Mass Effecting: Branching Dialogue

50 is such a nice number. The weeks have rolled by, and despite the occasional pang of guilt about neglecting this blog, the fact I left it on such a nice round number of posts (with such a strong piece about a subject I love at the top) has definitely eased my conscience on the matter. I have excuses, sure, water-logged carpets and corrupted CD drives, but mostly I've just been playing games instead of writing about them. In particular, I was consumed for nearly a month when I finally decided it was time to sit down with the Mass Effect series and see what all the fuss was about.

Me, ME and ME2: Long-term commitments
Being extremely late to Bioware's landmark RPG party I was able to play Mass Effect 1 and 2 (henceforth awkwardly acronym-ed as “ME1” and “ME2” ) back to back. It's doubtlessly a fantastic series, providing one of the most enthralling and rich universes (well, galaxies) I've seen in a game. I found myself completely immersed in the characters and choices, largely thanks to the tremendous feeling of freedom, responsibility and reputation that comes from being given your own ship and crew and having space laid open before you for exploration. The second installment was far more streamlined than the first, more traditionally “game-like” but eventually I grew to appreciate the extra polish and presentation it enjoyed over the first. The series' defining strength doesn't lie in it's presentation or vibrant characterization though, nor it's beautiful visuals, quality soundtrack, hybrid gameplay, or even in it's familiar yet fresh art direction and design; it sets itself apart by offering a series where for the first time your decisions echo into not just the games future, but yours as well.


For a lot of good reasons, it's rare enough that player choices can effect a game in a meaningful way; I wrote an article about just that back in the original TLDR before IGN butchered it into oblivion, but say even if a game managed to be flexible enough to let a player decide who lives and who dies, the decision is in nature temporary, the consequences fleeting. Even if the game was to last 20-40 hours, the consequences will never outreach that contained time period, they are bottled inside the script of that game. If I was to lose a character in ME1 or 2 however, they would still be dead in the third installment. ME3 will not be released for many months yet. That is MY future, the impact of my choices have the potential to over-spill the bottleneck of the game I am playing to situations I'd be dealing with months from then; which led me to genuinely give pause when confronted with the big issues. Future Steve would be the one dealing with the ramifications of my present actions, unpredictable ripples of chance that could come back to aid or haunt me later.

Unfortunately, it was relatively rare for ME1 or 2 to present situations that were truly “grey” in nature. Mass Effect fans can likely guess at the situations I refer to, but for the most part the game is divided into opportunities to be the good guy; chivalrous and honorable, or the bad guy; callous and aggressive. It was these disappointments that planted a desire in me to write this blog entry; because I think it's in all of us who harbor a design side to analyze the weaknesses in games that we play, even shining success stories like Mass Effect. Certainty for designers it's important to note what games do wrong as much as what they did right, whether great or terrible.


Shades of Grey: Ambiguous to the Touch
“Karma” systems were all the rage in the noughties; Lionhead led the charge with Fable and the aptly named Black and White; and while it's easier for designers (and on a philosophical level, people) to polarize life into black and white, good and bad, we all know real life is rarely so simple. We don't even prefer our fiction to be that simple. Audiences don't want easy answers and clean-cut characters, the conflicted and flawed will always be more compelling, more affecting. Speaking as a gamer myself, I want the hard choices, I want to have to dig a bit deeper to come up with my answer, and in the best of times I want to be unsure I made the right choice for a while thereafter. Unfortunately this classical polarization of choice has found it's way into the majority of ME1 and 2; worse still most conversations are divided into three options which are deliberately arranged top to bottom as “good” “neutral” “bad”. It is nice to be involved in aspects of the story that would usually be covered in cutscenes, but with turning conversation into interaction comes a desire to want to pour some of yourself into the character. The arrangement of replies in degrees of asshole-ery are all well and good for those roleplaying as Superman/The Punisher, but for gamers who want to “be themselves”, it's frustrating the options are generally not what you would like to say, but various ways to say the same thing.


Shepard himself is not quite the empty vessel you'd expect him to be, he seems to be stood at the needlepoint of a triangle, itching for you to push him towards being a clear hero or insensitive anti-hero. And seemingly he favors the latter. Mass Effect's dialogue options don't quite reflect the exact words Shep will choose, merely a condensed phrase intended to imply the thrust of the response. This would be well and good, except that the mood and tone of a response are everything during conversation, and Shepard has a tendency to take sincere liberties with the choices he is given. On one occasion I dared choose from the “bad” side of the spectrum, a seemingly innocuous warning of “you shouldn't have lied”. Shepard grabs the man by the neck and holds him off the ground, screaming “LYING IS WRONG!” in his face. Give him enough rope and Shepard would hang everyone in the room.


Master Conversationalist: Stats Versus Tactics
Most karma-based games make the mistake of reducing the “good” points when the “bad” points are rewarded, meaning that players showing kindness to friends and inflicting ruthless horrors on their enemies drag their spirit-level of a personality to a middling zero. Usually costing them the handsome rewards of being a shining white knight or grisly dark lord in the process. One of Bioware's more subtle masterstrokes with Mass Effect was keeping Paragon (good) and Renegade (bad) points separate from each other, so that a player could amass a fine collection of both and feel free to treat each situation on it's own merits without losing out too much in the long term. As an extra, players could unlock “charm” and “intimidation” options, and upgrade these personality traits as stats, alongside the usual experience bars like defense and pistol accuracy. Towards the end of the game though, these stats unlock new dialogue options glowing in blue or red alongside the good-bad gauge. Essentially, these options “win” at any conversation. Max charm or intimidation is like god mode for conversations, and as any gamer who has played Grand Theft Auto with infinite health and all weapons knows, god mode gets boring. It completely tore the challenge and tension out of the important conversations; those who have heard me talk of God of War before know how I loathe an “I win” button.


Ultimately I think what I wanted was the ability to tackle conversations intellectually, for them to demand mental acuity and tact the same way shoot-outs demand reflexes and tactical choice. I want talking my way out of a hostage situation to ask as much of me as landing a headshot on a moving target. There were many times in the ME series where I found myself in a very delicate situation that I felt might ask sincere thought and engagement on my part. These included speaking at a trial, talking down a suicidal victim, and chatting up my attractive lieutenant who is modeled after the girl out of Chuck. All these things turned out to be painting by the numbers, and all the extra tact I poured into the options I chose and the order I chose them, were irrelevant. The game doesn't ask much of you at all, in fact at the end of the game you can't talk to the female characters without having the option to bed them or tell them they are ugly.

Turning conversation into gameplay requires it to be considered in terms of interaction, reward and challenge the same as combat or stealth or platforming. It's thanks to my experiences with Mass Effect that I have started to see it this way, rather as merely an aspect of the ongoing “interactive narrative” debate. The potency of controlling your character within conversation goes beyond a chance to steer the story, it's in itself an activity that players can become engaged and involved in. The next step will be working out how to translate such a complex thing into a system within a game, but I think this could be a rich and untapped new element in games design, which alike combat or stealth or platforming, can be approached and interpreted into mechanics in many different ways.

• Thanks for reading!
• I had to write this one to get it out of my system.
  
• Whatever, **** you guys.

Now if you excuse me, I'm in the middle of some calibrations.
-Steve