Hey guys!
Just an update that I am still working on the next chapter, but the past month has had a lot of distractions and interruptions. I will update as soon as I can.
In the meantime, I thought I'd just post an observation I had this week. I was watching a bunch of videos by Totalbiscuit on YouTube, and in one of his Mailbox episodes he commented that games, in comparison to movies or books, must allow for players to express themselves within the game environment.
Now my first thought on hearing this was 'Not really. There are plenty of games that don't permit a player to express himself.' But then I realised that you have to broaden your definition of how a player can express himself. At first, I was only thinking about being able to express myself in an RPG context, where I choose the attitude and moral outlook of my avatar. While something like a puzzle game or a shooter doesn't allow for that, it does allow for alternate modes of player input. Puzzles are solved by your own creativity, while shooters or RTS games allow you to form unique strategies that change from person to person. These are all ways for a player to express himself.
So with this in mind, I turned my thoughts back to Mass Effect. Did it effectively allow for player expression? Moreover, what kinds of player expression should it have allowed for? Should it make room for the more complex forms of personal opinion and moral standards, or was it more suited for shooter-style expression, where the player input is done with strategies and squad co-ordination while a linear plot serves as the framework?
In my opinion, it should be the former, the RPG style. Expectations were obviously set from the start, and promised to be fulfilled throughout the trilogy. While the strategic combat was certainly a factor, it should have been a lesser one. While ME1 and, to a lesser degree, ME2, more or less managed to make room for this, ME3 certainly feels like it did not. Facets of gameplay that allowed for this narrative-shaping control that was expected were sadly streamlined out of the experience, and ultimately the writing itself was restrictive.
And there we have what I now think was the biggest problem with ME3 as a whole that led to it being such a disappointment for so many- players could no longer contribute their own ideals and standards to shape the experience. There was little more than token effort given to making room for the players in this experience, with author opinions and cinematic demands taking greater priority. As has been observed, Rannoch and Tuchanka allow somewhat for this player expression to take place, but only at the very climax of the scene, rather than throughout the plot (an example would be the fact that Wrex gets an incriminating recording of Shepard and the Dalatrass, a recording which Shepard cannot avoid saying regardless of whether the player was considering the sabotage. Even if you ultimately do Cure the Genophage, you've still said exactly what that recording contains. Such examples are spread throughout the game which we've taken to referring to it as 'auto-dialogue'.)
A part of this issue, of course, is the idea of 'our Shepard'. Did we ever have this control before? Did we have the right to this form of self-expression? I think that we did, but that fact was forgotten during ME3's development.
Of course, nowhere is this more obvious than at the ending, where its clear the writing focused entirely on promoting the author's ideals and viewpoints while (hopefully by accident) ignoring the potential for players to hold a different viewpoint or different priorities. In this case, author expression drowned out player expression to the massive detriment of the narrative. While such an ending with the ideas presented could have been quite functional and maybe even enjoyable as a movie, novel or even a game with a much more linear premise, in the case of Mass Effect it was utter poison to many.
Of course, some of the player base shared the same viewpoint that was presented (on the issue of Organo-synthetic conflict and on what the most important themes of ME were), but this was a narrow selection of the audience, certainly narrower than should have been catered to (you'll never please everyone, but in mainstream media you should try to keep as many people happy as you can). Thus, we now have a wide divide between those who enjoyed the experience and those who did not, and because its a division of belief, the conflict between the two sides can be especially visceral at times.
This can lead to the question of whether there is room in games (RPGs, at any rate) for overt authorial expression when player expression is so vital. In my opinion, the players need to come first, so this calls for humility from the creators of the fiction, a willingness to permit other viewpoints to exist within the narrative than their own and for the players to take the reins.
So what are your thoughts? Was player expression really core to your enjoyment of the ME franchise? How do you view its handling in ME3? How much do you think a game's writer can insert his own ideals and so on into a narrative before it becomes detrimental to the player's experience? Discuss.
Fainmaca Out.
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