Not Mass Effect
I was talking with a traditional RPG-designer friend of mine who was extolling the virtues of the RPG as a storytelling device. In many ways, in talking to me, he was preaching to the choir. He told the story of a friend of his who’d never played an RPG before and what happened when an NPC betrayed her character, literally stabbing her in the back. The player said “I felt like I had been stabbed!”
Certainly, for her, this was a revelatory experience. She didn’t expect to have that kind of experience while playing a game, and this is all well and good.
My friend said “That is the kind of thing RPGs can go that movies cannot do!”
This was where we parted company. Because I felt like movies do that all the time. It’s the reason film is so successful at communicating emotionally. When Ripley is running, confused and terrified, through the corridors of the Nostromo, I am confused and terrified. When I watch Rick drinking his sorrows away over Ilsa, I experience longing and loss and unrequited love.
The starkest example I can think of, and the one I use when talking about this stuff at work, is Heath Ledger in Monster’s Ball. Spoiler Alert! Very early on in the movie, in the middle of confessing something to his father, Ledger’s character very abruptly pulls out a revolver, points it to his chest, pulls the trigger, and kills himself. It happens so quickly; Ledger is going through with something he can only do by rushing through it and so we are rushed through it with him and when he shoots himself, I felt like I’d been shot. If I’d been sitting on a stool, I’d have fallen over. Without thinking, the instant the gun went off, I put my hand to my chest.
Certainly not everyone reacts that way, but that’s how I reacted and probably if you’re reading this you’ve had similar experiences in other movies. Else why do we cry at movies? Because we feel what the characters are feeling.
Steven Spielberg once, famously, said that games will reach the same level of storytelling as film when the player cries at the end of level 11. This caused something of an uproar, mostly, I feel, by people who simply didn’t want to entertain criticism of a medium they’d grown up with and whose legitimacy they took for granted…or always felt defensive of. To me, a storyteller in video games, I agreed with him. I felt we had a long way to go.
I don’t feel particularly motivated to make anyone cry, so I reject his example, but his point is taken. I was scared and curious and spooked-out when playing through Condemned and I’ve thrilled to various video game characters’ adventures, but these are simple reactions, I think. Spielberg was talking about a higher-level reaction. Something more than jumping when someone shouts “Boo!” Something like grabbing your chest and feeling like you’ve been shot because you’ve seen another character shoot himself.
And so we come to Mass Effect.
Mass Effect was produced by Bioware, one of the two great giants of American CRPGs. These guys have their shit together, know their audience, and have honed their style nearly to perfection. There’s a lot to say about Mass Effect, most of it positive, and I do not plan on rehashing the known virtues and issues here. Better reviewers than I have said it already. That’s why this essay is called Not Mass Effect, it’s not a review of the game. But I do want to focus on the story. On one particular moment of the story that I feel marks a small leap forward, at least to my own personal experience of story in games.
Like the other big American CRPG that’s come out recently, Oblivion, the player in Mass Effect can custom create his own human character. Male or female. Oblivion essentially exposes the XSI or Maya front-end that animators and character modelers use to create faces in games and this is all well and good…if you’re an animator. If you’re not, then the ability to control the ratio between the width of your nose and the angle at which the nose projects from the plane of your face is not super-useful because…what?
Whereas Mass Effect takes essentially the same thing and simplifies it so the player is only monkeying with things that make an obvious difference and as a result you’re much less likely to end up with a dude who can see through his own nostrils, and be unable to put it back the way it was.
Because of this, I was able to create a dude who looked exactly the way I wanted. I’ve been working on an outline for an SF novel and I decided I was going to use my first playthrough of Mass Effect to see if I could model the main character of my outline. I was able to make exactly the dude I imagined and this may be why I later had the reaction that prompted this post.
I decided not only was my character going to look like the guy I imagined in my outline, he was going to behave like him. Very straight-arrow, by the book, no bullshit. And, like the character creation system, the dialog options permitted me to play my mans the way I wanted. It was a fantastic synergy between my imagination and the options presented me in-game.
As a result I was having an unusually high degree of character-identification as I played Mass Effect. When my friends at worked asked me what I thought of the game I said, “It’s hard to tell. It’s like when you’re playing a traditional RPG. The GM might be shit, and the campaign might be boring, but if you really like playing your mans, that can make the game a lot of fun.” I really liked my character and as a result I was probably overlooking some flaws.
Early on in the playthrough, at the end of the first level/mission, gameplay transitioned into a cutscene and something extraordinary happened. My party came across an alien artifact and one party member walked up to it. She was pulled toward it against her will and seemed to be in danger. My character, and I was not in control at this point, recognized the danger and pulled her away. As a result, my character was pulled toward the artifact.
The whole level had built up to this and suddenly my character was telekinetically jerked into the air, funky lights started flashing, and the camera cut to a close-up reaction of my character as fear and pain and wonder fought for control over his face. Images flashed across the screen, representing what he was seeing as the Artifact probed his mind.
When it was over, I realized I had not taken a breath in several moments and my heart was racing. I had experienced all the same things my character experienced. It felt like it happened to me. Fear, wonder, confusion. This wasn’t a simple “Boo!” Or the dread of wondering what was around the corner. It wasn’t tears, but it was as complex, maybe more complex, than what I experienced watching Monster’s Ball. Several conflicting emotions, all at once.
And I thought “holy shit.” Because it was that kind of moment. It wasn’t until afterward, hours later, that I realized something amazing had happened. It’s reinforced throughout the game as that experience becomes critical to the plot. The Artifact is some sort of Uplift Device and it changes you.
Now, some of the options you’re presented with when your character talks about the experience later kinda undermine the whole thing (“I saw war.” What? You saw a bunch of weird shit that didn’t make any sense. Where’s the “I saw a bunch of weird shit that didn’t make any sense” dialog option? I shouldn’t complain though, because what my character would say, “What I saw wasn’t important,” was there) but this is a small point.
The game didn’t just create an emotional reaction in me, I felt like I was experiencing what the character was experiencing. And I wasn’t even in control of my dude when it happened!
At least for me, and at least in this game, and maybe because of the way I was able to customize my character, in that one moment the story in a video game became as effective as any movie I’d seen. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s clear to me the boundaries between good story and good games are rapidly collapsing.
Frankly, we’re getting to the point where describing games like Mass Effect as games is increasingly problematic. But that’s a point to be made in another post…
End of Line
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February 6th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
You owe me a Fairchild Channel F old chap! Cough one up for me tomorrow.