it), its is just disgusting. Some kind of last-minute asspull for fame and glory.

Now I'm just pis**d.

[drayfish]

@ edisnooM:

Thanks for that. I appreciate it.  Sorry, I messed up the sarcasm because I had fallen so deep into the meta-textual well.  For a second I thought there was some red-blue-green component to the force-quit action.

My idiocy entirely; no fault of yours at all.

And so, after witlessly Godzilla-stomping other people's fine humour, I descend back into the depths of the pacific...

[Seijin8]

If it was "witless", the Godzilla stomp would've failed.

No, far too plausible. And if true, the joke is on me for caring more about the series than they did.

[frypan]

I simply cannot pass up the opportunity to say again "Blazing Saddles"

A fascinating post Drayfish – so good I read it – twice! As an explanation for the end it certainly makes a lot more sense that IT, which only address the internal narrative aspect of the game.

How far it is true I guess we may never know, but if it was true, surely Bioware would come out and admit as much as part of explaining the EC? Like IT in this respect, there was a time for such admissions to gain gamer goodwill. However, Bioware’s approach to the EC has been to say it will clarify the endings and keep them – yet with the extra voice work, and the qualifications regarding the in game world so far. the activity suggests more internal narrative work rather than an address to the meta-gaming aspect.

I can’t imagine Tricia Helfer and Lance Henrickson will be invited back as part of a scene where they sit down with a coffee and explain things to us in really small words – the input of the actors points to a expansion of the EC as a continuation of the game itself. I suppose they could be doing both, by expanding the in and meta games, but that would not remove the discordance of the ending as far as I can see.

But I still think this is a good topic to address, and hope that Delta_Vee and CultureGeekGirl will soon provide some fascinating insights on the idea, as it is potentially both shocking illuminating in terms of authorial intent. In the meantime, I might run with it, although I was once picked up by a lecturer for making up the word “metatragedicial”, so don’t expect much in the way of technical proficiency.

My first thought is that this changes the whole build up to the games release. It changes what Casey was saying about multiple endings, from standard PR speak to a massive troll of the fanbase. With this motive, we were deliberately misled for entirely different reasons to resourcing and so forth.

There was also no hint of such a thing in the pre-release as far as I know, so this would have been an idea that was thought out at the last moment and deliberately not foreshadowed in any way. As a newcomer to the series I have to wonder also where it would have sprung from – others here have been on the boards longer and would know if it was ever mentioned in regards to previous games.

The other question is related to the last point – why? In a game where the players inhabit their characters so thoroughly, why would they risk breaking all that immersion to make a clever statement, with all the risks that entails. As an example, the possible meta-meaning of the decision spokes eluded me in game, as I was so much in Shepherd’s place at the time that a commentary on the game itself was farthest from my mind.

I don’t have much to add regarding a reading of this authorial choice. However I will add that a fundamental dissonance at a meta-gaming level would explain why, like you, I have barely touched a game since finishing ME3, and would rather discuss the game at this level instead. I too have played so many games with rubbish or dissatisfying endings that my reaction to this one is in need of understanding.

In fact, when I think about my gaming since, it has all been highly technical – including a playthrough of ME1, not as Shepherd, but as gamer inspecting the evidence an assessing the background to ME3. The other game has been Skyrim – played for the ability to tinker with mods, while quality games like The Witcher 2 sit untouched. All of it is engagement at a different level to usual, whether it choices of games, or a paradigm shift in my attitude to forums and online discussion.

On the plus side, all this gasbagging is cheaper than my often frivolous spending in the past, a small positive for what it is worth.

While I am not convinced whether this was the intent, it does bear further cautious examination (we don’t want to create a rival cult to IT) and an interpretation of the evidence for IT could also apply to this interpretation.

One final thing – you are now forgiven for those hurtful comments about Eurovision.

EDIT: Smiley for the Eurovision comment

Modifié par frypan, 02 juin 2012 - 12:13 .

[frypan]

@edisnooM.

Didnt pick up the in game association of ctrl alt del! Nice one.

@alleyd.

Welcome. You get an award for now adding the Punk movement to this thread's repertoire.

I think Drayfish has come closest to illuminating why it is that confusion is so prevalent among so many of us. This idea of the meta-statement makes much more sense to me than IT or simple incompetence, even if it does represent a significant misunderstandng of the player/game relationship in this case.

QUICK EDIT: I mean that the confusion is created by mixed authorial messages.

While I have to go out for a while and do real life things like walking dogs (fun) and chopping wood (not so fun) I cant wait to see where this leads.

Modifié par frypan, 02 juin 2012 - 12:11 .

[drayfish]

frypan wrote...

One final thing – you are now forgiven for those hurtful comments about Eurovision.

For me it's all about Iceland.  Why does Iceland always get robbed?!


And welcome, alleyd.  I'm glad to see you in the thread.  And yes, we need more Johnny Rotten in the mix.  He would have had some things to say to the Catalyst no doubt.


EDIT: Also, he was born in London.

Modifié par drayfish, 02 juin 2012 - 12:20 .

[edisnooM]

@alleyd

Good post and welcome to the thread, and I must say for someone with a recent fear of writing you do it very well.

Of course that could just be my Scottish bias. :-)


@drayfish

No worries about the humour, as I said I like boring people with computer stuff. The difference between GB and GiB is that where as GB can refer to either 1000 Megabytes, or 1024 Megabytes, GiB always refers to 1024 Megabytes. :-)

Also I thought of another thing after reading frypans post. The Mass Effect series took itself seriously (to an extent), it put you in the role of Shepard and the fourth walls remained firm. Which I think made little moments like Conrad Verner all the more awesome. In ME1 he was interesting as a sidequest, but his return in ME2 and 3 really knocked it out of the park. Poking fun at the universe and the RPG things we did in it.

I quite enjoy it when a narrative every so often turns to the camera with a small wink, but only if it fits and doesn't ruin the story.

Edit: Hey Anderson was too! 

Modifié par edisnooM, 02 juin 2012 - 12:26 .

[FamilyManFirst]

drayfish wrote...

The more I unpack Mass Effect 3, the more I come to believe that its creators, in those now-infamous ten minutes, were trying to make a similar meta-textual statement, although one that was received in a profoundly different manner from how it was intended.  Indeed, it might account for all that 'artistic integrity' stuff – perhaps they really did think they were making a comment about the nature of their medium and Mass Effect itself as the culmination this art form's expressive potential. It's just that for some people (including myself) it went completely, spectacularly wrong...
 

Hmm, perhaps.  I almost hope that you're right; at least that would give them the justification of trying to do something epic, something marvelous.  To be honest, however, I'm not sure that I give them that much credit.  This has the feel to me of hasty writing, of a failure to follow their normal writing Q&A processes.  The other storylines of the game are so brilliant, and this one so broken, that it really feels like someone outside of BioWare wrote the ending.  Assuming that wasn't the case, it seems to me that there are simpler explanations of how the ending went so spectacularly wrong.

For example, the 3 options seem to me to be clumsy attempts to allow the player to follow the traditional path that has been laid before them (Destroy), side with the Illusive Man if they want (Control) or side with Saren if they want (Synthesis).  I seem to remember an interview before ME3's release where a writer or developer stated something to the effect that they weren't going to railroad the player into one ending, that the player could side with the Illusive Man if they so desired.

The idea that the ending was a failed attempt at a meta-textual statement on videogames is fascinating, but I think it stumbles under its own weight.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequetely explained by stupidity."  -Hanlon's Razor

[CulturalGeekGirl]

I'm late for a movie, so this post is rambly and unpolished. But if I didn't submit it now, It'll sit untended in my browser all weekend.

drayfish wrote...
 
I'm sure many are already familiar, but for anyone lucky enough to have not already been subjected to wanky terms like self-reflexivity: meta-textuality, is simply when a text references its own nature as being a text. You see it all the time on television in shows like The Simpsons (back when they were actually good; yeah, I said it): see the Poochie Episode where an inexplicable cousin has somehow joined the cast; or where Bart and Lisa walk past the same background several times at a cheap animation studio. More recently in the exquisite 30 Rock they will call out the conventions of the sitcom form constantly (a character will say, 'What could possible go wrong?' and Liz Lemon will turn, look straight down the barrel of the camera, and raise her eyebrows). It's also frequently a convention of a lot of postmodern literature like Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which begins:
 

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

There are numerous reasons for making this kind of self-referential acknowledgement of the artifice of the text, but in essence it's about just reminding the viewer of the conventions that they have naturally grown accustomed to. Through our familiarity with other examples of the medium we know how narratives function, how the artwork is communicating with us, and these references just find a new means of speaking to us on a different level.  By now we're all fairly aware of how sitcoms work, so you throw Abed from Community into the mix, let him verbalise that savvy audience expectation, and we get to watch how those same predictable mechanics can be subverted or lovingly reaffirmed.

I have a weird relationship with "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler." Every time I try to read it, I get several pages in and then encounter some sort of life-altering event that causes me to be completely distracted for months, and/or pack up all my books and posesssions and move several hundred miles away, losing track of the book in the process. I only found my copy again last week, and I'm afraid to start reading it again. I'm still not fully unpacked from the LAST time I tried.

One of the times I made the attempt, the distraction was Mass Effect. I was unpacking a box of books and games, and I pulled out Italo Calvino and a PC game I'd picked up a year ago but never started. A few days later, I was playing Mass Effect during every  moment of leisure I could find, and the book fell behind my desk, lost for months.

The point is, I've read the first few pages of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" about seven times. I've made decent inroads into the book, even if I've never finished it, and what follows is a genre-twisting dream world of exploration into the nature of text*. But there's a reason the novel opens the way it does. It seeks to put you into a state that is both dreamlike and self-aware. It seeks to place you in a state where you can both fully invest in the story and not lose your engagement when it steps outside itself. 

Every other story I've encountered that succesfully uses this kind of meta-text has given hints earlier that this was the direction they were traveling... whether it is establishing the narrator as unreliable from the start, referencing unknown works of non-existant scholars, or simply self-referentially footnoting until the cows get bored. There needs to be a hint, early on, that we are going on a different kind of journey.

This is why I don't buy most of the meta-textual interpretations of this particular ending. From the start, Mass Effect has been dripping with pull-you-in, win-you-over, break-your-heart sincerity. I love metatextual narratives that encourage you to engage with the nature of the medium they're in, but Mass Effect has never been one of those, and I actually really respect their sincerity level.

And that's why I don't really get IT, and the idea of a meta-textual un-narrative, where the death of our investment in a specific character invites us to dream about the future of the universe as a whole. Mass Effect invited me to... invest. Wholeheartedly, and without irony.



*It is sitting on my desk at home right now. If I suddenly stop posting for months for no apparent reason, you'll know that it has claimed me again.

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 02 juin 2012 - 01:21 .

[drayfish]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

Every other story I've encountered that succesfully uses this kind of meta-text has given hints earlier that this was the direction they were traveling... whether it is establishing the narrator as unreliable from the start, referencing unknown works of non-existant scholars, or simply self-referentially footnoting until the cows get bored. There needs to be a hint, early on, that we are going on a different kind of journey.

This is why I don't buy most of the meta-textual interpretations of this particular ending. From the start, Mass Effect has been dripping with pull-you-in, win-you-over, break-your-heart sincerity. I love metatextual narratives that encourage you to engage with the nature of the medium they're in, but Mass Effect has never been one of those, and I actually really respect their sincerity level.

Absolutely. That's why I find the ending so jarring now that I am starting to read it in that way. Given the depth of sincerity and investment that the three games have asked from the audience, and repeatedly rewarded, this kind of break would be a complete violation of a firmly established relationship, and should never have been attempted.  I'm just finding it hard to discount the manifest dialogue wheel and the literally glowing deus ex machina. Again, the writers have never shown themselves to be this unaware of the ramifications of their material before now.

As you say, Calvino's novel is the perfect example for how to do it properly, as it indicates to you through it's very title the experience he is evoking, carries you through it on every page, and then ends (NOT-REALLY-A-SPOILER ALERT) as a textual kiss between fiction and audience, lovingly elevating the act of reading to a romantic embrace.

Mass Effect was the evocation of a universe in which we were invited to live. Telling us at the final moments (if indeed that is what they were trying to allude to) that it was also a game undermines that imaginative projection in a disturbing, self-immolating way.

Modifié par drayfish, 02 juin 2012 - 01:49 .

[Seijin8]

Not all life-altering events are bad ones. Here's holding out hope for you, CGG.