Mass Effect, Player Agency, and Artistry

This is going to be a long, educated opinion piece, so I'll be breaking it up into sections with bolded summary sentences. The first section is going to cover my experience of the overall series and why it was important. If you're a veteran to the Mass Effect series, the first section is going to be fairly redundant for you. Section 2 will cover my thoughts on the issue of Player Agency and its implementation in the series (but mostly its ending), and Section 3 will cover issues of art in relation to Mass Effect.

I. The Mass Effect Series 

The first game in the series, titled Mass Effect, was a buggy mess filled with choices that made a significant difference in the way your story played out. Everybody playing the game ultimately reached the same end, but how they reached that end could be drastically different. Some players would save an ancient alien species, others would destroy it. Some would calm their bullheaded companion down, others would let his hot head destroy him. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of little and big decisions scattered throughout the game, and so you, the player, decided who your character was going to be by deciding how he was going to respond to those choices. You reached the same end, but you did it your way. And, because you were consistently making choices that affected your squad characters and interacting with them, you grew to care for them more than you would in another game. You grew to love some of them, and perhaps you grew to hate some of them. For a random new release from Bioware, Mass Effect seemed a fantastic space opera game, if eternally a buggy mess.

And then we found out that there were going to be at least two more games. It was going to be a trilogy, and we were told that many of our decisions from each game would carry into the next and have consequences. This was a fantastic premise. We, the players, would shape the story that we were experiencing in a permanent way. That has been done before within an individual game itself, but this was going to be at least a trilogy! In the past, most games that allowed you varied choices would have to decide on a 'canon' path if they were going to have sequels, so many of your own decisions in an individual game might not be carried through. At the time, you could understand this as a player. How insanely difficult for the developers would it be to carry my decisions through into multiple sequels? Probably impossible, so they have to decide what decisions that character made last game. Not so with Mass Effect. Difficult or no, our decisions were going to carry through an entire trilogy and affect the whole damned thing. The Mass Effect trilogy promised something that, for its time, was relatively revolutionary and awesome to the video game scene.

So when Mass Effect 2 came around, gamers were excited to see how everything played out. Mass Effect 2 was a drastically different game than its predecessor. It was, thankfully, much less buggy. It also cut away a lot of old-school heavy RPG mechanics and streamlined the gameplay into being more of a light-RPG action shooter. But what was probably most important to the series, the branching conversations with varied and meaningful choices, only improved. Many of our decisions from the first Mass Effect came back in small ways that certainly changed the way the game played out, if not its overarching plot line. But Mass Effect 2's ending was a significant step forward for the medium. It factored in choices that you had made throughout the game and choices that you made throughout the ending to decide who among your squad would come out alive and who would die. And as you made the choices throughout the ending, you knew that your squad's fate depended entirely upon those choices, lending intense gravity to the sequence. I was heartbroken to lose Mordin Solus, even if his sacrifice redeemed him, because I knew that he died based on my choices. He died based on one bad call. For other people, Mordin Solus lived. Broadly, you still reached the same end result. That result was a choice with two paths, and though each had different implications, these weren't going to play out until the next game.

I walked away from Mass Effect 2 slightly disappointed in how little our decisions shaped the broad flow of the story, but also with the understanding that it would be pretty difficult to deviate into many different paths in the middle of that story. I was still satisfied with the direction that the series was taking and the suicide run ending took my breath away, but I wanted more. Mass Effect as a series was delivering something beautiful in factoring in your past decisions, but I wanted to take it a step further and shape the broad strings of this story. I knew that the best place to allow players to diverge that heavily would be at the very end of the trilogy, and announcements coming out of Bioware seemed to confirm that hope. We heard about wildly varied divergence and full, satisfying endings. This was, largely, what I played the series looking forward to. The journey is just as important as the destination, but that destination sounded like it would be awesome and a full realization of what the series had been promising. I imagined something like Mass Effect 2's suicide run on a larger scale, where the fates of entire species were at stake along with the fates of my friends and enemies. But also something more conclusive. An ending worthy of the trilogy, where the loose ends and all of the many story threads were brought to a close, good or ill.

What Mass Effect 3 delivers is something far from that. Throughout the game you do make some tough decisions that shape the fates of entire species, but when you finally reach the end that you've been fighting towards you're suddenly very small. A new character who shows up at the end dictates three different paths to you, and you must choose one of them. You cannot argue with this new character as your character usually has the option to when faced with hard decisions. You have three options, all of them very strange, and none of them seem to be relevant to or affected by any of the decisions that you've made over the past three games.

This left thousands unsatisfied, to the point that many of them banded together in media campaigns and communities to demand a new ending to the series and send suggestions for changing that ending to Bioware, the developer. Why? This is just a video game, after all, right?

II. Player Agency in Mass Effect's Ending

Stories are told through many mediums. They can be told orally, on paper, on a big screen, on a small screen, on a stage, in a song, played through a game, and more. Each one of those mediums has its own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to telling a story.

Video games in particular have to deal with a heavy amount of player agency, or input. As a player, you are the audience to a story that the game's developers have crafted. But you're also moving yourself through that story in your own way. While the amount of input a player has may vary from game to game, in general you have some choice in how you go about traveling through the world and how you deal with its friendly and hostile inhabitants. Perhaps you can even affect some of the characters and make some important decisions. This means that in many games the character you play will be relatively silent or heavily malleable, because that character is an analogue for you, the player, traveling through the story.

The medium of video games is thus the easiest for me to project myself into, and I'm surely not alone there. I know that many of my friends grow attached to fictional characters, and video games seem to breed some of the strongest attachments. Because I am able to project myself into games, I am able to empathize and sympathize with their characters to a much greater degree than I can in other mediums.

Mass Effect brought that player agency to a deeper level in allowing you to observe and alter a lengthy and intertwining story that was released over a period of five years. This was something that had been happening for years on tabletop grids with Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, but Mass Effect was the first time that I had ever witnessed it in a video game.

The most important aspect of player agency in Mass Effect was, for me, my interactions with squad characters and my impact on their fates and personalities. By the middle of Mass Effect 3, Garrus was my Shepard's bff. Perhaps for you it was Wrex, Thane, or Tali. The love of my Shepard's life was Liara. For my brother, it was Miranda. For a friend, it was Ashley. Talk to any given Mass Effect fan, and they'll each have their own opinions on any given character and will have interacted with them in a different way (though Garrus is generally well-loved). While this success at bonding audience to characters has to come from great writing, it also has to come from the player's ability to react to that writing in their own way in the game.

When Shepard recovers from unconsciousness to face the story's end, he's alone. His squad is gone, nowhere in sight or sound. You face the ending without most of the characters that you've grown to love and hate throughout the series, and you don't get to see the final ramifications of your choices on nearly all of those characters. From the perspective of most appreciating player agency in relation to shaping characters, this is a blasphemous oversight for the ending of our generation's greatest space opera.

The ending has a multitude of problems. Anybody who agrees with me probably already knows a good deal about those problems, and those who disagree can generally still understand why most people see the end as problematic. I don't buy Anderson randomly being on the Citadel. I don't like the Starchild or its ideas and I don't trust it at all. I'm enraged that I can't argue with the thing. Considering that its answer to the problem was the Reapers, I don't really see much reason to listen to anything it says. I have no choice to find an alternative, and that is stupid for the ending of a game so dedicated to player agency that usually takes the time to allow you an alternative. I don't forgive the ending for these problems.

But the largest of them is the way the ending ignores what was most important in the series to me and many others: the fates of those wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) characters. They were the greatest player agency that I had, and the story abruptly takes them from me.

Ultimately, player agency is largely a sort of illusion. We're making choices through the story and changing the characters, but we're also playing within the confines of somebody's art. The player can only make those choices because somebody created them and fleshed them out with consequences and unique dialogue and character reactions. But that illusion is an important part of video games, and it is an especially important part of a video game series that largely focuses on and promises player agency. That Mass Effect 3's ending sequence abruptly ends that illusion is either a massive failure or a resounding success, depending on what you're looking for. To me, it was a massive failure, and that comes from my roots as an artist.

III. Art and Mass Effect 3 

What is art? What can you call art? Countless humans have spent time trying to answer this question. The answer differs from person to person. Some people would call the infamous Piss Christ a work of art. Some would laugh to hear Jackson Pollock's work be called art.

My own opinion is that we think far too highly of this idea called art and spend far too much time trying to figure out what it is. And so I bring art down. If you drive a trash truck and pick up cans around the city, I say that there is art in what you do. If you're Jackson Pollock and you paint, then I say that there is an art in what you do. I think each is performing a different art and creating a piece of art. But I don't believe that art is inherently good.

As an on-set sound mixer for small independent films, I call myself an artist. There is certainly an art to recording audio on a living film set, whether or not what I record ends up being used in anything that anybody calls art. I can tell you that in my brief two years of post-college work, I have created wonderful art and horrible art and everything in between through sound recording.

There is no doubt in my mind that video games are an art form and are all works of art, good or bad.

Can art change after it has been created? Absolutely. Novels are cut and edited before release and after release. Films work the same way. Games have been releasing patches and expansions for a long while now, and while many of these patches may address smaller issues in the game, those smaller issues are part of a greater work of art.

In that case, is it fine for people to demand a new ending to Mass Effect 3? This is where things get slippery for me. An artist has power over his art, without doubt. But when others are paying for that art, the artist does need to consider his reputation and future and art's relation to making a living. Given the promises that were made regarding Mass Effect 3 before its release that drove us to purchase the game, I'd say that it's fair for us to demand a new ending. But as consumers of art we also have to realize that we're in no place to make that particular demand. We can ask for a refund, we can tell the artist that if things don't change we will cease to be their patrons, we can give feedback and ideas, and we can vote with our wallets, but ultimately it's going to be up to the artists to decide whether or not they should change the ending to their game and, if so, how they should go about that.

I know that I have changed art before based on a responsibility that I felt to my audience and peers, and I have certainly reacted to criticisms directly. That doesn't stop the product from being art. Bioware could most certainly respond directly to the criticisms piled against Mass Effect 3's ending and call their game a work of art. For now, the only course seems to be waiting for the Extended Cut to release later this summer. Perhaps after that, most will be satisfied. Or perhaps fans will want more and ask for Bioware to respond. Either way, the Mass Effect series was certainly a work of art. Whether it was good art or bad art is still a question up for much debate.

Please leave your own thoughts and criticisms in the comments section if you have anything to say on this subject!