The Button at the End; Or: How Not to Write a Blog Post

It’s been a while, huh? Looks like my last blog post was five years ago. I’ve changed jobs twice since then. Learned some: probably more than I realize, but certainly less than I should. But five years is long enough. It’s time to dust this place off; if not to say anything profound, then at least to get back in the swing of putting words together in something other than a P4 check-in.
To kick things off, I thought I’d pull something from my own slush pile. Blogger tells me the draft for “The Button at the End” was first written in 2012, which I’m pretty sure makes it nearly as old as some of our programmers. When I wrote this I had just come off of EVE Online, and was about to start my run on ESO. Changed jobs, genre, company, and states. The years to follow were humbling in a lot of ways.
So understand it’s strange for me to read this piece years later. I barely remember writing this. I recognize the voice, and a lot of my habits. But I also feel (or hope?) that this piece isn’t representative of what I’d write today. There’s too much certainty, the authority too much of an affectation. Some of my arguments were doubtless more complete in my head than what landed on the screen.
It’s not all bad. I was edging closer on a voice with this than some of my earlier pieces. I was leaning less-heavily on tearing down those more successful than myself than I had in entries like the short-lived “KotOR Replay” series. This is probably as close as I got in the “old” posts to be constructively critical (constructive for whom?) without being outright mean.
And I know: a fucking Mass Effect 3 ending post. I don’t really have any defense other than it was the thing to have an opinion on at the time. It and Deus Ex were fresh in my mind, and I really wanted to make something of that.
Occasionally throughout you’ll see inline comments [like this]. These are notes I just put in during a read-through. These are more spur-of-the-moment than proper critique.
So, here you go: “The Button at the End.” Take it for what it is: a video game grunt’s attempt to slam ideas about two of the industry giants together and come out with something at least interesting.
Or don’t. I’m not your boss.

The Button at the End

People care about Mass Effect. A lot. And not “care about the environment” care, or “You have a serious LEGO problem, and we’re here to help,” care. Players invested their hearts into the brands. The fans were so dedicated to the series that when the ending to the third installment underwhelmed, people burned down the internet. Rants. Op-eds (paid rants). Petitions. Threats. It was even one of the contributing factors to EA being voted the worst company of 2012, edging out Bank of America, a company whose primary products are Catch-22 fines and depression.
Eventually the fans won. Or as much as you win when the product you’re rallying against has already shipped a bajillion units. Bioware released an expanded-ending DLC. One of the Doctors issued a PR apology on their website.
Obviously players cared a deeply about the game. And it’s true that the choose-you-own-adventure buttons at the end were—design wise—a little underwhelming. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution [Should have made this a separate paragraph, give Human Revolution a proper intro.- Future Me], a game in roughly the same genre, shipped just seven months earlier and with largely the same story-button ending design. But [Do not start sentences with “but” twice in a row. –FM] Human Revolution did not destroy Eidos/Square Enix. On a whole, players loved the game. So why did fans try to burn EA’s house down, when Human Revolution pulled the same thing?
As usual[“As usual.” Fuck you, lazy phrasing. –FM] there are a couple of likely culprits.

Tonality

First there’s the differing tonality of the games. The world of Deus Ex is a shitty place. If you imagined Robocop wandering the streets of Blade Runner, only all the rich people dress like Draculas, you’re pretty close the near-future dystopia as presented. Also you can punch hookers, because player freedom. One of the big themes throughout the whole game is that there are no stellar good guys, just variations on self-absorbed cyborg plutocrat. Well, except for the dudes who killed your buddies. You have to kill someone. When the final story-buttons hit and they all go to bad-ish endings, the player isn’t too thrown.
Contrast this with Mass Effect. The games are obviously grand in scope, with long, melodramatic histories and backstories for every race and culture. The default “good” playstyle is called the Paragon path (and let’s not kid ourselves, Paragon is the assumed default). In it players are assumed to be bringers of justice and right to the off-brand Lensemen universe. Planets are saved. Evil space crabs are destroyed. And your crew’s emotional problems are all solved. The game lets you be an outright bastard, too. Sure, Jensen [Explain who Jensen is, dammit! – Future Me] might kill a hobo or twenty (player freedom!), but Shepherd can wipe out colonies, turn her back on building full of burning people, kill dozens of people in cold blood, and commit up to four genocides.
But despite those entertaining highs and lows, Mass Effect is never really a morally grey world. You’re either a Space John Wayne or a Space John Wayne Gacy. Attempting to mix and match between the two only makes Shepherd inconsistent, not complicated. The world of Mass Effect is not built for that. It’s built for big, showy, unequivocal moral absolutes. So when the ghost baby asks the player to push the blue or red button (or bonus green!) button, players rightfully expect that same dichotomy. Except not. All the endings are really the same, but with shades of difference. Red is a little more murdery than blue, blue is a little more hippy than red, and green is a little more bewildering then either. But that’s it. Everything is minor variations on the same ending. In a game built for big operatic extremes, all endings keying off the same major beats is jarring. [This should have been brought up higher. This isn’t a magic trick. Make your point, and then support it. Arguments first is just confusing. –FM]

Precedent, and Forget It!

Human Revolution and Mass Effect 3 are both the third entries in already establish brands. Human Revolution had the original Deus Ex and Invisible to draw from. Mass Effect 3 had, well, the other 2. The endings for Deus Ex and Invisible War established the model Human Revolution followed. In both games in the final level the player reaches a point where they are presented with several clear options, and each will lead to a different, singular ending, regardless of all of the player’s actions up to that point. The player then does the required action, and they’re treated to a cutscene where the respective gruff protagonist and some other talky-head discuss their new cyber-paradigm.
Certainly Human Revolution drops the ball a bit. CGI or in-engine cutscenes are traded out for some old stock footage, and the whole sequence bares the hallmarks of the budget-saving hail-mary it is [Conjecture, asshole. –FM]. But the pieces are largely there, and the whole things fits with the others.
Bioware’s space opera ends up damned by its precedent, particularly Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 1 is a fairly [find a better word] linear game. Planet quests exist in their own little pockets with no crossover. The majority of choices have implied consequences, rather than seen. The only major choices that make a broad impact on the game are whether you save dinosaur-turtle-man, and whether you kill off racist lady or the blandest man in space. Everything else was destined. You climb the tower and shoot the evil badguy. Maybe you killed the Council at the end. That changes roughly 3 lines of dialogue.
But Mass Effect 2 made all sorts of promises. “Import your game,” it said, “and your choices will all have big meaning!” And to demonstrate, Mass Effect 2 changes stuff based on your decisions in 1. Now the brand is about lasting choices. That moral dilemma? That shit’s coming back. Did you turn in the space-bugs’ murder factor to Martin Sheen? That definitely is coming back. And then nope. Closed loop. It was bound to happen. Very very few games pull off widely divergent endings without cutting corners, and even fewer pull it off well. Trimming everything back down to a finite, manageable number of endings was one of the smartest thing Bioware could do. But it went against the spirit of their own PR and marketing, and therefore the player’s expectations.

Where Drama Lives

Despite both being science fiction action-RPGs with named protagonists, Human Revolution and Mass Effect hang the majority of their narrative investment in very different places. Human Revolution is a big plotty space. It’s politics, conspiracies, and hobo murder. The majority of characters are at best ciphers, having only enough backstory to justify their particular ideologies. “I’m an industrialist, so I like technology.” “I’m religious fanatic, so I hate technology.” “I’m an Asian woman stereotype, so I’m going to betray everyone for no reason.” [Joke is perhaps accurate, but not needed.] Even the interactions are all very thinky-talky-head stuff. Characters might talk about their emotions for a single card, but you’re always one dialogue choice away from musing about Cartesian anxiety in a post-human society.
When the final story buttons lead to different rambly, naval-gazy musing over NPR footage, it isn’t completely different from what players have been getting from the story. Does it resolve many character arcs? Not really. But it’s the protagonist getting quasi philosophical about Big Issues™. And in a weird way it kind of works. Sure, it’s not ideal. We all wanted something more satisfying than that, especially after that boss fight where we shot the cyber-BDSM chicks  in the metal clamshells. But it maintains the heart of the Deus Ex story: self-serious pop-philosophy.
Mass Effect is all about the characters (well, some of them). Sure, there are the space crabs to worry about. And techno-zombies. And Martin Sheen. But that’s not really why players care about Mass Effect. For Mass Effect fans, the ones who would unmake reality with their anger, the team members on the Normandy were the main attraction. Curing the genophage is only important because your dinosaur-turtle buddy is against it [Against the genophage, not curing it. Sentence should be clearer.] (and, later, your funny-talking gecko doctor). Stopping the war between the flashlight people and the flashlight Terminators only matter because it might make your lady and robo-dude flashlights sad. Your investment in Mass Effect depended almost entirely on how much you cared about your space entourage. And to it’s credit, 99% of Mass Effect 3 milked the hell out of this. The amount of fan service moments in the course of ME3 is staggering. And that’s not strictly a negative. As popular entertainment it knew exactly what its draw was, and it played it for all it was worth.
Except for that 1%. It just happened to be at the end. This elaborate, epic, space opera, after dozens of hours of hours playing on the character interactions, then removes all of the characters. They’re replaced with a ghost baby. And ghost baby wants to talk to you about Cartesian anxiety [Used that one already. Find another smug reference.] in a post-human world. There’s a very little support for it from a plot perspective, and thematically ghost baby’s obsession with the Big Idea™ of Man versus Machine is a C-line at best. But the most befuddling thing is the absence of all of your space pals in this segment. It’s just you, the buttons, and a translucent toddler that wants to wax philosophical. That baby does not care about your on-again off-again romance with blue lesbian Spock. The baby will not trade quips with you like dinosaur-turtle-man or cat-bird-lobster-man. That baby wants to convince you you’re playing a different game. A game with Big Ideas™. And it falls flat. [Ending is trying to be too strong. Even if it does fall flat: 1) have I really supported it; 2) is that even my conclusion; 3) is it a conclusion worth publishing?]

KotOR Replay 03: SPAAACE BLACKJAAACK

I’m walking around Taris, right? I just got done murdering a Sith officer and a couple of faceless troopers for being unpleasant to a jabbering alien guy (an alien guy whom—it must be noted—seemed to have some experience completely vanishing dead bodies). So, like you do after successfully killing intergalactic authority figures, I’m off to the bar to celebrate.

(Wait, sorry. I meant I’m off to the cantina. Because one scene in Star Wars took place in a cantina, the rest of the goddamn universe is robbed of bars, saloons, lounges, taverns, and dives. It’s like there are only two types of eatery licenses available: cantinas, and that Silver Diner Obi Wan went to when he was too lazy to do his own homework.)

I get to the bar (fuck you, Star Wars style guide), and there’s some dude standing around asking if I want to play cards. Only he calls it Pazaak. Sure, okay, like in the old west, right? Well, see, it turns out it’s not so much. It’s a lot like cards. Hell, it’s a lot like blackjack. But someone’s gone and spaced it all up.

I’m not trying to make 21, I’m trying to make 20.

And I don’t just take whatever the hell I’m dealt. I get to play special cards from my hand, like in hold’em.

But instead of each player being dealt from the same deck, I only get to use cards that you own, like in Magic.

And there are these special cards, see, that allow me to switch up the values of the cards and OH MY GOD I WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE FACE, SPACEMAN.

For the life of me there are two things I will never fully appreciate about modern RPGs:

1) Every RPG developer feels the need to include a gambling mini-game.

2) Every RPG developer feels the need to reinvent gambling games.

KotOR is not the only RPG to do this bullcrappery. Witcher has its dice games. Mass Effect has Quasar. New Vegas. Etc. And each time it ends up annoying me.

My main problem is this: Pazaak is making the familiar strange—needlessly.

Almost every time a relatively straightforward game is muddied up and overcomplicated for no good reason. To go back to Pazaak, the game is goddamn blackjack. But sure, there’s no blackjack in Star Wars. So target number is changed to 20. Whatever. But there’s a hand to play from. Now it’s self-indulgent. On top of that, there are special wild cards that make it wacky. Now we’re in silly-land.

Why was blackjack so bad? Are there that many GDs with frustrated dreams of being tabletop designers, and this is the only way that their designs see the light of day in a world where physical gaming products are a dying market?

Oh, right.

But that still doesn’t mean it’s a good reason. Mini-games should not be a place to work through creative frustrations and insecurities.

That’s what blogs are for.

Here I give some credit to New Vegas, for sticking to traditional gambling games for the most part. I get slot machines, I get roulette, I get blackjack. Didn’t have to wasteland it all up just for its own sake.

I blame Star Trek’s Tri-D chess for this. If you don’t know, in Star Trek everyone plays three-dimensional chess. It’s like normal chess, but instead of one flat board there are three or four smaller boards in a weird sort of tower. And what are the rules? Spock kicks everyone’s ass until Kirk does something unexpected. That’s fucking it because it doesn’t need real rules. It serves the same damn function as normal chess.

Wikipedia tells me that there are three-dimensional chess variants, but Star Trek didn’t give a shit. It’s a visual gag, pure and simple. So long as it stays chess but with a visual gimmick, all’s fine with the world. The instant understanding the special space rules of Tri-D chess become important to following the plot, some writer is going to writer hell. SPACE CHESS, MOTHERFUCKER. SPOCK’S GOOD AT IT. END WORLD BUILD.

It’s the same with mini-games in a larger video game. What’s important is that the space game serves the same narrative role as whatever it’s standing in for. So Pazaak is like poker, right? I’m the goddamn space cowboy, and wandered into the saloon cantina, and I’m gonna win a space ship off of Lando. You remember that part, right? Han won the Millennium Falcon off of Lando in a game of chance. Probably some form a space cards. They don’t tell you what game it was, but you can guess it was probably something cowboyish, given that it was Han. A game of chance that involved skill, but ultimately can go to either player given the right conditions.

You know, like blackjack.

You know what it probably didn’t involve? Han scouring the universe for three hours so he could find the super-ultra-rare Blue Eyed God Fucker for his black deck. But that’s the Pazaak experience. It’s blackjack, but with the random bits of CCG design thrown in to prolong the consequence-less closed-loop experience despite serving no mechanical function and violating the only narrative purposes it had.

Pazaak isn’t about being a space cowboy. It’s about being a space nerd who drops way too much time and money into building my awesome deck, so my deck can be the best in the universe and all the jabbering, cop-killing aliens will stop laughing at me.

Again, going to give props to New Vegas here. Just a classic mix of casino games and cowboy aesthet—OH WHAT THE HELL, CARAVAN.

KotOR Replay 02: Burn Their House Down!

The opening section of Old Republic, the Endar Spire, is a fun little NPE. For those of you at home, an NPE is fancy-speak for New Player Experience, which is itself fancy-speak for the tutorial section of your game. For most MMOs, it’s Noob Island. In Half Life, it was the Hazard Course. Oblivion had the escape from the dungeon. Etc. There’s no set way to do an NPE. Many designers even question the need. Thankfully though, market forces are simply making that breed extinct.

So, Endar Spire. To be frank, this part of the game works pretty damn well. Tutorials pop up where they should. Gameplay elements are introduced piecemeal, so I’m not overwhelmed with five new concepts at once. I’m even provided with a friend, Captain Deadsoon, who will explicitly tell me what I need to do in audio, even occasionally breaking the fourth wall when needed to make sure my monkey brain knows what to do.

I dearly wish more games would break the fourth wall in their tutorials. In everything else, by all means try to contextualize. But when a player is just learning the game, for god’s sake, tell them what the hell button to push. You can have the best world build in the world. If the player can’t figure out what button to push to get to the next bit, they will hate your world, your game, and your bloodline for time immemorial. Give them the poop.

Another thing I will note—which is not a complaint—is that Endar Spire follows the Bioware habit of burning down the player’s starting village. The player starts off in what should be a quiet environment, takes two steps, and BAM! OH GOD ALIEN DEVIL BABIES, KILL TO LEARN! KILL TO LEARN! The player learns the ropes during the battle, but at the end of it the village is destroyed and the player has to go off into the wide world for justice.

It’s a damned convenient device. Bioware gets to create one-use content, which means each bit can be custom-tailored to the NPE’s needs. They establish the bad guys quickly and clearly. Who needs to die? The guys who wrecked up your room and killed your buddies. It throws the player into the fray immediately, getting the hole game and story moving quickly. The last point doesn’t quite hold true in Jade Empire, but it’s not coincidence Jade Empire is the Bioware game I have the hardest time starting.

It’s not always an actual village. Sometimes it’s a institution (NWN), sometimes it’s a quiet homefront planet (Mass Effect), and some times it’s actually your damn village (Dragon Age, Dragon Age 2). But every time, the player gets a quick and guided intro to the game’s mechanics, and they get to scream, “YOU KILLED MY MUDDAR! YOU KILLED MY FADDAR!”

Nothing wrong with that.