Fandom, Endings, & Why We Tell Stories

WARNING: The word "story" appears in this blog post approximately way too many times.

How do you end a story?

This question arises from the game Mass Effect 3, the last part of a trilogy that arrived in March of this year. That trilogy began in 2007 and many of its fans continued to replay the first two games of the series right up until the third game's release. 

While the third game was generally well-received, its ending was met with incredibly mixed reviews. The series' fan base was largely polarized, with some declaring the game's ending as wonderful art and others decrying it as an insult to the series.

Could that have been avoided? Largely, perhaps. I think it could have been avoided if the game's developers had kept fandom in mind. Fans are strange creatures. They become incredibly dedicated to the stories that are being told, perhaps to the point that in a way those stories become very real to them. 

Indeed, stories must become real to us all in some way or they would not work nearly as well. If something about Harry Potter had not rang deeply true in our hearts, we would not have followed it nearly so fervently or closely. Those characters will never stand next to me in line at the grocery store, but they are very real to my soul, and often more real to me than many of the people who ARE standing in line next to me. For a story to truly move us, its characters and its tragedies and its triumphs must become some sort of real, even if only in meaning rather than individual characters.

Why, then, do we tell tales full of good overcoming evil when our world is already so full of brokenness that we could be mending? All of our art tells stories, and those stories seem silly in light of how many physically real problems we have to deal with, yet so many have a compulsion to write them, and even more have a compulsion to absorb them. I would posit that stories help us reconcile our souls to our worlds - that, broken as we are, something deeply embedded in so many of us cries out for the world to be made right and whole and good, as perhaps it once was. Stories can answer that cry, and often do. In turn, this can inspire us to greater heights and better stories.

Fandom in particular often responds very strongly to stories and their endings. Fans are still mad about the endings of Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix. For the common fan, their media is largely real in its soul and spirit to the point of getting mad about it when things don't quite go their way. Why, though, are they not mad until the end?

I think it's partially letting go of the story that frustrates many fans. They have watched a story unfold that feels real, and now a void is left. While the story will probably be retold time and again, perhaps nothing new will happen in its retelling.

But more than that, fans have invested emotionally into a story. In return for that investment, they need some kind of catharsis. Frodo needs to go back to the Shire. Bill Adama needs to enjoy the rest of his life with Laura Roslin. These desires vary from person to person, but they express an emotional reward to the viewer. Everything has turned out alright for the heroes who made it this far. The world is a better place for their struggles. All of that fear, anxiety, and worry about our characters dissolves into joy.

When that emotional return is denied in the ending of a series, fans are upset, and understandably. While it's not the fans' art, they're invested all the same, perhaps more-so than the artists. Nor could the artists exist without them.

Indeed, storytelling is often a form of symbiotic bond. You as a writer can tell your story however you like. But when you want others to read that tale you're going to have to return their investment. Not every story is the same, but every good legend rewards its fans in a manner befitting the genre.

Mass Effect 3 does largely break this bond, initially providing a pulpy space opera heroic and suddenly shifting into an attempt at high science fiction for its ending.

The authors of that story told their fans that this was the intended ending regardless. While the Extended Cut of the game certainly improves its ending a great deal, it also maintains that odd shift into an attempt at high science fiction, and based on that alone it's going to leave quite a few of the series' fans upset.

How, then, do you end a story? 

Factoring in symbiosis with your fans and the reason that stories exist, you need to reward the audience for its investment. If your art is created in a void for your own reasons, then by all means, go to town with whatever insanity or sanity you'd like in the story that you're telling with that art. 

But if your art is going to be absorbed by others, you need to consider your fans and their investment along with your intentions for that story. Endings are no place to screw around. You're never going to make all of your fans happy, but you'd do well to give it your best shot.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything that I brought up or anything relevant that comes to your mind.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Two relevant details to get out of the way: First, I've never read the novel that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is based upon, so I can't really comment on whether or not it's a faithful adaptation. Second, I saw the film in 2D, and am thus unqualified to comment on its 3D incarnation. However, I can say that I didn't feel like I missed anything with the 2D version.

This film was never going to be a piece of critically-acclaimed art, and if you go to see it expecting such you're going to be heavily disappointed. You're also probably pretty stupid. It's called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, for goodness' sake. If you're going to see Abe Lincoln, it's probably because the title and concept are awesome and you want to see a film that lives up to its name.

And, surprisingly, the film does live up to its name. It's a movie about Abraham Lincoln both as we know him from history and as a vampire hunter. It either takes itself deadly serious or is trying to be funny with how serious it takes itself. Which of those is the truth  I've yet to decipher, but it matters little because Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a stupid blast to watch.

The story has a lot of ground to cover, so the film moves very quickly. This is no character piece where we slowly learn the intricacies of Lincoln's life, but is instead a broad and sweeping roller coaster ride of big historical events laid underneath the alternate history of Lincoln as a dedicated vampire hunter, highlighted by two awesome action set pieces. The pace of the film is rather uneven because of this, but that speed also keeps the film from ever settling into anything that could possibly be boring and keeps it focused on the vampire hunting aspect of our hero. Sure, it also avoids depth, but you're not watching this movie to experience depth, are you? I hope not.

Acting is solid considering the subject material. Nobody's going to walk out of this one with prestigious acting awards, but they probably knew that when they signed up for the job. There were no bad performances, nor were there stand-out stellar performances. An even "good," then.

Visually, the film is rather painterly. Or perhaps cartoon-like would be a better way to describe it? You're going to see a lot of CGI and instead of trying to make that look real the film rolls with a very animated style. If you have some revenge grudge against CGI then you might have a problem with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but I rather enjoyed the well-executed visual aesthetic and it certainly remained consistent enough throughout. As with Wanted and his Night Watch series of films, Timur Bekmambetov employs quite a lot of slow motion in the movie, much of it unnecessary but also incredibly fun, and that summarizes the movie itself perfectly.

Sound was fine. Much of the story is carried by narration and the sound effects stay true to standards for a slow-mo-heavy action film. I didn't truly notice any of the music but what I can remember was decent enough and largely existed to complement the action.

Would I recommend Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? If you're the kind of person who enjoys stupid fun movies, then there's no doubt that you should see this one ASAP because it provides a great amount of said stupid fun. It's the kind of movie that you can simultaneously laugh at and cheer on, and that's exactly what the title suggested it would be.

The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day

I've never gotten into the Walking Dead TV series. I tried watching the first episode and couldn't get further into it, and with our current situation of zombie media saturation there was no real motivation to push further into the series.

But when Telltale released their game adaptation of The Walking Dead, which was supposedly going to tell its own stories with different characters, I was intrigued. Telltale has made some decently good games in the past. I loved the Sam & Max series, Back to the Future was good, and Tales of Monkey Island was also good. I had recently been disappointed in their release of Jurassic Park The Game, which was a complete failure in my eyes, and so none of this was enough to convince me to purchase The Walking Dead. My brother, however, was also intrigued, and so he went ahead and bit the bullet this time. And it ended up being a pretty nice bullet.

Telltale's engine is looking old. There's nothing all that fancy in the visuals here, and the game runs pretty poorly for me compared to a lot of games that look much, much better. But it still runs fine, and the engine works here because they've approached the game's visuals with a good deal of cel shading, which you might correctly imagine works well when you're adapting a comic book world. They pull that aesthetic off, and so it looks like you're playing a graphic novel. Animations are as stiff and awkward as Telltale's always are. To give you a better idea of the game's visuals, here's a link to the trailer for the game, or watch it below in the tiny video player window:

The game's audio is decent. Telltale's voice work always sounds very raw and warm. I'm not sure if that's a recording flaw, an aesthetic choice, or a digital problem, but it's certainly there and it could be a big problem for you if you can't forgive the game that, but it could also be a strength depending on your taste in audio. For the most part, I'd wager that many people would have no problem at all with these audio oddities, so if you're in doubt over them I would cast that doubt away. Music and sound effects are good. The voice acting itself was pretty fantastic and definitely sold me on the desperate zombie setting.

Where The Walking Dead game really shines is in its gameplay. Wonderfully for a zombie game, that gameplay strength isn't in its action scenes. Indeed, these action scenes are the weaker side of the game, with relatively awkward controls. Why is that wonderful? Again, this is a zombie game. And realistic zombie enthusiasts (irony, I know) will tell you that the best way to deal with zombies is from far away in a safe place. Melee is just a bad idea when it comes to zombies, and it's presented as incredibly awkward and relatively inefficient in The Walking Dead. Luckily, you won't be fighting too many zombies. You play the role of Lee, and as the trailer above suggests, you're on your way to jail in the back of a police vehicle when the zombie event hits. You're not trying to kill all of the zombies, you're just trying to survive. And the game's strength is in allowing you to make decisions in regards to that survival. Is your Lee an asshole, or is he a decent dude? How do you treat the survivors around you? When one of them is a complete prick to you, how do you respond? When you have the choice between saving one friend or the other, which do you take and which do you damn? These decisions are the meat of The Walking Dead's gameplay, and they make for an intriguing voyage.

Of note, the game is short. It will last you two or three hours each run-through. This is because Telltale releases its games episodically. The current release is only Episode 1: A New Day. It came out in late April. Episode 2 still hasn't released yet, but is supposedly due by the end of June. In general, you can expect the episodes to release with some regularity over a period of months before the full 5-episode season is finally finished. So, if you buy the entire season, you're not getting much game right now, but are instead getting a decent slice of game with the promise of eventually receiving the whole pie. As far as I know, the only way to buy the game on PC is to pay for the entire season upfront. Have no fear, you'll definitely end up getting your game eventually, but the wait may be a nuisance to some. I believe that you can purchase individual episodes on Xbox 360 or PS3. These would, if you purchased every episode, end up being more expensive, but also allow you to invest a smaller initial amount into playing each individual episode as it released.

Would I recommend The Walking Dead game series by Telltale? That depends on what you're looking for. If you want a zombie shooter or zombie action game, these aren't the droids you're looking for. If, however, you're looking for a choose-your-own adventure story, set in the zombie apocalypse scenario, where lives hang in the balance and depend on your fast decisions, then The Walking Dead should scratch that itch very well. I certainly enjoyed the game for what it was and I look forward to future episodes. If the game series can continue to provide the player with interesting and heavy decisions, it should stay awesome.

Old Favorites: Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption has been out since May 2010. I finished it about a week after its release, and I've yet to play a game quite like it or quite so wonderfully executed since then. Before I go into an analysis of the game, I have to urge anybody who has not played Red Dead Redemption and is capable of doing so to remedy that and do so as soon as possible. The following will only contain establishing story spoilers, but if you haven't played yet you should go procure a copy right now.

I have only one criticism of Read Dead Redemption, and this is that it took me a while to become accustomed to its controls. Over the dozens of hours that the game carried me through, this is honestly my only complaint, and it was only a nuisance for a few hours.

So, why do I feel that Red Dead Redemption was and still is the greatest game I've played in a long while? As should always be, the story comes first. John Marston is a man who wants to leave his past life of crime behind him. But his past chases him, and the story quickly turns towards forcing him to confront that past and become part of it again. The plot of Red Dead Redemption is the most perfectly-executed I've seen in a video game. I know that this feels like a classic story set-up, but it's asking a very relevant question: can we escape the sins of our pasts by repeating them with a different intent?

Helping that plot along are the stories that the world itself tells you. Red Dead Redemption felt and still feels more alive than any digital world I've ever explored, and its characters are broken. During the course of the game you'll come across men trying to murder hookers, thieves making off with horses, lost souls wandering through the desert, men driven to grief by death, and so much more. Red Dead takes place during the end of the Wild West, when modern society is coming to tame the wilderness and the exploitative nature of modern industriousness is ravaging that wilderness. The world that you'll ride through as John Marston is an incredibly racist, sexist, drug-addled, violent, and generally messed-up setting. If you can imagine a sin, it's probably present within Red Dead's characters. There is a great deal going on, and you're not nearly the center of it all. Nor are you the worst of men or the best. You are just one sinner in a living world of sinners, and you're trying to escape those sins unscathed that you might care for your wife and child.

Red Dead Redemption is also a visual wonder. In a game that is so heavily dependent on its living world, that world's visual representation is incredibly important. If you drove out to the Mojave and spent a day exploring (safely, of course... watch out fo mojave greens and cougars), you'd get a good picture of what Red Dead's deserts looks like, because Red Dead's deserts are the most real I've seen in a game. They're barren things in regards to humanity, full of brush and dust and tenacious life. That's not to say that they are photo-realistic, as Red Dead certainly has a solid art style, but within that art style these are the most beautiful and impressive deserts I've explored digitally. In a game that is so heavily dependent on its living world, that world's visual representation is incredibly important. As you travel abroad you run into new scenery, and it's executed just as beautifully as the game's deserts. The characters within the world also look great, whether animal or human. Models are detailed and wonderful, while animations are varied and smooth besides the occasional odd collision, which are apparently inevitable in open-world games.

The game sounds beautiful and alive. Conversations happen without you. Screams of terror and pain sometimes echo across the plains as you ride, and much of the time you'll never figure out whose they were or why they rang out. I dont have an impressive subwoofer, but it works fine, and the first time a thunderstorm rolled through the desert I rode in awe of the way visuals and audio combined to immerse me in that storm. Thunderstorms are still a wonder to behold when I boot the game back up. Much like the characters and the visuals of Red Dead Redemption, the audio helps make its world a living world. Voice acting also keeps to a standard of high quality and realism. Even the conversations that happen on their own sound wonderful and true to life. Music is also beautiful, if more eclectic in range. Of particular note is the track Far Away by Jose Gonzalez, which plays during a particular moment in the game and makes that moment one of its most memorable and beautiful.

Red Dead Redemption is also full of content. I have played the game for over a hundred hours and have yet to find nearly everything there is to find. While much of the game takes place in the desert, that desert is full of secrets and stories. So at current price of $20-$30 you're easily getting your money's worth.

I know that reviews of this game have been floating around for the last two years and many of you have probably already played the game. I'm writing this in the hope that anybody who hasn't yet will do so. Red Dead Redemption is, at the very least, a phenomenal video game, and is definitely worth your time and money. I could not and would not recommend any modern video game more than this one.

If you're not tired of zombies, I'd also highly recommend picking up the Undead Nightmare DLC once you've finished the main game. Rather than adding content to the game's story, Undead Nightmare has its own lengthy story and re-casts the world as a B-movie zombie horror, and it works wonderfully. It's particularly nice for Halloween, but really is fantastic any time you feel like playing Wild West zombies.

The Lara Croft Attempted Rape: Story & Sexism

In case you missed it, there was an uproar last week about the trailer for Lara Croft and a developer's comments on it and the game's story. In particular, there was something about Lara Croft facing an attempted rape in her upcoming game and players wanting to protect her. I'm not going to go through the whole clusterfrak itself when plenty of folks have already written about it, so I recommend you read this article on Eurogamer to get the basics down. The trailer itself is linked at the bottom of that article, but here's a youtube link for it if you'd prefer that or you can check it out below (apparently in an incredibly tiny video player).

 

Shortly after the uproar, game developer Crystal Dynamics came out with a statement 'clarifying' that "sexual assault of any kind is categorically not a theme that we cover in this game."

Which is a load of bollocks. If you've watched the trailer in question, it's pretty hard to argue that the last assault on Lara there is not sexual assault. Forcefully groping at a lady's ass while you pin them against a wall qualifies as sexual assault in my book, at least.

I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Tomb Raider. Lara Croft always felt like she was assembled by a committee to pander to horny teenagers. There's nothing wrong with being sexy, but Lara Croft pushed that way over the edge with a bust bursting at the seams. Really, I don't need to argue with anybody about this; that gaming and society have a problem with hyper-sexualising women is generally a given, and the Tomb Raider series has generally been an example of that problem. I suspect that much of this entire argument was just a publicity stunt.

But the whole debate brings up some important issues in regard to video games as an art and storytelling medium. Many community responses from across the internet suggested that attempted rape and sexual assault were subjects that should not be touched in video games. I take issue with that. Rape and sexual assault are dark and abhorrent events, but they are very real threats or even vile realities for many women across the world every day. Should they be ignored in stories?

Movies have portrayed sexual assault, as have books and comics. To propose that a storytelling medium should leave sexual assault out of its stories for the sake of pleasantness is preposterous, particularly so in video games, which are incredibly powerful at developing empathy and sympathy by experience through the player's analogue. Our greatest stories are full of darkness and evil that must be overcome. The greatest stories aren't the pleasant ones where everybody is wonderful to each other and everything turns out perfect and shiny in the end with no cost, because those stories generally aren't relevant to the world that we see every day.

Video games need to deal directly with darkness in their stories, especially considering that video games are now being used as therapy for soldiers going through PTSD. I know that I find a type of therapy in media, especially when their scenarios have a relevance to my life and crises I've gone through. Is it possible that telling a story about Lara Croft as a beaten, sexually-violated lady rising out of that low point could help actual women who have been sexually assaulted work through their own traumas? Stories exist for a purpose, and from my experience part of that purpose is to help us deal with the realities that envelope us.

Another common outrage that came out of this controversy was that the game would employ said sexual assault scene to help get players more involved and invested in the character that they were playing, in particular as her protector. This touches on a unique power of the medium, which is very direct involvement in a developing story. When you read, say, Harry Potter, you hope for the best but you don't have any control over the way Harry's story plays out. When you play a video game, you're often diving into a fantasy world through your character, which allows you that level of story control. Is it terribly sexist to employ a sexual assault scene that makes the player feel like they need to protect their character?

I am, believe it or not, a man. I will never be a woman, nor am I particularly good at putting myself into a lady's shoes. I am, without doubt, sexist, by way of living in a society full to the brim with sexism. When my character in a video game is a lady or when I'm interacting with virtual lady characters in a video game, I certainly develop a protective instinct once I've invested myself a good deal into that game. While I hope that male characters will turn out all right and I'll certainly help them, I don't have nearly that level of protective instinct. This is true in real life as well. It is certainly division by sex, and thus sexism by definition.

Is it wrong? I will certainly tell you that it's not equal. It displays clearly that I feel ladies need to be protected and men do not. There's no thinking myself out of that mindset, either: I've tried and failed. Perhaps it is a form of brokenness, perhaps not. Either way, it is very real for a great deal of men of all ages in our society, and its presence in a story is thus highly relevant... for men, at least.

I can't speak for ladies, but I'd imagine that different people of both genders would feel differently about their role as player when engaged in Lara Croft. I have no doubt that some ladies will have that protective instinct, some men will just be playing a bad-ass lady thief, and many people will experience both. Art is open to interpretation, and we each reflect ourselves upon it even as we absorb it.

And it's not as if they're only portraying the damsel-in-distress side of Lara Croft. She still seems like she'll be just as violent, acrobatic, agile, strong, and busty as ever. So anybody looking for a strong female character should still be able to find it here.

Here's a question: Is it more negatively sexist to deal with sexual assault and moments of brokenness in media or to hide them away from sight?

Have any thoughts or comments on this particular controversy or on the matter of sexism in media? Want to tear my opinion apart? Do it in the comments section and I'll be sure to respond in a timely fashion.

Portable Highlight: King of Dragon Pass

Apple's App Store is full of content. Much of it is junk, but search through all of that gunk and you'll find a very healthy population of serious gaming treasures, and among those treasures is the nigh-impeccable King of Dragon Pass. Measuring in at a flat $9.99 purchase for the full game with no trial available and no in-app purchases, the game is a hefty initial investment relative to much of the App Store's fare, but if you're a fan of strategy games, kingdom sims, or choose-your-own adventure books, this game might just be a dream come true, and in portable form no less.

King of Dragon Pass is not a game with new and shiny 3D graphics. Instead, it's largely text based and features beautiful illustrations. There is no animation. This is because it is an enhanced port of the computer game of the same name released in 1999. I didn't find the visuals to be a problem and rather liked the illustrations, but check out the screenshots yourself to see if you'd be fine with them: 

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/king-of-dragon-pass/id335545504?mt=8 

Of note regarding the visuals: whenever there is an illustration behind text in King of Dragon Pass, keep in mind that you can tap the screen to fade the text out in order to fully appreciate said illustration.

The meat of KoDP is its wonderful, enveloping, and addictive gameplay. In the world of Glorantha where the game takes place, magic, trolls, dragons, and gods are all common knowledge. Throughout your time managing the clan you'll sacrifice cattle and thralls to various gods for their blessings, rebuke dragon emissaries or embrace them, and perhaps fight off a few troll invasions. You start the game by making a few important decisions about the history of your clan. Which god is your clan's primary one? Do you embrace wanderers seeking shelter as clan members or take them as thralls? Who are your clan's mystical ancient enemies? Are you generally a peaceful clan or a warmongering clan? All of these decisions are presented through a story prologue, and they'll directly influence the game that you play.

When you finally arrive to manage your tribe, you'll already have friends and enemies in the newly-settled Dragon Pass, along with favors owed to you and favors that you owe others. The management and sim portion of the game is largely one of numbers. You'll need to make sure that your clan is well-fed, maintains a decent mood, and can engage its enemies both in raids and defense. Gather too many children in your clan and you'll quickly find yourself starving due to proportional lack of adult labor. You'll need to sacrifice to the Gods every once in a while to keep them content. To run your clan, you'll be able to take two actions in a given season. Although the season can also dictate the action. If you send your laymen off to raid an enemy clan during planting season, your crops will suffer. Send an exploring party off in the cold season and you're bound to lose a few men to harsh conditions or be thwarted by a snow-filled passage.

The numbers game that you play just to keep your clan afloat is intriguing on its own, but the icing on the cake is that between each season you'll usually get an event pop-up. I don't know how many of these random events there are, but in any given game you'll run into events that are new and events that are familiar. And the events themselves vary greatly. Sometimes a betrothed clan member has been caught having a lusty affair with a local poet. Or maybe a visiting weaponthane insulted your own weaponthanes. Perhaps you've stumbled upon a civilization of humanoid duck people. Whatever has happened, it's up to you to decide how to deal with it. You do have a council of varied personalities that can advise you on a course of action, but they'll often conflict with one another. There's usually no single right or wrong way to deal with an event, so you're still left with a hefty decision regardless.

Another layer of frosting is the quest system, with which you can send any of your clansmen on an epic quest to re-enact the ancient heroism of the gods. Each one follows a path parallel to an old tale of Glorantha. The game comes with a handy manual built in, inside of which are pages upon pages of lore and legend (and useful game info, read the damned thing). To successfully complete a quest, you'll need luck, a skilled clansman, and a good knowledge of the story that your quest is based upon. Completing these quests can earn great rewards and prestige for your clan or tribe, an important step on the road to becoming King.

The victory condition of KoDP is to create a tribe compromised of clans and have one of your clansmen become its King. It's a long road to get there and you'll need to take some rather specific steps as you come closer to that goal.

The game's musical score is fitting and wonderful fantasy fare that's generic enough to be turned off without missing much but a wonderful addition to mood if you want to hear it.

The game has been out for a long while now, and I have poured dozens of hours into it. It's easily my most-played on the iPhone. It's not a game without flaws, however. While the game comes with a thorough and solid tutorial, the manual will be required reading in order to gather additional info on everything that's going on in the game and also to memorize tales before embarking on a quest. It's also a game full of menus. Everything you do in KoDP is done through a menu. There are no platforming sections, you won't walk around your clan's tula, and there are no battle maps. In addition, while it's on a portable format and the game is perfectly playable in short bursts, it's also the type of game that allures you into longer sessions. You can lose track of time pretty easily while you're managing the clan.

King of Dragon Pass is a very peculiar and particular game, relatively slow-paced and full of text to read. It's not a game for everybody. But there's also a very particular audience that is going to love it to death. If anything that I've written about above sounds awesome to you, I highly recommend that you invest in this game when you have a good chunk of free time to dive into it and lose yourself in the world of Glorantha. If I sound like a walking advertisement for King of Dragon Pass, it's because this game made me one, and it didn't even need to lure me in with free coin offers.

Prometheus: Cosmic Embarrassments

I'll come right out and admit this from the start: I'm a minor fan of the Alien/Predator mythos. I've read some of the books and been disappointed by multiple films in recent years. Predators was a pleasant surprise, and so I was quite hyped for Prometheus in a desperate hope that the series could be on a roll. The film was disappointing to me, but that view may be colored by fandom.  It was, for the most part, an average film, so if you're not expecting anything special you should be able to enjoy it as decent stupid summer fare. I walked in with higher expectations.

With that out of the way, here are some (spoiler-free) good aspects of Prometheus:

Fassbender was good. I wouldn't call his performance stellar, but it's certainly one of the most solid in the film and David is acted very well to the point that his was the only character that interested me.

Idris Elba is fantastic as usual. Just because he's Idris Elba. Also, he's trying to pull off a country accent, which is absolutely hilarious.

The premise is interesting. Ancient aliens are in these days. It's an interesting idea to consider, particularly from my religious perspective, and that the subject is dealt with in a summer blockbuster rocks.

The film looks and sounds fine. I saw Prometheus in 3D, and I didn't notice the 3D, which is basically the best you can hope for in a time when everybody's jumping onto the 3D bandwagon and often executing that piss poorly. The film certainly was 3D, but in an artful way rather than a "Look, Ma, me too!" way. The visual aesthetic itself was pulled off well, if nothing particularly special. While horror movies are generally shadowy affairs, Prometheus is fairly bright and clean. The film sounded fine, as well. None if it seemed stellar, but in an age of shinies it's pretty hard to pull off stellar.

So, like most movies, Prometheus is not without its good sides, and they are genuinely good sides. The rest of this is going to delve into heavy tone and plot spoilers, so SPOILER WARNING HERE. If you read beyond this point, you have no right to complain about spoilers in particular (you're still free to complain about everything else). 

It's time to deal with the numerous and intertwined bad aspects of Prometheus:

It was not advertised well. The trailers sold this film as a horror movie. Strobe editing, foreboding and tense music, characters clearly running from some horror: these are the signals that you're going to be expecting horror when you walk into the theater. But even my family, who are more easily frightened than most, walked out of the film talking about how scary it wasn't and how disappointed they were with that. To give you an indication of just how easy we are to scare, the first time we watched Signs we had to watch it in the reflection that it cast on our sliding glass door, wrapped up in blankets to hide our eyes. Signs isn't even really a very scary movie, but we were horrified that first time. While we've grown since then, some of us are still that easy to scare. And Prometheus did not scare very well.

So what is the film, if not horror? I'd call it a science fiction adventure film. But this is also problematic. Usually when you're dealing with solid science fiction some of your characters are reasonably intelligent. Not so with Prometheus. Characters take their protective helmets off within minutes of discovering that the air is breathable and contains no KNOWN contagions, which are clearly the only potential problems when we're on an alien planet, right? They reach out toward clearly aggressive critters in the hopes of making peaceful contact. The team's geologist and mapping expert breaks off to return to base... and gets lost? This despite the fact that there is a readily-available digital map of the entire structure they're exploring back on the ship, which he has a direct line of communication to. Despite every indication that every being around them is going to be hostile as all heck, the team still travels to meet one of the Engineers right in its own home. 

In horror films you expect a degree of stupidity, but generally you're still not dealing with quite this much. As I've established, Prometheus is not much of a horror film. But if it's supposed to be science fiction, it's not doing a great job of that, either, because of how completely idiotic all of its characters are.

Another problem is that we're not really given enough time to observe much development in many of the characters. Noomi Rapace goes from an outburst of crying because of her infertility to the next Ripley in a matter of minutes with no real growth to get her there. The shift is sudden and unbelievable. Her boyfriend never gets beyond the annoying skeptic stereotype before he's snuffed out. Side characters like the geologist and biologist obtain basic character traits over a period of 5 minutes and then abruptly become incredibly stupid alien food. Charlize Theron never goes beyond ice queen boss. Fassbender and Elba probably have the most development, and those character arcs were oases in the dry sand.

My favorite science fiction tends to ask big questions and seek answers to them. Prometheus asks some very big questions about creation, aliens, and God/gods. In an attempt to answer those questions it posits cosmic horror. From what we glimpse of them, the engineers are above and do not deign to communicate with their creations, opting instead for senseless bloodshed and a heavily destructive form of willful creation. But they're not a cosmic horror unless they're vastly powerful, and neither these sentient beings nor their monstrous creations seem all that powerful throughout the film. They are, by and large, handily dealt with by the film's incredibly stupid human beings. Even the greatest of them are easily pitted against one another toward mutual death, from which springs the birth of a small, slimy, bipedal black dog with two mouths that's clearly supposed to be a Xenomorph predecessor. If you ask me, that doesn't work for cosmic horror. Cosmic horrors need to appear omnipotent and implacable to really work well, and neither feels true here.

That Xenomorph predecessor is an entire problem on its own. Its development throughout the film from black goop to slimy dog makes very little sense and seems forced as a prequel plug more than it is a valid thread of Prometheus. 

If you can reasonably explain that thing's development to me, feel free to do so in the comments and prove me wrong here. I'd also love to hear any of your own thoughts on the film and responses to or critiques of my own.

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!

The Grey: Facing Death

I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to many things, and so I waited to see The Grey, featuring Liam Neeson, until the movie had debuted at my local Redbox. Based on its previews, I went in expecting to watch something along the lines of Taken, but with wolves as the bad guys. So I expected to see lots of action and for most of the film to feature Liam Neeson awesomely destroying the vicious pack of wolves that was hunting his motley gang of survivors.

I'm going to delve into some establishing story spoilers a few paragraphs down, but before that let me give you a relatively brief summary of my thoughts on the film with a broad thematic spoiler that shouldn't ruin the movie:  This is not a story about Liam Neeson killing wolves. If you watch this movie expecting that, you might come out disappointed. There's some of that, but not much. Instead, The Grey is a story about death and dealing with death. The film takes a while to get to the point where you realize that and the theme finally comes into focus. Would I recommend you take the time to watch the movie? Absolutely. Liam Neeson is reason enough for me to recommend most anything, and that the film ends up being an interesting examination of our relationship with death only adds to that recommendation.

SPOILER WARNING HERE: If you continue to read on then you have no right to complain about spoilers in particular (you're still free to complain about everything else). I'll try to minimize spoilers and won't spoil any of the twists or deaths, but there will be story spoilers. You were warned!

The set-up for our story is that Liam Neeson works somewhere near the cold and icy end of the world with people he claims are unfit for society, guarding the post's inhabitants from wolves with his rifle and Liam Neesoniness. Oh, also, he's sad about his wife, presumably because she's dead. He cannot get her out of his head to the point that he would have committed suicide but for the wolves left to hunt. So, yeah. Conflicted and deep and stuff, I guess? At this point I was still hoping and praying for awesome wolf-slaying action. And there is a quick bit of that, displaying Neeson's competence at his chosen profession. 

Now Liam and a few of his co-workers are traveling on a plane over the barren landscape of snow around them. The plane runs into turbulence, a few of the passengers have basic character traits established, and then the plane crashes in the middle of said barren landscape of snow. In wolf territory. Making the wolves whose territory they've landed in quite angry. In response, the angry wolves start to play a game of pecking away at Liam Neeson's small group of survivors, taking members out one by one.

These men have no working weapons. With but a few supplies and survival items strung across their backs, they have no choice but to flee, and flee they do. But they're fleeing from a pack of wolves who own the territory. Given the weaponless and freezing circumstances that the gang find themselves in, these wolves become an implacable force of death.

How do you deal with that death? God or no God, the movie makes it pretty clear that dying is going to suck pretty bad. Do you fight death with what basic weapons you might possess? Do you run from it as fast as your legs can carry you? Do you pray for a miracle? This question of dealing with death becomes the central theme and story of The Grey. Perhaps some of these characters might make it out of the film alive, but it's certain that along the way many of them are going to die.

There were some superb moments of acting in the film, although no one performance stood out as fantastic for me. Technically, it was competent. Its picture was on the grainy side and its audio design relatively minimalistic, but both were good choices for this story. Again, neither stood out to me as anything particularly special, but nor were they in any way bad. The end, however, is poetry.

Few of our stories confront death this directly, and fewer still take that confrontation as their main focus. The Grey is certainly worth seeing just for eventually executing that focus well, but you'll also have a hard time enjoying it if you're not in the mood to consider the question of death. Also, Liam Neeson.