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?]

Deus Ex: Gonna Go Back in Time

If you’re at all into them-there video games, you probably know that Deus Ex: Human Revolution hits the US this week. Like many nerds of my age bracket, I can’t wait to put on some mirror shades and fight the technocratic oligarchy. (Scientists now believe Invisible War would have sold a billion more units if the PCs had mirror shades.)

If you haven’t played Deus Ex (because you weren’t a PC gamer at the time, you aren’t into FPSes, or— god help us— you weren’t fucking born yet), the game still has a lot to offer a modern player.

Deus Ex is a cyber-punk FPS-RPG that depicts a world rebuilding after a devastating economic collapse. Sovereign nations are giving way to a global community. New advances in technology at once give governments a tighter grip, but also empower rebellious factions and civil war. And the hero is a nanotechnologically enhanced super-soldier, working for an counter-terrorism group formed after a terrorist attack on New York City.

In short, it is almost the perfect representation of the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

Except it came out in 2000.

Okay, back up again. That stuff I said up there about the plot? With the terrorists and the technology boom and the governments collapse? That’s all true. Those things happen. But I’m selectively elevating certain elements. These are the bits that stick out to me as I’m playing back through. These are the parts that are reverberating, bouncing around in my 2011 head.

Something’s off, though. It’s not like the game only became a hit after 9/11. I’m irrationally proud to say I played Deus Ex when it dropped in 2000, and I played the shit out of it. The story was just as strong then as it was a year later. But what was Deus Ex actually reacting to?

Buckle up for a journey in the Wayback Machine. We’re taking a trip to the 90s.

(Also, fuck New Critics.)

Do you remember the 90s? It’s okay if you don’t. It was a bit of a shit decade. Parachute pants, grunge, Howard Stern, Russian mob, Windows 95 release parties. When 90s nostalgia comes around, I will force VH1’s “I Love the 90s” off the air with my pure hate until people forget that horrible null space of human development.

Shit, where am I? Right, the 90s. There’s some stuff that’s easy to forget now.

If you forgot or were absent, we were actually paranoid as fuck about terrorism before 9/11. And it seemed not without warrant. There was the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The US embassies in Kenya and Tanzia were bombed in 1998. Jihadist terrorists have been kicking around long before that, but we’ll stick with the 90s here.

So yeah, Deus Ex already had a lot of terrorist stuff to play off of. Except foreign terrorists weren’t the biggest boogeyman at the time. It was us.

There was this fear in the back of the American consciousness that we were a country coming apart at the seems. Ruby Ridge and its big-budget sequel, Waco, in the early 90s gave us the image of US agencies violently botching raids on US citizens. With bullets. And fire. I think there was a tank, too. The Oklahoma city bombing—the big sumbitch of the 90s—showed the destructive potential individuals could pose to those very same agencies. And with the arrest of Ted Kaczynski in 1996, the series of events got its meta-narrative through an American-bred-crackpot’s manifesto.

For a while, it seemed that around was a group of survivalist nuts out in Montana preparing for the next American Revolution against big government. So when Deus Ex set told 2000 players they were fighting a group of domestic terrorists called the Northwest Secessionist Forces, they weren’t whiting up the terrorists (thanks, Sum of All Fears). Domestic terrorism was demonstrably a very real threat. When Deus Ex was released, it had only been 5 years since Oklahoma City. We’re twice that past 9/11 now. Unless something bigger happens, it takes a while to forget that shit.

There are a host of other things going on in the story that still work, but have lost some of their context. Like greys. Remember them? The little alien dudes that just couldn’t get enough of abducting people. They were bigger than fat Elvis. Fire in the Sky, The X-Files, Men in Black, etc., made greys and the related men-in-black common figures in the popular conscious. So, Deus Ex is a game about government conspiracies and stabbing MiB’s in the face with a laser sword? Gotta have some greys in there. (Granted, making them mutated venom-spitting monkeys was goddamn outta left field.)

Speaking of X-Files, any discussion of the original Deus Ex has to bring up FEMA. In Deus Ex, the bad guys plot to overthrow the US government with injudicious use of FEMA’s emergency powers. Declare emergency, declare martial law and nullify the constitution. Today, that plot sounds goddamn ridiculous. Well, okay in 2000 it was crazy-pants paranoia stuff too, but it wasn’t zany. But in 90s conspiracy theory land, the emergency powers FEMA could use were a popular topic. Sure, FEMA hadn’t overthrown the government yet, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t. Post-Katrina? Obama’s Death Panels sound like a more reasonable threat.

Millennialism was also big. That giant round magic number was coming up, and goddamn if we weren’t heading towards something apocalyptic because of it. Suicide cults were offing themselves to get on the Hale-Bopp comet. Angel sightings were vying for real estate with the greys. And we were paranoid as fuck that our technology was out to get us.

Oh, I can still taste that sweet Y2K paranoia. All of our computers were going to run out of magic year bits when the year hit 2000, making every computer convinced it was Jesus-o-clock. The punishment for our folly was going to be the simultaneous collapse of the internet, banking, and a huge fuck-off nuclear holocaust. Y2K clearly didn’t destroy civilization, and looking back at it all you can really see is a number of embarrassing newscasts and sitcom episodes about stockpiling canned tomatoes. But Deus Ex builds off the millennial tone perfectly. Deus Ex presents a world filled with hubris and apocalypse, all through a veil of anxiety over the progress of technology.

So where does that leave the current reading of Deus Ex? Are people going to enjoy it less without the 90s anxieties and concerns pulsing in their heads? Of course not. I played Deus Ex on a nearly yearly basis for ten years after launch, and I forgot most of that 90s shit in the first two. Hell, I had to Google half of that just to write this up.

Deus Ex is a large and complicated game that asks a lot of political and philosophical questions. Its questions aren’t about the 90s any more than they’re about post-9/11. They’re about the relationship between power and corruption, security and freedoms, and the march of technology. The topics and events that Deus Ex presents can be read and re-interpreted in almost any year, and the odds are good that the reading will hold up. Like any good work, it lives beyond its original context and loses none of its real impact.

And that is why you should just goddamn play Deus Ex.