Endings arise from what comes before. Let’s start by going back to 2006, a year before the first original Mass Effect. Specifically let’s go back to my Oblivion post, on downloadable content (DLC), starting with a Wired article quoting an analyst on the key benefits of DLC: ““We believe that an online marketplace will provide varying high-margin incremental revenue opportunities for all of the major video-game publishers with the [Xbox 360] over the next five years.” In Bethesda’s case, their opening salvo in the field of high-margin incremental revenue opportunities was letting you spend your genuine dollarbucks on armour for your horse in Oblivion. Fans and games media ridiculed this, protested it, and ultimately accepted it as the way things would now be done.”
RPGs with their arrays of systems and emphasis on narrative were particularly ripe for some of the types of DLC which went down better than that initial foray. BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 had eight different DLC packs just including those which provided additions to the story of various sizes. In a game which already rewarded getting invested in a web of stories with a big cast of characters, it made sense to extend that further still for those who wanted to. It could even be used as part of the promotion campaign for the next game, with the final pack Arrival trailing the events of Mass Effect 3. If you didn’t care for extra chapters, though, you could just skip all of that and wait for the big event. Except… hmm.
Mass Effect 3 starts with a full-on invasion of Earth by the Reapers, and has you as the reinstated Commander Shepard working to put a stop to them. To give a sense of the preparations going beyond that of your one ship, there is a counter for Galactic Readiness that ticks up depending on your actions and comes into play in the final calculation. It’s not quite as direct as Fable III’s equation of one gold coin to one civilian life, but it’s the same principle. You follow the story of Shepard and crew, but those actions get magnified across a galactic scale.
The calculation of your War Assets and the overall galactic strength includes elements based on whether you completed the previous DLC. If you haven’t played the previous two games, you can select in the opening setup whether Shepard is haunted by the death of Kaiden Alenko, the death of Ashley Williams, or the deaths of everyone, but not whether she did Arrival. As the player, you have to have put in both the effort and the additional £4.69 for that one. Video game stories can have particularly porous boundaries as to where they end and they begin, and this complicated that further still.
That change to the nature of a story is a long way from a carefully sectioned off introductory horse armour offer, and had happened over the course of just six years. It’s still smaller than the transformation of entire genres of games by online multiplayer, and smaller than the changes an increasingly online world was leading to outside of video games. It was happening right alongside those, though, and that had unintended consequences.
I recently listened to an episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About called The Chicks vs. The Iraq War. It focused on the extensive attacks the country band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks received after their singer commented in 2003 that she was ashamed of the US president. I hadn’t realised that those remarks did not take place on a televised awards show, but at The Dixie Chicks’ own concert in London. The comments reached beyond the audience of a couple of thousand fans at Shepherd’s Bush Empire thanks to a mention in a review of the show by The Guardian, which crucially was published on their website. A few years earlier, in a less connected world, those remarks would most likely have gone without wider notice. Instead, they escaped confinement by space and time, and outraged people in the US deluged the band with hatred and launched an organised campaign to get them excluded from radio playlists.
Hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes describe it as an example of “the beginning of the internet enabling people to create a false sense of local consensus”. Rather than a change in how individuals feel about cultural issues and act on those feelings, it was “more about the ways that a small number of people can direct harassment at a particular person or to a particular institution”. They explicitly draw a line forwards to the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate. We are in 2012, so I’m still getting ahead of myself slightly there. Yet even before they actually mentioned it, I couldn’t help thinking not only of Gamergate, but of Mass Effect 3.
In the wake of the release of Mass Effect 3, some people were unhappy about its ending. Or rather, they were unhappy about its endings, plural and the fact that their choices did not result in significant differences between them. Once it wouldn’t even have been an expectation that many players would make it to the end of a game. When Jet Set Willy’s flaws on many formats made it literally impossible to complete, it wasn’t easily distinguishable from the game’s base level of difficulty. By Mass Effect 3, with its selectable ‘narrative mode’ with minimal combat difficulty, the idea was that the ending should be reachable for all. Which is a lot better in several ways!
Beyond that increased ease, players could turn to YouTube and easily see the other endings, even if they hadn’t made the choices to get to them themselves. So the similarity between the end results escaped confinement. I can do the same now. The weakness of the ending seems more like the need for a grand action finish getting away from what was best about the series at any point, and I don’t think that changing the nature of that spectacle a lot more than changing the colour of the magic blast would have helped it much. Either way, this was also a game series which had told players that their involvement wasn’t over after release, and that they could expect more. Furthermore, it was a series which had told them in-game that you could be a dick to other people at all possible opportunities (‘renegade’) and that doing so would provide you with your own specially crafted ending.
The ability for the actions of small organised groups to be blown up to a galactic scale had only grown between 2003 and 2012. It met the series’ own particular messages of empowerment. Together, they then met the new social media attention economy, with its high scores awarded for engagement, any engagement. The results were toxic, with a group of people launching a harassment campaign against the game’s developers. How many were actually involved as a portion of the game’s players is less easy to tell, but they got the new ending they wanted. People Make Games’ video on the situation focuses on the human cost, both of the campaign and of EA folding to it. Management took already overworked people, due for a break, and instead made them head back in and construct a new ending to meet those demands.
I remember this feeling like an extraordinary thing at the time, never mind in retrospect with what followed. Not because it came out of nowhere, but because it was such a perfect crystallisation of a series of building tensions across different arenas. Bloated, ever-more-expensive productions which had to ruthlessly compromise narrative ambitions to even make it to being released. Marketing which had pandered to the worst instincts of a specific group of players for decades. Games as a way of turning the player’s own psychology against them, a biotic trap to extract resources as efficiently as possible. Here were the end results. In one metatextual way, Mass Effect 3 truly did provide a thematically satisfying conclusion. If only it had been the ending.
Top of the charts for week ending 10 March 2012:
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