8bitten

The Mass Effect Effect

So after buying a physical copy of Dragon Age: Origins, installing and playing for a bit I came to my customary fork in the road: to persevere or not to persevere.

Initially I uninstalled, vowing to use the time thus saved more productively. Of course I cracked several weeks later and reentered the land of junkie wizards and slightly irritating companions.

I tuned out again not that long later as I realised something profound, yet bleedin’ obvious: I don’t care about my character, and the story that is happening to them is neither compelling nor, well, compelling.

This was my second attempt, first time round an ironically skinny hipster magic user with a big overbite proving just slightly too close to real life for comfort. So my lady-with-the-pointy-swords duly (dully?) completed her origin quest, then the hand-holdy ‘get inducted into the secret society’ quest, and then was one of the sole survivors of the blahdy-blah disaster.

She managed all that without once speaking a single word.

This, to me, is not a convincing recreation of a world, it’s a slideshow happening for the benefit of an avatar (yeah, see what I did there) who amazing things happen to without once passing comment. And what’s more, no one passes comment on her not passing comment. Maybe it’s one of those situations where after a while it gets so embarrassing that every character Elspeth met was really trying to think of a way to broach the subject but couldn’t. Perhaps.

But this was a direct consequence of trying to give me as much control as possible over the creation of my character, which seems particularly ironic. I can control Elspeth’s degree of overbite but I can’t hear her talk.

And without that, none of the choices I was making for her seemed to carry much resonance. Yes, yes, everything you do in the game catches up with you sooner or later and there’s like this AMAZING end sequence where you find out what happened to that guy who you advised to buy a really sharp knife for his wife’s painful corns.

But really, what’s the point if throughout the game Elsie has been pointing and miming at stuff like she’s on a German exchange program? The relationships you develop are kind of all in your mind after that, and if I need to have conversations with voices in my own head to enjoy a multi-year, multi-million dollar entertainment franchise, something’s wrong.

Perhaps this is just a hangover from the Baldur’s Gate text-heavy approach to interaction - there it really didn’t matter about the lack of a voice to your character as whatever response you selected would only appear as a written response anyway. You were free to speak them aloud in your head in a Silvio Berlusconi Italian accent if that’s what floated your boat.

So then I bought Mass Effect 2. I cracked after trying to get through the first one (again) so  I could import a savegame after saving the ENTIRE GALAXY from DISASTER and MAYHEM. I got a little stuck in the mire of driving that infernal six-wheeled Bigtrak lookalike round the every world in the entire galaxy looking for crashed probes and secret identikit sinister research bases (do they come in flatpack form from SpaceIkea?), so treated myself to the sequel on Steam.

And well, the beginning was, a little lame (Spoilertastic: You survive the first game only to be killed and resurrected two years later, necessitating, well, a character generation procedure. Smooth). But after that the choices that you make for Shepard are compelling, precisely because if you want him to be narky, he’ll be narky. And if you want him to compete for Chief Good Boy Scout In Charge Of A Shiny Spaceship badge, well, you can do that as well. And take the moral highground against President Bartlett, which is nifty.

So although things like Shepard’s (sur)name are set in stone, the result is a more believable world for the player, and one in which the illusion of choice and of affecting events is much richer than having created a ‘hero’ from scratch. The conversations you have are two-sided, and you can see why characters react to Shepard in the way they do, rather than be bemused as to why no one has run through the  pointy-eared little git who’s nodding glumly to herself in the corner.

Perhaps it comes down to wanting to be involved in a story as much as wanting to play a game: and if your aim is the former it’s a huge plus that choices have been made about your character before you as a player get involved. Say no to overbite manipulation and yes to Actual Characters In Games.

It’s Only a Game

It’s what my mum would say, exasperated as I would mash the keys on our knackered Commodore 64, or hurl an innocent joystick to the ground in petulant fury.

I could never explain my anger adequately, why it needled me so much to have lost the third of three lives, no continues left. Partly it was simply being a bad loser, unwilling to concede defeat to a computer that even then was dusty, sputtering into old age.

Partly I think it was the frustration of loving computer games but (whisper it) not being very good at them, outmaneuvered in one epic frustrating Streetfighter 2 jag by a brother repeating the same game-killing move (‘Yoga flame’, Dhalsim fans) over and over again and laughing at my insistence on fraternal fair play.

I tell myself that I play just to play now, especially since you can save your progress, that death is built in to many game narratives, that there are in fact narratives worthy of the name in videogames nowadays.

But there’s still something of the twelve year old about not merely wanting to watch the hero but wanting to be the hero too. Suspend whatever it is I was doing and launch into a simple world, one that has rules it is possible to master.

And master them, of course.

What used to infuriate me most of course was that mum was always right. It was just a game, nothing rides on success or failure in it, and it would indeed always be there later.

So why could I never resist the lure of just one more go? Why can I still not resist the lure of one more go?