{"id":2926,"date":"2012-05-31T11:00:58","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2926"},"modified":"2012-07-25T07:48:24","modified_gmt":"2012-07-25T11:48:24","slug":"irrevocability-and-meaning-in-mass-effect-rules-of-the-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2926","title":{"rendered":"Irrevocability and meaning in Mass Effect (rules of the text 9)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The very large differences in the ways players of Mass Effect<\/em> have viewed the way choice works in the trilogy deserve attention from a practomimetic perspective first because they represent critical perspectives worth refining. Second, and more importantly, however, those differences demand attention because of their affective nature, in light of what I would call the fundamental relationship in practomime between form and affect.<\/p>\n

If we take on board the notion that performances within rulesets, making rulesets for new performances, form the essence of something like what I’m calling the great chain of practomime<\/a>, then we must view players’ individual performances both formally (these are the choices the player makes) and affectively (this is how the player feels about those choices), because the affective dimension gives us access to an essential element of practomime that would be unavailable through formal criticism: the contribution of the player’s subjectivity to the development of his or her performance on the one hand and the practomimetic ruleset itself on the other.<\/p>\n

To that end I want to look at three posts about the ending, by Sparky Clarkson<\/a>, Kate Cox<\/a>, and David Carlton<\/a>, that provide a way into the problem of irrevocability precisely in the different manners in which each of them deals both in a formal and in an affective way with the parts of the ruleset of Mass Effect that enforce that irrevocability.<\/p>\n

Compare the following generally representative excerpts:<\/p>\n

Clarkson:<\/p>\n

The end of ME 3 disregards the player\u2019s choices on both galactic and personal scales. In contrast to the exquisite, if occasionally opaque, ways the player\u2019s decisions dictated the outcome of Shepard\u2019s suicide mission in Mass Effect 2<\/em>, ME 3\u2032s finale is essentially a railroad. Provided a player has gathered enough military force, all three possibilities for dealing with the series-long villains, the Reapers, are available. The player can opt to control them, destroy them, or join with them in an organic-AI synthesis of some kind. The choice only determines the primary color and some other minor details of an ensuing cutscene. This denies the player any meaningful feedback about this decision, and the game\u2019s refusal to elaborate in any serious way on what happens to the galaxy undercuts the importance of choices made in this and previous ME games.<\/p>\n

Cox:<\/p>\n

Perhaps Mass Effect 3<\/em> really is a bleak endorsement of a joyless philosophy. In an argument between fate and free will, we are left with the reasonably free will of the player against the stark and unforgiving fate handed out by the game’s designers. And yet, to argue that Shepard’s choices cease to matter, to argue that the player’s input ceases to matter, seems to miss the point not just of the game but of existence itself.<\/p>\n

Carlton:<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t just a redirection of the game\u2019s theme: the mysticism that\u2019s always been present in the game (in the name Shepard!) erupts. It\u2019s always been a series about salvation, but one that involved heroism of a fairly banal adolescent game nature. But the recurring nature of the Reapers harkens back to the eternal recurrence of another one of my favorite adolescent game series, namely Zelda; to Nietzsche, that favorite author among a certain type of adolescents (of people who haven\u2019t yet escaped from adolescence, no matter their age; and yes, part of me is in this group); but also to Buddhist notions of recurrence of ages.<\/p>\n

That recurrence is, I think, more of a H\u012bnay\u0101na Buddhist theme; I see Mass Effect 3<\/em> as putting a Mah\u0101y\u0101na spin on it, with its insistence on the possibility of breaking the cycle of recurrence for all sentient beings. Which leads to the ending; though I enjoyed reading and respect both points of view, I\u2019ll side with Kate Cox over Sparky Clarkson and end up satisfied, pleased, impressed by the ending.<\/p>\n

The most passionate of the voices, Clarkson’s, declares that choice is meaningless in the end because the lack of variation in the ending of Mass Effect 3<\/em> fails to reflect the promises BioWare made explicitly about the meaning of choice in the trilogy on the one hand, and, on the other, the implicit promises made by the ruleset itself that for example saving the Geth would, in fact, save the Geth. Clarkson’s negative reaction is thus specifically not to the irrevocability of choices like saving the Geth but to his perception that the ruleset in fact fails<\/strong> to make that choice irrevocable.<\/p>\n

Cox and Carlton both see precisely that dynamic as the game’s insisting on a more adult way of looking at the possibilities of human existence; for them, the failure of irrevocability signifies the deeper irrevocability of an eternal order.<\/p>\n

The critique Plato makes of homeric epic<\/a> as a guide for running a culture may be seen from one perspective as a critique of the ability of a system run along the lines of homeric practomime to provide rewards that matter–irrevocable rewards. The honors of the cave-culture game<\/a> are trash that Plato’s Socrates explicilty and ironically likens to honors among the dead in the underworld–the kind that Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather be the lowliest living man than have.<\/p>\n

Clarkson’s criticism of Mass Effect<\/em>‘s ending to my mind is that it provides precisely this level of reward–the kind that’s not worth having–precisely because of the way the game’s ruleset over-rides them, and imposes its own irrevocability.<\/p>\n

I want to suggest that this criticism represents an analysis of a failure of irrevocability, but that the fact of the criticism’s arising, and of its cogency, is an indication of the accomplishment of Mass Effect<\/em>, and of the nature of irrevocability as a determiner of the ruleset as we have it. On the other hand, praise of the way the trilogy ends reflects the success of precisely the same dynamic–that the role of irrevocability in the practomime creates a meaning-effect players can take with them.<\/p>\n

Irrevocability, simply put, is the tendency of performance decisions in a practomime to effect a permanent alteration of the ruleset of the practomime. As such, it stands in a symbiotic but vexed relationship with the constraints of the ruleset themselves, because those constraints have themselves been encoded irrevocably into the ruleset by ruleset’s designers. It’s the perceived conflict between the two that, if Clarkson’s post is anything to go by, has displeased some number of players: their irrevocable choices have been over-ridden by the irrevocable choices of the designers.<\/p>\n

In Platonic terms, the fundamental choices of Mass Effect<\/em> have been shown to be the rewards of the cave rather than the rewards of the sunlit world–but that revelation is then put by the game in the context of the potentially greater rewards to be had through that exact recognition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The very large differences in the ways players of Mass Effect have viewed the way choice works in the trilogy deserve attention from a practomimetic perspective first because they represent critical perspectives worth refining. Second, and more importantly, however, those differences demand attention because of their affective nature, in lightContinue 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":[188,101,16],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-2926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-mass-effect","tag-plato","tag-practomime"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926","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=2926"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3063,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions\/3063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}