Personally, I don't think they owe fans an apology for the content of the game – and I'm not sure I'd want one at this point anyway, it would feel far too contrived. Bioware have made the decision to stand by their text in its current form, indeed they expanded and clarified it so we know that this was indeed the message they wanted to convey . I suspect the most those unsatisfied will ever get is some backhanded, mealy mouthed promise to 'address the issues that disappointed fans in ME3' in the pre-release materials for ME4 (whatever that game turns out to be).
(I do, however, think they could stand to show a little humility for the utterly, shamelessly misleading promises they made about ME3's content in the lead up to release – for their own sakes as much as the fans. That whole 'A, B, or C' endings quote might haunt them for years.)
But ultimately I don't think they need to apologise because they are artists producing an artistic statement - I might despise, and be shocked by the clumsy witlessness of that message, but it is their right to make it in the manner that they see fit.
What I do think they should do however – what any artist in the same circumstance would be expected to do – is to explain their intent. Not apologise, but own it. Speak about what their mission statement was, and why they made the choices they did. Again, not an apology, but a statement of poetics:
this is what we were hoping to convey.
An artist should never be compelled to change their art against their will, but I believe that they do have a responsibility to explain or defend their work. Authors, painters, directors, all have to stand by the material that they release into the world. A film-maker cannot produce a movie that seems to advocate racism or sexism or hate and simply refuse to speak about what they intended after the ticket sales have been counted (particularly not after saturating the market with quotations pre-release only to disappear in a puff of smoke after the audience sees it). To do so means that the work has either failed in its communicative purpose, or was never worthy of being called an artistic statement in the first place.
And if – as appears to be the case with
Mass Effect – the work has failed to have satisfactorily communicated its purpose to a good portion of its audience, I would have thought that the creators themselves would have been eager to voice their intentions, to give the work the context that for some it clearly needs. It's been over half a year, and so far all anyone has heard from Bioware (through more PR spiel leading up to the release of the EC) is that they stand by their message, and that they found it unfortunate that fans misinterpreted what they were trying to say... But still no explanation of what that message
was that they were trying to communicate, or what moral or themes they intended their text to embody.
In that context, refusing to speak, hiding behind 'speculations', and hoping that some unsatisfied members of the audience will embrace IT as an alternate ending as long as the company does not outright discredit it, is neither artistic nor philosophically deep. To me it suggests that perhaps they themselves are not even sure what the purpose of their text was. And how can you explain or apologise for something if you don't even know what you did?
Modifié par drayfish, 21 septembre 2012 - 12:14 .
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