Mass Effect and video game storytelling

I've been wondering how to go about writing a first post for this blog, one idea was to give a summary of the games I played last year but the more I thought about it the longer and more boring I realised it would be. So for various reasons I decided to concentrate on one game series I caught up with last year - Mass Effect.

This was a series I'd ignored for a long time - partially because I didn't have a very good impression of what it was actually about and partially because most of my gaming time had been spent labouring under the impression that I might eventually get good at fighting games (more on that another time maybe). All I'd seen of it was 'Generic Bald Space Marine' shoots things in space, which didn't really interest me (I'm sure some of you are making belm faces at me right now for how wrong I was). Eventually I heard more about the character customisation options, the conversation system and the fact that you could carry your character through to the next game, which grabbed my interest if only for the fact that I'd never heard of the cross game character thing being done before.

When I finally picked up both games I think I may have sprinted through the first game a little too fast - I'd heard a lot of people say to just play the first one to create a character and transfer them through to the second one as that was the much better game. In the end I liked a lot of things from both games though and found myself missing some of the stuff from ME1 that was more streamlined in ME2 (not the scrolling through every item you've ever acquired when selling them though). I generally enjoyed the storyline, which seemed pretty good by most games standards but that brings me onto my main reason for writing this. I was reading an article by Film Crit Hulk yesterday on why we should stop it with the hero journey shit and about half way through it mentions Mass Effect as a bad example of using the same basic stories and characters over and over again. This being my first Bioware game I obviously hadn't picked up on the similarity to their other games but there's no denying the fact that it follows a very similar structure to dozens of other stories. It wasn't something that bothered me while playing the game but it's interesting to look at after the fact and try to understand what I did like about the story.

Before reading the article on the heroes journey, I read another of his called The myth of 3 act structure (yes I am doing my homework Hulk). Specifically the idea that the end of an 'act' is characterised by decisions being made that you cannot be undone, which move the story forward. Aside from the gunplay in missions, this really struck me as being the main idea of the Mass Effect series, there are plenty of decisions that you are forced to make and they aren't just wishy-washy things that don't really affect the rest of the game. First and foremost you have your character, which in my case was designed in partnership with my wife and came out something like the following image I think.

A good deal of time was spent tweaking bone structure etc. and we were also thinking about her backstory choice and what her character would be like. We picked the option of being famous for having to make a tough decision to sacrifice people for the greater good, which made me mostly stick to the pragmatic best decisions possible despite the cost (most of the time anyway, my wife would quite often comment that I hadn't chosen the best dialogue option for her character). It really hit home when your last decisions really affected the landscape of the second game - it makes me want to go and see how things could have turned out differently but I think that will come after I've played ME3 and our Aimee Shepard's story  is complete. I think that identification of the character as 'ours' is what overrides any feeling that the story is too derivative, because you've taken a significant role in shaping the story so it obviously seems unique to you. Funnily enough I hear that the third game will have an 'Action' mode where most of the conversation options are taken out of your hands, it'd be interesting to see whether this results in you playing a completely bland character devoid of personality or if it will auto-direct conversations a certain way.

It's also an amazing undertaking from a technical standpoint and I can see how it must be hard to write/design ME3, taking into account every possibility from all the previous games. So much must have gone into it that would never be seen by someone taking a specific path. I particularly liked the fact that I could just leave certain conversation choices unfollowed, anything that seemed to stray towards traditional goody goody hero stuff or taking the moral high ground I would tend to avoid when in a lot of games you would just have to sit through the hero taking the holier than thou approach. I guess this is not something unique to Mass Effect but having never really played any other western RPGs this is the first thing to make me aware of it. I can see now why people talk about playing Dungeons and Dragons as good practice for writing stories as you're thinking about a character different from yourself and how they would react in situations. So while games should definitely strive to create better, more interesting stories I find it hard to criticize this too much when the moments that you helped create are what stick with you.