{"id":2681,"date":"2012-04-05T11:00:43","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T15:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2681"},"modified":"2012-04-05T14:39:59","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T18:39:59","slug":"a-galactic-ruleset-under-siege-the-mass-effect-3-controversy-rules-of-the-text-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2681","title":{"rendered":"A galactic ruleset under siege: the Mass Effect 3 controversy (rules of the text 5)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two weeks have passed since the CEO of BioWare attempted to quiet the fans of Mass Effect<\/em> with an announcement<\/a> that the Mass Effect 3<\/em> development team would be working on a modification to the game\u2019s ending. The announcement was gracious, and whether because internet rage tends to die down more quickly than anyone expects or because Dr. Muzyka\u2019s announcement actually did mollify them slightly, the fans appear at least to have paused in their enormities<\/a>, perhaps with the intent of seeing what will come of it, pitchforks still ready to hand.<\/p>\n

Today BioWare announced<\/a> that a free downloadable content pack will, this summer, provide new cinematics to add closure. Will the ending really change (what does \u201creally\u201d mean? What does \u201cchange\u201d mean?)?\u00a0We\u2019ll have to wait and see.<\/p>\n

But the practomimetic path that led us here has already produced an astonishing amount of new cultural material to analyze, in the ending itself, in players\u2019 reactions to it, in the action they took as a result of those reactions, and most of all, I think, in the beginning of BioWare\u2019s response to that action. All those things, from my perspective, have to do with exactly what I\u2019m talking about in this series, because they show how much broader our ideas of what rulesets and mechanics are need to be than they have been to this point.<\/p>\n

Just as I\u2019m arguing here<\/a> that we can see the text of GRR Martin\u2019s A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> as a ruleset and as a performance within an existing ruleset, I think it can be very helpful to see that Mass Effect<\/em> has mechanics that lie outside its combat-system, its dialogue-system, and the other parts of what we think of as the game, coded but also, as we see assuming increasing important, malleable by the game\u2019s designers. These mechanics are not coded, but they control the relation of player-input to game-state nonetheless, when we see that the game-state is much more than what’s happening in what appears to us to be the gamespace.<\/p>\n

In a wonderfully perspicacious article<\/a> that appeared Tuesday, Rowan Kaiser lays out a case that those of us with an eye to the past, and to other narrative discourses, have been waiting for: BioWare\u2019s plans to modify the ending of Mass Effect 3<\/em> are no more or less a violation of artistic integrity than changes made to the film 28 Days Later<\/em>, or to Great Expectations<\/em>, and the fans of Mass Effect 3<\/em> feel no more entitled than fans of things throughout history to exert their influence to re-shape a beloved work of narrative art.<\/p>\n

Rowan\u2019s examples make my point about texts and rulesets very forcefully: fans of all the works he cites were players of those works as rulesets<\/a>, and engaged in those rulesets on the same basis players of Mass Effect<\/em> engage with BioWare\u2019s game. Within the choice-creating constraints of the mechanics enacted by these rulesets, players of Great Expectations<\/em> (readers), of the Iliad<\/em> (bards), of A Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> (readers, again–including Roy Dotrice as the reader of the audiobook<\/a>), of Mass Effect<\/em>, all perform in such a way that the works they perform are legible only in their performance, to them and to others.<\/p>\n

It is entirely unsurprising, then, that they should feel they have a claim upon these rulesets, whether textual or digital-interactive, because without their performances those rulesets could never take cultural effect, in their lives or within their communities.<\/p>\n

But to my mind the way discussion of the Mass Effect 3<\/em> controversy has focused on issues of authorship is terribly limiting, and Rowan does a great job of putting paid to that part of the conversation. A guy like me who is steeped in cultural forms much older than the ones Rowan cites is perhaps even more inclined to say that authorship is always a kind of polite fiction and, in the case of attempts like mine, to connect games to culture heritage, indeed a pernicious fiction.<\/p>\n

Thank goodness we don\u2019t have to do that debate in this post, though, because I think we can get beyond that part of the conversation and into what really makes the Mass Effect 3<\/em> controversy if not different from older such controversies than at least interesting in a new way: the way the ruleset and mechanics of the Mass Effect<\/em> series have themselves<\/strong> figured into the controversy. This isn\u2019t the equivalent of reader outcry at Dickens ending Great Expectations<\/em> sadly; this is the equivalent of Dickens allowing readers to choose Pip\u2019s actions after every number of All the Year Round<\/em> and then ending the story without consulting them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not about authorship, that is: it\u2019s about rulesets, and the choices they allow. What we have in the Mass Effect<\/em> controversy is an unprecedented chance to delineate the difference between various kinds of practomimetic rulesets–the chance to ask more interesting questions. How is the fan-participation in this discourse different from that in Rowan\u2019s other examples? Even more interestingly: How does that participation relate to fans\u2019 feelings about the choices they made in the three Mass Effect<\/em> games?<\/p>\n

Even more interestingly for me, but perhaps not for everyone: How does that participation begin to re-awaken the kind of fan-participation we see in Odysseus\u2019 relationship to Demodocus<\/a>, or the bards\u2019 relation to the Choice of Achilles<\/a>?<\/p>\n

If, as Victoria Szabo has suggested<\/a>, this thing we sometimes wince at calling \u201cdigital humanities\u201d is the application of digital methods to the traditional objects of humanistic study, in the Mass Effect 3<\/em> controversy we have a tremendous and unexpected chance to do digital humanities. We can use digital game-culture to study the discourses with which humanists are more familiar–as long as we remember the rules of the text. In my next post I want to try to do just that, by beginning to expand my reading of player-performances (including fan-outrage) as expressions of the Mass Effect<\/em> ruleset with regard to what I regard as the two distinctive features of that ruleset: multiculturalism and irrevocability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two weeks have passed since the CEO of BioWare attempted to quiet the fans of Mass Effect with an announcement that the Mass Effect 3 development team would be working on a modification to the game\u2019s ending. The announcement was gracious, and whether because internet rage tends to die downContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-2681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2681"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2685,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2681\/revisions\/2685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2681"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}