Episode 16: Grown-Ass Adults and Mass Effect 3

It’s Friday! Nerds are angry on the internet!

This time, as was inevitable, they’re angry about Mass Effect 3. I say inevitable because any ending to a multi-year, multi-part epic storytelling and gaming experience that some people spent upwards of 150 hours invested in was going to please some people and disappoint others. By definition, those people are passionate about the material and if they didn’t like the ending, that opinion was going to be a passionate one.

So, of course, some people were upset about the ending, but what was unusual is how vehemently some have not just been complaining about it (as is their democratic right, O Canada, etc), but actually demanding a better one. This group of gamers has started a movement and petition called Retake Mass Effect 3, featuring the tagline, “Demand a better ending. We will hold the line!” and images like this one, which I actually had to research because I couldn’t believe it actually existed.

The movement consists of a petition and a donation drive for Child’s Play, a charity that provides toys and entertainment for sick kids at Christmastime. And while I love and support Child’s Play, and am glad to see at least some good coming out of a giant bout of internet whining, I like to think that the two are mostly just being conflated so that calling the creators immature can be seen as a swipe against helping kids, seeing as one is an already successful multimillion dollar charity and the other is an online petition that says:

We believe:

• That it is the right of the writers and developers of the Mass Effect series to end that series however they see fit

And then, because the writers don’t understand irony, they immediately contradict that by saying stuff like:

We therefore respectfully request additional endings be added to the game which provide

• A more complete explanation of the story events
• An explaination [sic] of the outcome of the decisions made, especially with regard to the planets, races, and companions detailed throughout the series
• A heroic ending which provides a better sense of accomplishment

I’ll get why to the former precludes the latter in every conceivable way later, but first a summary of some of the fallout from this is required. DualShockers editor Joel Talveras wrote an open letter to the people demanding a new ending, where he accused the people behind and supporting the petition of being entitled. In response, Erik Kain wrote a Forbes piece titled: “Upset Mass Effect Fans: Entitled Gamers Or Responsible Consumers?” and if that title wasn’t enough of a hint, I’ll spoil things: he totally thinks that demanding a new game because you didn’t like the one you got is what a responsible, grown-ass adult does.

I disagree.

Here is the thing: you are not owed anything except something that works. If you put in your game disk, press start and are able to play a game, one that is not mispackaged or mislabeled and is the game with the same title that you thought you were buying, then you have literally gotten your entire money’s worth. Your $60 doesn’t buy you a good game, it just buys you a game. Good or bad, as long as you can actually play it, you got exactly what you paid for. Every time you play a good game, consider yourself lucky because you weren’t entitled to it. You got lucky.

This doesn’t just go for video games, either. If your album played, your book wasn’t missing pages or the movie actually played on the screen, you got what you paid for. You paid for something that, objectively speaking, works. Nothing more.

Patches exist to correct technical issues. This falls under the “games that work” category. If your files won’t load, or there’s a glitch that harms your gameplay, that’s your game not working the way it was supposed to. Those things get fixed.

An ending isn’t a glitch, no matter no much you dislike it. It was a labour-intensive, creative decision and you just don’t like it. It was a deliberate choice; that’s what you paid the $60 for. You paid some people some money so that they would make creative choices. If you don’t like it, well, they’re not your employee. You can’t demand a new one. Especially not for free.

The author responds to the initial letter writer’s statement that people would and shouldn’t make the same demands of musicians or filmmakers that they are of BioWare, which was probably an unfortunate choice of words because this is a world where people legitimately believe that not liking the ending to Lost retroactively wasted six years of their life, something that Kain is all too ready to remind him of:

Actually, protesting a film or television show’s bad ending isn’t such a bad idea. I keep bringing up Lost because it’s the best example of a really disappointing ending to a show that made lots of promises that were never kept. Why shouldn’t angry fans let J.J. Abrams know that the terrible ending of that show was a disappointment, that the loose ends remained more frayed than ever?

I’ll take over answering this one: because it makes you sound like a contemptible asshole. Not only is it comically self-aggrandizing, but it’s also extraordinarily insulting because it attempts to invalidate the opinions of people who disagree with Kain. I liked the Lost finale and know others who did. I haven’t played Mass Effect 3 yet, but I know people who liked the endings they got. Others disagree with us. Guess what – dealing with that isn’t just a basic rule of being a grownup, it’s one of the conditions of art. Reactions to it are subjective and the purpose of art is to provoke a reaction. Even a negative one can be valid. People disagreeing with you is part of the game, and pretending it’s not because you’re inherently right is grossly immature.

The argument is also flawed on another fundamental level: it assumes that the game’s (or any narrative’s) worth is decided only by its ending. I can understand not liking an ending. I can even understand not liking one so much that it casts a pall over the rest of the story to the extent that you don’t want to re-experience the parts you liked ever again. An unsatisfactory ending can do that, because art is powerful. However, what it can’t actually do is erase the happy experiences you had beforehand. Just like the ending of Lost didn’t mean that you didn’t spend the rest of those six years liking the show, an unsatisfactory ending to the Mass Effect series doesn’t erase the fifty hours you spent enjoying the rest of the game or the other hundred you spent enjoying the rest of the series. That time and those feelings might feel distant, but they still happened. The experience still had worth.

Endings are a pretty small part of why I, personally, play video games, read books and comics, and watch movies and television. I’ll admit they’re valuable and important, but it’s the entire experience I covet. If all I cared about was the ending, I’d save the $60 and watch the YouTube clips. I don’t know if I’ll find my ending to Mass Effect 3 disappointing, but hey, I will have gotten a lot of good hours out of the series. I’m happy now, and I hope I will be down the line.

And guess what: you’re not owed a good ending, just like you’re not owed a good game. In a game with so many factors imported from the other games and whose ending is so predicated on a complex mixture of time and unforeseen consequence, how much of this uproar is from people who just didn’t make the right choices to get the ending they want? Or who didn’t put in enough time in the right areas? Maybe they don’t see the connections that are there? I don’t know; I’ll find that out when I get my own ending, but I’ve seen enough people happy with their ending to know that the answer isn’t simple, so I don’t think a simple, kneejerk reaction from either party is what’s called for here. One of the conditions of the petition is to have an explicit explanation for which things had which consequences, and I genuinely can’t think of a worse way to kill the magic of art by explaining all the strings behind the curtain. At the end of the day, some things just have to about a subjective personal reaction, good or bad.

My favourite part of Kain’s article, however, is when he mocks the letter writer for suggesting that developers and distributors don’t need to cater to the most obsessed fans’ desires because hey, their money is already BioWare‘s and that making significant, expensive changes just to please a vocal minority isn’t a great business model or precedent to be set. In response, Kain mocks Taveras for not understanding business, saying:

This is terrible business advice, and a bizarre way to chastise loyal fans.

This is the point I actually started laughing.

Since Kain is so eager to give out business advice about how alienating fans leads to a business’ demise and how “Your hardcore fans are the ones that are going to spread word of mouth, for good or ill, about your product the farthest,” I’m ready to give a bit of advice, too:

This is a complete misunderstanding of basic math. A small audience, by definition, doesn’t carry word-of-mouth very far. They may be passionate, and they can have an effect, which Taveras admits, but they are by definition smaller. Kain, sentences later, uses the term “broadening the appeal of a game,” but doesn’t understand that, again, broaden has a definition that is literally “to become larger in distance.” A broad audience might not have the same opinions as a diehard core audience, but it’s the reason why Mass Effect 3 is getting reviews in major newspapers and not just Official Playstation Magazine. Taveras understands this. He’s not saying that the diehard fans should be ignored, just that there is a point at which pleasing them doesn’t have a good cost-benefit ratio.

I’ll use an example: did The Dark Knight make a billion dollars at the box office because of the 125,000 people who read Batman every month? No. It made a billion dollars because everybody else saw it. The diehard word-of-mouth has a part to play in that, but it’s a small one; The Dark Knight was part of a major franchise that other people were interested in, and while at one point the core nerd audience might have started that, Batman long since outgrown being just something that nerds and geeks care about. Before The Dark Knight came out, nerds were threatening not to see it because Heath Ledger would be the worst Joker ever. How many of them saw it anyway? How many of them saw it twice? The reason multi-million dollar creative decisions aren’t governed by nerds threatening to quit in a huff is because they do it so often. The diehard audience exists because, through Kain’s own admission, it sticks with its interests through thick and thin. If they actually did quit as frequently as they threaten to, when things got thin, they wouldn’t be diehard, and I’m guessing it’s that which BioWare is betting on. They didn’t get big and successful by spending thousands of dollars every time a minority doesn’t like a creative choice, they got rich by being more pragmatic and not getting bogged down in minor squabbles. Call it the George Lucas effect. If they don’t issue a new ending, maybe they’ll get burned. I’m betting they won’t.

Near the end of a conversation with a friend about the issue, he said that the ending to Mass Effect 3 was so disappointing to him that he may never buy another BioWare game. A little hyperbolic? Maybe. I haven’t played the game, so I dunno. It was certainly his response, and that’s totally valid. But regardless, that’s the correct consumer response. If BioWare actually gives in and spends thousands of dollars trying to fix something that objectively doesn’t need fixing, however, I’ll be profoundly disappointed in them. The reason they’re my favourite developer, why I’m willing to give them my money, is because of their uncompromising creative choices. That’s the horse I backed and the one I’ll continue to. I’d much rather they just donate to Child’s Play and get on to their next game.

Ultimately, Kain admits that he doesn’t understand what Taveras is saying, asking:

How does any of this lead to the “entitled gamer” label?

And that’s it in a nutshell, really. He doesn’t understand that asking someone to spend thousands of dollars to give you specifically what you want because you didn’t like the end to a story might be something other than a completely rational response. He doesn’t understand that art is subjective or that saying other opinions don’t matter as much as yours is kind of disrespectful. He overestimates the importance of his subject and of his importance in the economy. He doesn’t follow his own argument through to its logical end. I understand his opinion and his vehement response to a video game ending that he found perplexing and disappointing, but I just can’t indulge the idea that it’s anything other than just another hyperbolic response tinged with an immaturity that is regrettably frequent. Learning to live with disappointment is a big part of growing up. I don’t think complaints like Retake Mass Effect 3‘s are, however. I think they’re just childish devices that need some perspective, and until they get it, their proponents won’t understand why the people around them are just wishing they’d stop.