Don't Fear the Reaper

It’s very rare for me to observe a chain of events in its entirety and still have to stop and ask, with no irony whatsoever, how did we even get here? How did things degrade so fast in, at the time of this writing, only fourteen days? I’m sure that’s the question being asked around at Bioware at the moment, because as March the 6^th finally dawned on us I don’t think anyone was expecting this.

After years of waiting, months of hype and loads of hard work, Mass Effect 3 was finally released and for a time everything was good. But then people reached the ending, and the internet exploded.

Pictured here: the internet hate machine in motion.

By now I think it’s become readily apparent to the internet at large that ME3’s ending is… let’s say “divisive”. Now, I’m not going to discuss the ending itself in this article because the game has just now only been out for a full two weeks and I’d rather not divulge any spoilers. If you want to know specific details I’d be happy to direct you to literally any other part of the internet in existence. We won’t be discussing it here. The only thing I’ll say is that there is a fair amount of criticism of the ending floating around, and it is valid. To be fair, I agree with a lot of people that there is a lack of closure post-decision at the endgame that, if that wasn’t the case, I’d otherwise be content with how it ended, other factors be damned. With that said, we need to focus on something of far more importance; the fallout that the ending has caused.

Now, I’ve made it no secret in the past what my opinion is of the Bioware fanbase at large. They can be called a number of things. “Passionate”, for example. “Dedicated”. “Outspoken,” even. “Unpleaseable,” if you want to make blanket generalizations. They are, as a collective, a by-product of Bioware’s corporate culture itself and how they maintain close ties with their community. This is both a blessing and a curse, because this results in fans that are very loyal, but fans that become very enraged and very vocal when they feel they’ve been slighted.

And hoo boy, are they being vocal now.

Prior to this chain of events unfolding I’m not sure if it would even be possible to imagine the degree in which things have degraded. To put things lightly, people do not like the ending, and instead of this stopping and ending at the logical point of mere criticism (both constructive and not), we’ve advanced past that into something else entirely. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the “Retake Mass Effect” movement.

This is a full-on movement requesting, nay, demanding, a revision of ME3’s ending.

I can only feel sympathy for the boys and girls of Bioware at the moment, because even pre-launch the more vocal members of their fanbase must have been giving them the impression that they could do nothing right. Just about every detail released about the game, every marketing move, every sneak peak, everything somehow managed to spark some hate. There was the inclusion of Kinect support, there was the entire FemShep fiasco, there was the reveal of multiplayer, then Jessica Chobot’s involvement, then the Day 1 DLC issue, and so on. Everything they talked about managed to draw the ire of somebody. Now, some debates over these issues were probably more warranted than others. Hell, I’ll readily admit that I’m still curious as to what the rationale behind casting Jessica Chobot in a role is when, among other concerns, she can’t act.

If I may be blunt, I can only assume that it involved her doing something similar to this.

I will say one thing in all of the anger’s defense; it was at least criticism. Regardless of how valid or helpful these people’s opinions were, they were still opinions and they wanted them to be heard. As obnoxious as that got at times there isn’t anything inherently wrong with that. The problem with the boat we’re in now is that it’s not just criticism. What we have here are demands.

The Retake Mass Effect movement is a community drive formed for one purpose; to convince Bioware to change Mass Effect 3’s ending. The movement has created a petition requesting Bioware to create an alternate ending that the community will be satisfied with and, to show how serious they are, they started a charity drive with all proceeds going directly to Child’s Play. At the time of this column’s writing said donation drive has accumulated close to 70 thousand dollars. Now, for the most part this movement has been rather civil and their good intentions have been backed by good deeds, but that doesn’t change the fact that they can be readily identified as the proverbial “eye of the storm” for this entire mess. The movement is, by far, the most visible aspect of all this and regardless of how well they’re conducting themselves as a whole, their end-goal still boils down to a simple statement of “we want you to change this”.

Of course, every movement also attracts its radicals, and with this being the internet the fury and mindlessness is out in full force. From what I’ve observed everything that Bioware says is being met with a response of “change the ending”. Everything. Here, take a look at an example I found.

You’re getting angry over t-shirts of all things you shrill, belligerent harpy.

It isn’t just things that Bioware says, either. The best I can tell just about every person in the games industry that says a single positive thing about the game these days gets accused of being “paid off” by Electronic Arts. For example, I know that Susan Arendt has been accused of accepting bribes or some such drivel thanks to her review that’s up on the Escapist. Susan, for Pete’s sake. This is a woman who I first met on the Escapist back in 2008. I have a lot of respect for her both as a game journalist and as a person, and the very notion that she’d be willingly “bought” is just galling.

It’s not just half of The Escapist’s staff whose credibility is being called into question, though. I’m sure every major gaming outlet is being hit with these kinds of accusations, with IGN probably getting far more flak than most. The one that puzzles me more than any is someone said this about Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade. Considering that one of Penny Arcade’s largest scandals was almost entirely the result of Krahulik sticking to his guns and being uncompromising in speaking his opinions I don’t see any justification for that beyond a simple need to lash out at someone.

Oh, but it gets better. Yesterday morning I discovered that one enterprising member of Bioware’s fanbase took it upon himself to report both Bioware and Electronic Arts to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau on the grounds that the ending in the game wasn’t what we were promised and that Bioware should be punished for false advertising.

It… it’s just… am I the only one seeing this? Does no one else see anything wrong here? Is it just me? Am I really the only sane one left? Does no one else notice this lunacy? Does no one else care?! What is going on here?!?!

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here!

Okay… let’s try to take a step backwards and see if we can explain my stance…

The Creator and their Work

First of all, it might help if you understand where my rage is coming from. I am, first and foremost, an artist and a creative type, so the movement as a whole to make Bioware change the game’s ending disgusts me on a personal level. If you don’t quite understand the correlation here, you need to stop and realize that the entire Mass Effect franchise is, at its core, a creative work. It’s the result of seven years of labor from writers, programmers, concept artists, voice actors, animators, level designers, and countless other people working together to create this trilogy of games. These people all pooled their talents together for one purpose; to tell a story. Now, it’s true that based on both criticism and suggestions from their fans each installment of the story did slightly change, but it’s still Bioware’s story either way. They made it, and what’s happening here is that people are looking at their work and saying “I don’t really like this part. Do it again.”

If you read that statement and don’t understand what the issue is, than I regret to inform you that you are the problem.

This is why earlier I made a very clear distinction between what has been criticism and what has been demands. There isn’t inherently anything wrong with criticizing a work of art. Personally I’d say it’s necessary. Hearing a person’s personal opinion on what you created gives you a fresh perspective, can bring up points that you may not have considered and can even offer suggestions that can make your art better and help you grow as an artist. The thing you have to keep in mind here is that all criticism is inherently based on a person’s own opinions, and an opinion is not ironclad fact. It’s just what a particular person thinks, how they feel, and so on, and these things vary wildly from one person to another.

Herein lays the problem. Personal opinion is influencing demands of Bioware to alter their creative work. I honestly don’t care how much of a consensus there is about how bad the endings were. In the end it’s irrelevant because it’s an opinion. More importantly, it’s an opinion held by someone other than the creator.

Understand something, here and now. It does not matter how big a fan you are of something or how fervently you support it. You never have the right to tell the creator of a piece of creative content that based on your feelings with their work, they need to change it. This is even true with something like Mass Effect where the story is essentially tailored for each player. The game gives you the illusion of participation and control, but every possible event and outcome was written by someone. At the end of the day, it’s not your story, and it never was, and as such you are not allowed to control it and dictate what needs to be changed.

... however, Bioware does have that kind of control, and if they feel so inclined...

The Retcon

Lets take out my own moral objections to all this for a moment. Rather, let me ask you a question; assuming that Bioware suddenly has the urge to change the ending to ME3, is there really a precedent for this kind of thing?

I know it's safe to say that this is hardly the first time someone has been "upset" by a piece of media. Certainly not the first time someone has been mad about the ending, either, but to be fair I don't remember seeing any fan petitions being created to change the ending of The Sopranos. Or Lost, either. Hell, even all the uproar over the quality of the Star Wars prequels and George Lucas constantly editing the films has stopped at mere rage. I guess what I'm asking here is "what exactly is different"?

It's certainly not how passionate the fanbase is, considering how many self-described "Losties" and people that claim Jedi is their religion there are running around in the world. Granted, Bioware's fanbase is more vocal and passionate than most, having just accomplished something thought impossible by convincing a company to patch a book. Still, it's more of an issue with the medium itself rather than the work's fans.

I know that there was no shortage of hardcore Star Wars fans who weren't exactly "happy" with The Phantom Menace, but to my knowledge there was never any movements to get George Lucas to reshoot parts of the movie. "Yeah, things like the lightsaber battle and seeing some of the characters again were nice, but that Jar-Jar character is an insufferable skidmark stain on the metaphorical underpants of this movie. Get rid of him, make Anakin about ten, fifteen years older and get rid of all of the podracing and I'd say you'll have a much better movie. So yeah, what I'm saying is film it again."

Now, besides the fact that saying such things would make you look like a stark raving madman, something sadly not stopping people now, the reason no one made outright demands to Lucas to "fix"his movie is because it's functionally impossible. The thing with movies, and indeed any visually recorded creative medium, is that it requires numerous different elements to create. Not just the presence of the actors, either. To theoretically refilm even one scene of "Phantom" after the fact actors would need to be contacted, sets (re)constructed, props and costumes gathered, camera and sound equipment would need to be bought or taken out of storage, and depending on the scene all of the above would need to be lugged out to a location somewhere. That isn't even taking into account all of the post-processing like basic editing, folly work, special effect and, of course, re-releasing the movie.

With that all in mind changing Mass Effect 3's ending is a more reasonable request from a technical standpoint. For the most part the only people or resources Bioware would need to actively seek out are, in theory, the voice talent. Beyond that everything else is already in-game or they have the staff to create whatever is needed on hand. Whatever they make can be delivered to the audience with next to no effort via download, much like a patch or any other downloadable content. Essentially the argument boils down to "well, if they're able to make DLC for the game, they're able to make a new ending".

Indeed, there is a precedent of sorts for this kind of thing in the form of Fallout 3, but I wouldn't quite point to it as an example of history repeating itself.

As the game comes to a close the player character has the option to activate something called "Project Purity", which for the sake of brevity is a way to fix the Capital Wasteland and make it less of a putrid, irradiated armpit of a place. However, the control chamber for the project is heavily irradiated so whoever steps into the room to turn it on will die. It comes down to a choice between choosing who to kill off, yourself or the leader of the local Brotherhood of Steel forces Sarah Lyons.

... except that, you know, you have companions who are immune to radiation poisoning who could do it so no one has to die.

Comic by PhoenixFuryBane

This plothole aside, the main issue with Fallout 3's ending was that, after completing the main quest, all gameplay was over. If you're scratching your head at this statement and don't quite understand the problem, you have to understand that this is a Bethesda game we're talking about. Bethesda's "hat" as a developer is to create massive, immersive worlds that you can faff about in for hundreds of hour and essentially do whatever you damn well please, up to and including actively ignoring the story. Compared to the game's then closest contemporary, Oblivion, not being able to play after Fallout 3's ending was completely unexpected and rather jarring. There was a lot players didn't do under the reasonable assumption that "I can do it after finishing this quest", but finishing the final mission in the main questline locked out all other content without any real warning.

Eventually "Broken Steel" was released as the third DLC pack for the game and tweaked the ending, fixing the plothole and allowing players to keep playing after the end. Even in spite of all that I would hardly call Broken Steel precedent for what's happening here. While this does show that a game's ending can be changed after the fact, the circumstances are entirely different. With the Fallout 3 situation the ending change was primarily a gameplay fix. Any changes to the story were so negligible that they could have just as easily not been included and there would barely be any difference. While Broken Steel was made to address a gameplay issue that would effectively lock the player out of other content and end their character's journey, the drive to alter Mass Effect 3 is one targeted just at the writing.

For the sake of contrast, allow me to show you the complete opposite of the Fallout Precedent, a game that suffered from the exact same problem as Mass Effect 3 in which an otherwise solid game with brilliant writing was derailed in the last five minutes.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West wasn't exactly a game that broke sales records, but it reviewed rather well and still worked for what it was. The story itself wasn't exactly Shakespearean in it's complexity, with the driving focus of Act 1 being that one of the main characters gets back home. From Act 2 onwards it becomes a story of revenge as a result of what the characters found at said home. Still, the main strength of the story came from the character's themselves and their interactions. As things progressed it became apparent that it was far more about the journey and the characters, not the end destination.

Which is good, because it turns out the "end" of everything is a reveal that Pyramid, the omnipresent and threatening presence in post-apocalyptic Earth who uses a massive army of mechanical soldiers to abduct and seemingly enslave what's left of humanity, is actually The Matrix.

I'm not even joking.

The characters actually look more confused than I was.

Enslaved's last ten minutes or so introduces so many plotholes that the writers might as well have shot the game's script point-blank with a shotgun. The degree in which the game's ending disappoints and derails things is on par with what happened at the end of ME3, but I've never seen any movement or community drive set up to fix this. I could jokingly say the reason for this is because a grand total of seventeen people actually played this game, but even that hints to the real reason. There just isn't any passion for Enslaved, at least nowhere near the levels that Bioware's fans show for the Mass Effect series, and that's because players failed to become invested on an emotional level.

Entitlement

I hate to harp on the issue of modern gamers having an undeserved sense of entitlement any more than I already have in the past, but it's an issue that's come to the forefront of all of this madness.


Just to clarify, look at the above picture. The overall movement to retcon ME3's ending is called "Retake Mass Effect 3", with a great deal of emphasis on the word retake. Exactly who are you retaking the game from? Bioware? They're the ones that made it. The game is in no way yours and you don't have the right to dictate what happens to it.

I know that it seems like I'm retreading ground from previously in this article, but bare with me here. As I see it, everyone clamoring for a change to the ending feels that they're entitled to something different, something "better" than what they've already been given. My usual response to these sort of complaints is that you are owed nothing free, nothing extra, and you in no way deserve anything.

... except this time, well, you do and you don't. At the end of the day I still stand by the belief that you really don't have the right to demand anything of a developer, regardless of whether or not they can technically do it. After making their game and shipping it out in working order you don't deserve anything else, but in this case it's just not about additional content anymore. It's about something else.

For five years now fans of Mass Effect have been a part of the story. They've seen the universe change, they've watched as characters have developed and grown. In some cases they've started relationships with some of those characters and have taken things even further. They have grown attached to the story and the characters involved in it. They care about these people and what happens to then, and you know what? In that regard you're right. You do deserve something better. You deserve, at the very least, closure to something several years in the making that you helped give your own personal touches to. Instead, where there should have been resolution, there are only more questions. You feel cheated. I know for a fact that I do.

I guess what I've been attempting to explain here is that, while I disagree with the drive to make the ending change, I still agree that what we were given just isn't good enough. We're sort of in murky waters here, If anything, I guess my stance could be summarized as "I agree with why this movement exist, but not with it's existence" if that makes a lick of sense.

Either way, I think it can be agreed that events are rapidly approaching the point of being taken too far (that is if we haven't crossed that line already). Bioware is currently dealing with a storm of disgruntled fans and bad PR the likes of which I have never even seen within our industry before. All thanks to fifteen minutes at the end of a game.

Fifteen. Minutes. Regardless of what side of this debate your on or what your stance is, you have to remember that's all it is. Fifteen minutes of story and exposition that went wrong. Perhaps more importantly, it's fifteen minutes at the end. Think about everything leading up to that last moment. Everything you played, everything you experienced. Everything you felt as events were unfolding. Up until the tail end of the game was brilliant, and regardless of what your feeling on the ending are those fifteen minutes cannot devalue whatever you were feeling earlier on in the story. No matter how bad those fifteen minutes are, even up to the point where you have to ask yourself if anything you did actually mattered, those fifteen minutes can never take away the emotional impact you were feeling before.

If everyone had just taken a minute to take a breath and put everything into perspective like that, maybe we wouldn't be where we are now where things have degraded so fast. Sadly, we are now, and all we can do is sit and wait to see how all of this unfolds, for better or for worse.

~V

Max "Vanguard" Phillips is a freelance photographer, occasional writer and a long-time gamer. He's nowhere near important enough to be bribed by anyone, so don't even bother accusing him of anything.

The Film of the Game

Oh boy, we’re opening up a can of worms with this one.

So, at this point it’s pretty widely accepted that movie adaptations of videogames don’t exactly turn out all that well (i.e. they suck). It’s sad, I know, but this just seems to be the way the world works, and for whatever reason Hollywood keeps churning these movies out. Just like with every other disaster this particular trend does have an actual cause, and believe it or not it can’t all be traced back to some wingnut thinking it would be a good idea to hand over the movie rights for a videogame franchise to some German guy who keeps insisting that he’s a real director.

Truly the face of a visionary.

… granted, that isn’t exactly helping, but that’s not the point.

It may not be readily apparent at first, but this whole adaptation business is a two-way street, and there are problems on their side and ours. So, let’s get down to business and get to the finger-pointing, shall we?

The Movie Side

Let’s get the obvious part out of the way first; part of the issue here is that it just seems that movie studios just don’t care. Now, that isn’t exactly a “fair” umbrella statement to make. I’m sure there are plenty of people involved who are very dedicated and are really giving it their all for whatever project they’re attached to, but for Christ’s sake, you guys, churning out pieces of crap like Wing Commander doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, even more so if everyone on board really was trying their best.

No, from as far as I can tell most movie executives do care. Quite a bit, in fact, just not in the areas that we want. They’re more worried about their profits and their bottom-line than anything else. Heck, if you stop and really take a look at things, what we have here is a complete reverse of the “movie licensed cash-in game” problem. Case and point: Doom.

Doom 3 was released by id Software back in ’04 and, despite a few complaints here and there about how the game veered towards survival horror territory and how in the future all guns apparently have a natural magnetic repulsion to flashlights, it was a good game. It reviewed well, it sold well, and for what it’s worth I thought it played well. Somebody somewhere in Hollywood took notice of this and said “Hey, this franchise is making money. Why don’t we make a movie based off of it so we can make some money, too?”

And make a movie they did. A little over a year later Doom was released in theaters, and it was deplorable. Good job, boys.

This just helps reinforce what I see as being the main problem. The studios care more about the license itself than the actual integrity or content of it. With Doom they kept a few of the key elements added in by the most recent game, but managed to flub up one major point; Mars wasn’t being invaded by demons from Hell. That’s pretty much the entire premise of the Doom franchise. Company experiments with teleportation, company discovers the portal to Hell, and everything goes to crap. That was the entire story of the original game.

How hard was it to mess that up? Seriously? You even had a game that was a reboot of the entire franchise that had it’s own story. Sure, it wasn’t exactly Sharsperian in complexity, but it was a story. You could have just lifted the script of Doom 3, written a few one liners for Karl Urban to say in the margins and then filmed it. There. Problem solved. You have a movie that’s at least of the same quality of what we got that’s actually faithful.

Apparently none of these things entered anyone’s mind during scripting or production, and even then I can only guess that if someone said something no one who was high enough up on the food chain to have the power to fix it seemed to care. No, none of that mattered. It was all about the license. The brand recognition. That was going to sell tickets and put the butts in the seats either way, so why bother actually trying?

This same thing almost happened with the Uncharted movie but, thankfully, we seem to be avoiding it. I’ll admit to never playing any of the games in the Uncharted franchise, but even then I could tell there were problems when I started hearing about the casting choices.

Now, when I bring up casting I’m not talking about Mark Whalberg as Nathan Drake. I personally don’t think he can pull off being the lead in an action movie (I’m looking at you, Italian Job remake) and the movies I’ve liked him best in are dramas like Four Brothers and The Departed. That said, you have Nathan Fillion practically throwing himself at your feet for the role and you cast MARKY MARK! What is wrong with you people?!?!

It’s okay, Capt’n, us Browncoats still love you.

*ahem* No, this isn’t about that. I’m referring to comments saying that Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci were being cast to play Nathan’s father and uncle, respectively. From what I understand these are characters that have never appeared in the franchise and, for all intensive purposes, don’t really exist.

You’re starting to see the problem here, right?

Director David O'Russell had a “vision” for the Uncharted movie where Nathan Drake is part of some kind of secret underworld family that kept watch over all of the antiques and shiny ancient relics of the world, and that’s all well and good, but it’s the diametric opposite of Uncharted’s basic premise. Nathan Drake is suppose to be like a modern-day Indiana Jones (or more accurately a male version of Laura Croft, who in turn is a female version of Indiana Jones) who runs around the world shooting ambiguously evil henchmen and liberating ancient civilizations of their priceless artifacts. O’Russell’s take on things directly contradicts the source material to the point where you have to ask yourself why they would even bother.

Dave, if you want to make a movie where Marky Mark, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci fly around the world breaking the kneecaps of treasure hunters with lead pipes, good for you. Go make that movie. I might even watch it, but don’t bend a pre-existing IP over a table and have your way with it to make that movie.

“What, you think treasure hunting is funny? Funny how? Does disturbing the resting place of an ancient civilization amuse you?”

Even after this entire rant this is something that might give you a bit of hope; David O’Russel walked away from the project due to disagreements between him and Sony, and now the project has a new director and they’re sticking far closer to the source material. Press releases say that the split was mutual, but personally I like to think it went down something like this:

David O’Donnell: … and that’s my script for the Uncharted movie. Thoughts?

Studio Executive: Yeah, it’s good and all, but last night on the advice of my family councilor I actually spent some time with my son instead of trying to cram a Ritalin prescription down his throat as a substitution for proper parenting and he said the Uncharted game is nothing like that. At all.

O’Donnell: Yeah, I may have taken a couple artistic liberties and re-imagined a few things…

Exec: Re-imagined how?

O’Donnell: Well, for example Nathan Drake now travels with Blotto, his talking Jack Russell Terrier who says witty one-liners and fights crime.

[beat]

O’Donnell: I’ve been trying to get a hold of John Travolta to see if he’s available to voice him, but he isn’t returning my calls.

Exec: Dave, you’re fired.

The Game Side

As I said blame lies on both sides of the fence, but unlike the Hollywood side of things game developers aren’t inherently doing anything wrong. It’s more a problem with the medium itself.

Videogames are, regardless of genre, an interactive form of entertainment. The player takes an active role in things, driving the plot forward and in some cases even making decision about how it unfolds. Movies, on the other hand, are a passive form of entertainment. As a viewer all you really have to do is sit and, well, view. The movie takes everything else from there and does the work for you.

This is where we start running into issues. Regardless to whether or not the game is just running a bare bones excuse plot or has an epic, fleshed out narrative there’s still the obstacle of how to transfer gameplay into something that can work in a film. This is why every videogame movie I can think of can be accurately described as an action movie. The shift from gameplay elements to action set piece is pretty simple. At least that’s something that Uncharted will be able to deal with better than most. That game was already designed like it’s a movie directed by Michael Bay, and if someone manages to still mess that up then it’s time to hand over their director card and find a new line of work.

It’s because of this little obstacle that I think moviemakers believe they can get away with making anything that carries a game’s name. As long as it has fighting, explosions, monsters or whatever it is that made the game fun the fans will just eat it up. Who the hell cares about “plot”? *pfft* We have a scene where the camera goes into first person, like in the game! People will love it!

… and now you know why the world has four Resident Evil movies. I hope you feel enlightened.

If the gameplay issue wasn’t enough, some of the franchises that get chosen for the movie treatment don’t exactly offer themselves up to the transfer very well. Look back at the Super Mario Bros. movie as an example, if you dare. The plot of Super Mario Bros. doesn’t extend that far past “a gigantic turtle with an attitude problem just captured your princess and you have to go get her back”. That’s it, and when you start looking at the gameplay elements of jumping on mushroom people and collecting coins it’s no wonder that the scriptwriters panicked and wrote what they did. That doesn’t absolve them from making that abomination, but I get why it’s the way it is.

Now, if people on the game industry side of this are to blame for anything, it’s probably not keeping a degree of creative control. I honestly don’t know if this is a condition for Hollywood paying for the game’s license, if publishers like EA and Activision just sell the IPs off independently of the actual developer that made the game, or whatever, but not having someone around to represent the actual creative team that made the source material is a problem.

I’ll admit to this just being an assumption on my part, but let me put it this way: I sincerely doubt that Shigeru Miyamoto was invited to the offices of Hollywood Pictures, was shown this…

… and after watching it said “Yeah, that looks about right. Good job.”

The Solution

… I’m not going to lie, I’ve got nothing. Seriously, how does one fix this without just throwing out speculative ideas and theories?

The best I can do, honestly, is suggest two things. First off, studios, maintain some creative control over your IP. Make it a condition of the business contract that you guys have veto power over any particularly ideas, and if it comes down to it bite the bullet and walk away from the project, killing it completely. It’ll hurt your wallet, but if you care about your creation it’ll be worth it for a moral victory.

Meanwhile, filmmakers, be a bit more selective with your choices. Because of how the videogame medium works even some truly long games can be thin on story outside of pre-scripted events or cutscenes. Ideally, and this is just a suggestion, your more popular adventure games or RPGs are your best bet. It some cases they might have too much story, and unless you’re willing to go the Lord of the Rings route things will have to get cut. Still, as a fan I’d rather the writers had to cut out side plots and the like instead of come up with some kind of inane story to fill the gaps.

In the meantime? All there’s really left to do is just sit back and see how some of our next movie offerings are going to fare. I’m sure I’ll see some of you guys at a midnight screening of Mass Effect somewhere. I’ll be the guy setting the theater on fire in retaliation for the movie being terrible.

~V

Max "Vanguard" Phillips is a freelance photographer, occasional writer and a long-time gamer. Right now he's trying to get Christopher Nolan to read the screenplay he's written for "The Longest Journey", but so far all he's gotten back is a sternly-worded restraining order.

Showing Your True Colors

“The first thing a God masters is itself” – Legion, Mass Effect 2

Let’s take a moment to talk about morality in games.

Hey, sit back down, dammit!

Okay, yes, I already know that practically everyone else on the internet has been beating this dead horse for a while now. The good/evil system just artificially extends game time by forcing a second playthrough, it railroads players to make certain decisions for certain outcomes, your choices boil down to either being Mary Poppins or Caligula, yadda yadda yadda. Yeah, we’ve all heard it, and believe it or not I agree with it. Hell, I even take issue with it in the Mass Effect series, which I’ll openly admit to being a fanboy of. Sure, for the most part ME doesn’t commit the sin of locking out certain endings based off of an arbitrary morality “score”, but it does still restrict certain dialogue options and actions based solely on you not being enough of an asshole.

Also, being a jerk to people in this universe makes you look like Techno-Satan. Or possibly the Terminator.

That’s not either here or there. Today we’re not here to talk about meters or the morality of characters. We’re here to talk about you. Yes, you.

Let me run a scenario by you. Imagine that you’re an omnipotent and all-powerful whatever just floating in the sky over a happy little village. The villagers pretty much live unremarkable lives. They eat, they sleep, the work, they gossip about their neighbors and throw insults back and forth over the fence. That kind of thing. Still, these are a people that are, at least to a point, dependent on you and your influence. They worship you, their belief strengthens you, and they rely on you.

Now, let’s be honest here, about how long do you think it will take you before you start smiting people with bolts of lightning from the sky?

This is a question indirectly asked by Black and White, a series made by Peter Molyneux before he had his studio Lionhead hunker down and do nothing but churn out sequels to Fable. Like everything else Lionhead has ever made Molyneux got a little… “excited” about both the original and the sequel. “You’ll get to adopt a Creature and help it learn,” he said. “You’ll be able to interact with all of your villagers on a personal level,” he said. “Rubbing the game disc on your genitals will cure all major STDs,” he said. You know, his usual shtick. Still, it was a unique and good game for what it was and, personally, both games are still among my favorite games of all time.

Why is any of this important? Well, B&W was a “God game”, and I don’t mean like The Sims is allegedly a “God game” in which you do things like seal a Sim into a room to slowly watch them die like you’re reenacting Saw on a budget.

You could at least put some wallpaper on those walls, you sick, demented bastard.

No, you are literally playing as a God. The God as far as your people are concerned. You are a non-corporeal entity that can do pretty much anything from control the movement of the Sun in the sky to making earthquakes scar the land. You are all powerful… within your own influence. You’re literally as strong as how many people believe in you, and naturally the end goal is to make everyone believe in you.

… and how you do that is entirely up to you.

You have only one overall end goal; make everyone in the world believe in you, and while you may have individual objectives from land to land the game never tells you how to do it. You can either be nice an benevolent, an utter bastard or anywhere in between, and there aren’t any alternate endings or achievements or little bonuses for a New Game+ for favoring one over another. No, how you choose to do things is, in the grand scheme of things, completely irrelevant. You just have to win. Whatever means to an end you use is entirely on you.

This brings me back to that little scenario from earlier. Exactly how long is it going to take before you start raining meteors down from the heavens on the unbelievers? How long is it going to take before you start grabbing your followers to sacrifice them just so you’ll have the power to launch your next attack even faster? How long will it be before you’ve won purely because there isn’t anyone left to believe in something that isn’t you?

“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me, lest you be smote by my giant doom ape, Mr. Pickles.”

The next time you hear the morality system discussion come up anywhere be sure to point at Black and White as an example on how to do it right. This game’s system is one that by today’s standards doesn’t even exist. Sure, depending on your alignment you get little cosmetic things like fields of happy flowers appearing on the very ground you touch or the blades on your windmill being made from stretched human flesh, but that’s it. No rewards, no incentives beyond one relatively simple thing. The evil way is often easier and gets far quicker results, but you end up squandering much of what you could gain and ultimately hurt yourself in the long run. The good way is slower and more ponderous, but all of that hard work pays off in the end. Both methods are completely valid and you’re never pushed into one path or another. You’re just told to win, no matter the cost, and when you start making decision about whether to win by offering an outstretched hand or the point of a sword it’s when your true colors starts to come out.

It’s just you. No outside rewards, no factors pushing you to do anything other than your own leaning to take a certain action for the sake of doing it. This is one of those rare games where it doesn’t try to get a player to make decisions based on a character’s morality, but their own. In a way it even forces the alert to take a step back and look at exactly what their choices have been and why they’re making them. Are you doing things the way you are because it seems easiest? Because it seems like the right way to do it? Simply because you can?

So stop and ask yourself, in our little hypothetical example how long did it take you to smite that little villager? Hell, how long did you think about it, if at all? Regardless of what your decision was, if you decided one way or another without even having to think about it you’ve just been shown what kind of person you really are on the inside.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it looks like when the subject of morality is done right. Not through points or a meter, but by being prompted to take a look at yourself.

~V

Max "Vanguard" Phillips is a freelance photographer, occasional writer and a long-time gamer. He has no idea where that giant volcano currently destroying that quiet little mountain village came from, and he's horribly offended by whatever it is you seem to be implying.

Thus It Begins

Well, here we are. Assassionista. The Internet. Etcetera. Thanks to the always wonderful LadySnip3r I now have a regular featured segment here on this very site where I can talk about, in essence, whatever the hell I want.

… I’m still not sure if that was a good idea, partially because I’m a jaded, cynical, and emotionally crippled blatant narcissist, but hey, it’s her site, and for whatever reason she thinks it’s a good idea. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from there.

Anyway, Snip3r thought that it would be a good idea for me to introduce myself to you, the reader. That’s all well and good, but no one wants to see me talk about my entire life story, so instead here’s another idea. To properly “introduce” me, I think you need to quickly get acquainted with my mindset and overall way of looking at things.

For example, I hate fans.

Now, that doesn’t mean you, the fan of this site. No, you get a gold star for sitting here and validating my existence by reading my insane ramblings. I’m speaking a little more in abstract terms. With every fanbase there are, in my mind at least, two classes of people. There are the fans, who generally like a piece of work regardless of how dedicated they are, and then there are the “fans”. Those people are the obnoxious, vocal people who are never happy with anything. Ever.

I’m sure there are those amongst you that are now recounting your own experiences with these kinds of people. In fact, some of you may even be having Vietnam-style flashbacks to moments when you met one of these people in person, and God help you if you are. Still, if you aren’t quite following me yet let me run an example past you.

Let me talk to you about FemShep.

If you have even a passing familiarity with the Mass Effect series, even if it’s just hearing about it in passing, you should already know that one of the main gimmicks is that you can completely customize your character, gender included. This is a system that’s been so well thought out that Shepard is fully voiced as both a man and a woman, and largely thanks to the voice acting of Jennifer Hale the female Shepard (i.e. “FemShep) has a strong following. Naturally at some point people started asking why,  was FemShep never in any of the marketing material, at all? Well. Bioware listened, and long story short there is now an “official” default FemShep that will appear side by side with the male version of Shepard in Mass Effect 3’s marketing material and even on some versions of the game box.

Savior of the known universe and a redhead? Frick’n sold.

So, the fans spoke out, Bioware responded, and now we have equal gender representation. That’s all well and good, but I don’t know why I’m pretending this was ever about the happy ending.

No, the real issue here comes from the in-between of all this. How we arrived at having “Scarlett” Shepard here be the spokeswoman for FemShep involves Bioware posting six pieces of concept art on Facebook and asking for the fanbase to vote and choose which one they liked best.

Keep in mind that this all took place on the Internet, and as well all know everything that anyone ever says or does is apparently wrong.

What followed were the “fans” bitching and moaning about just about everything. The overall look of each one of the choices, the fact that there were only six choices, that Bioware even giving them a choice to make was “pandering”, and so on. In fact, I dare you to come up with a senseless justification bordering on outright parody about why this scenario makes Bioware evil and post it in the comments. I guarantee that, at the very least, whatever you come up with will resemble actual comments in spirit.

At any rate, after all of the dust settled we had our results. The fanbase had chosen a blonde version of FemShep as the default, and almost immediately the “fans” started to say that she looks like a bimbo.

I’m not allowed to show the fourth panel of this comic, in which Shepard tears al-Jilani in half like a wishbone, because it’s apparently “too violent”.

*sighs* Goddammit, you guys. This is why we can’t have nice things.

This entire scenario, in my eyes at least, got even more irritating when Bioware unleashed a second volley of voting dedicated solely to choosing what color Shepard’s hair was, and while I largely tried to stop paying attention to what people were saying at that point, the most blatantly idiotic thing I heard were accusations that the second round of voting was an act of appeasement by Bioware in reaction to “fan” outcry.

There’s a reason that I’ve just done a recap of all this, and it’s not just because it’s still barely “topical”. It’s because this perfectly illustrates the two things that makes me hate this type of fan so much; a fundamental misunderstanding of what they’re talking about and an undeserved sense of entitlement.

First of all, and this is something that I’ve brought up in defense of both the use of “MaleShep” in Bioware’s marketing material and the prospects of a Mass Effect movie, there is no “canon” version of Shepard. There just isn’t. Hell, any piece of background fluff or spinoff media I’ve ever come across goes to great lengths to not even refer to Shepard as anything beyond “they” so it doesn’t imply that Shepard even has a canon gender. Even with that said the defaults for both genders don’t have to be your Shepard. Nothing is being forced onto you. The entire point of this series, arguably, is to have your version of who Shepard is supposed to be and your version of the story.

If there is a “canon” Shepard, it’s what your canon version of Shepard is. I have my own “canon” version of Shepard, you have a version of Shepard, Lady Snip3r has her version, and if Wilfred Brimley owned an Xbox I’m sure he would have his own version. Just because the face on the box is different from the face you made in the game it isn’t the end of the world. Calm down.

In Holly Conrad’s case she is her Shepard. For her dying in that game must be a really surreal experience.

Of course, for some people that is the problem. The version of Shepard chosen may not be anything like their version. “This isn’t my Shepard,” they say. “She has blue eyes, and tanner skin, and hair that I had to hack into games files to get her to have, and blah blah blah”. It isn’t supposed to be. Isn’t it enough that Bioware gave you the opportunity to help make this decision, which is something that they didn’t even have to do? Must you really throw a temper tantrum like a spoiled brat because you’re getting what you wanted, but didn’t get your way after you started making other demands on top of that?

There are some days where I feel sympathy for Bioware. This is the kind of idiocy they have to deal with for caring too much about what their fans think. It must be like dealing with thousands of kindergarteners.

Well, there you have it. If you’re somehow still with me after reading all this, than congratulations, you now have a good idea of exactly what you should be expecting from me. That’s assuming that, after this being posted, I’m not immediately fired. We’ll just have to wait and see.

~V

Max "Vanguard" Phillips is a freelance photographer, occasional writer and a long-time gamer. To some degree he's been helping Assassionista from the very beginning, most notably by helping set up Lady Snip3r's interview with Susan Arendt. He got this column on this blog completely by his own merits and not thanks to some sort of equal-opportunity hiring mandate, and anyone that says otherwise is lying to you.