- A modest proposal for viewing literary texts as rulesets, and for making game studies beneficial to the publick
- The rules of song and the rules of myth: playing with dragons and other mythohistorical archetypes
- Transmedia and tabletops
- Performances and operations
- A galactic ruleset under siege: the Mass Effect 3 controversy
- Detour to the Magic Kingdom
- Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 1
- Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 2
- Irrevocability and meaning in Mass Effect
- The Rules of the Text
Showing posts with label Mass Effect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mass Effect. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
The Rules of the Text series, at Play the Past
This post is an index to my posts in the Rules of the Text series, at Play the Past. I'm starting to think of my post-series as books; I invite you to do the same, if you find it helpful.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
First thoughts on “EMS” (“Effective Military Strength”) in Mass Effect 3
Here begin the spoilerish posts. If you haven’t finished yet, I sincerely hope you’ll come back once you have. I’m hopeful that we have in Mass Effect material for many years of analysis, that in its scale and the way that scale exposes important features of its ruleset (in which, as is my wont, I include what’s generally called its “content”) these games will stand as a landmark if not as a classic. The only negative outcome of the incredible ferment of discussion about the ending of the trilogy over the past few weeks would be if the dispute were a nine days’ wonder.The thing that struck me most forcefully as I watched the credits roll had nothing at all, on the surface of it, to do with the strange and apparently inconsistent events of the ending, with their echoes of so many well-known sci-fi (non-)resolutions (The Matrix is the one that I felt the strongest resonance with, but I could name many, many more). What struck me was that I knew instantly that in some way I had not had the range of choices at the end that I could have had, and that this constraint (this rule, or rather this mechanic) was operative because I had not played enough multiplayer recently enough.
Such tedium to describe the bizarre system of Galactic Readiness. It comes down to BioWare breaking the apparent boundaries of the gamespace (also known as Huizinga’s Magic Circle and as the possibility space), papering that rupture over with the veneer of a galactic war, and laughing all the way to the bank as players purchase gear for their multiplayer characters on the plan of Wizards of the Coast’s brilliant Magic: The Gathering model, where the player (or rather, consumer, or perhaps player-consumer, in this case) gets the wonderful little frisson so well known to anyone who’s entered a casino, of pulling the slot-machine lever to see if this time s/he’s got a piece of gear worth having.
If you play enough multiplayer, in your single-player story you do not suffer a crippling weakening of your Effective Military Strength, and narrative possibilities are. . . different. I say “different” where most players would undoubtedly say “worse”: people (characters) die, when you don’t play multiplayer. More, your BIG CHOICES are fewer. I had two of the three possible, and when I had made my choice the final cinematic indicated pretty clearly that my failure to play multiplayer had cost Liara, my consort, her life.
You can point to other examples of important choices in other games, but I defy you to produce anything that truly compares, above all when it occurs at the end of 120 hours of practomime.
It’s also in my view consonant with the thematics of the narrative ruleset of Mass Effect in an absolutely extraordinary way. I’ll explore this further as time goes by and my thoughts unfold, but it’s difficult to escape the impression that BioWare is here in the role of the Reapers, especially if we subscribe to Indoctrination Theory: we can’t tell whether our choices mean anything, we consumer husks.
Such tedium to describe the bizarre system of Galactic Readiness. It comes down to BioWare breaking the apparent boundaries of the gamespace (also known as Huizinga’s Magic Circle and as the possibility space), papering that rupture over with the veneer of a galactic war, and laughing all the way to the bank as players purchase gear for their multiplayer characters on the plan of Wizards of the Coast’s brilliant Magic: The Gathering model, where the player (or rather, consumer, or perhaps player-consumer, in this case) gets the wonderful little frisson so well known to anyone who’s entered a casino, of pulling the slot-machine lever to see if this time s/he’s got a piece of gear worth having.
If you play enough multiplayer, in your single-player story you do not suffer a crippling weakening of your Effective Military Strength, and narrative possibilities are. . . different. I say “different” where most players would undoubtedly say “worse”: people (characters) die, when you don’t play multiplayer. More, your BIG CHOICES are fewer. I had two of the three possible, and when I had made my choice the final cinematic indicated pretty clearly that my failure to play multiplayer had cost Liara, my consort, her life.
You can point to other examples of important choices in other games, but I defy you to produce anything that truly compares, above all when it occurs at the end of 120 hours of practomime.
It’s also in my view consonant with the thematics of the narrative ruleset of Mass Effect in an absolutely extraordinary way. I’ll explore this further as time goes by and my thoughts unfold, but it’s difficult to escape the impression that BioWare is here in the role of the Reapers, especially if we subscribe to Indoctrination Theory: we can’t tell whether our choices mean anything, we consumer husks.
consummātum, et nōn consummātum, est (Mass Effect)
I finished it (Mass Effect 3). The controversy over the ending forced it upon me, since I was feeling less and less qualified to discuss the game as more and more people were having discussions about it in which I couldn't participate. I vow to return to my variegated playthroughs, but for the information of anyone who was following those posts, I finished on Perfect Paragon, but had to cut corners to reach the end, which is in itself a very interesting opportunity for future analysis.
The ending is in my opinion of mixed quality, and my guess is that it's the quality problems that have driven much of the player-protest. The true difficulty is in my opinion that so much of Mass Effect is so good, so far beyond anything we've played before, that the bits that are run-of-the-mill RPG fare and run-of-the-mill sci-fi fare really hurt.
Ending this thing in a way that lives up to the heights to which Mass Effect has soared, especially on the very first try and in the development situation in which the Mass Effect 3 team must have found themselves, was almost certainly an impossible task. Thank goodness they're getting another shot. There are things they won't be able to fix, of course, like the sheer number of times you're told that "This is it," which eventually made me feel like some terrible Reaper-writer was shooting a red ray of exposition into my skull. But I can certainly see how some new cinematics would make a big difference.
The quality issue is obscuring, however, more interesting problems of choice and irrevocability. To those I shall return.
The ending is in my opinion of mixed quality, and my guess is that it's the quality problems that have driven much of the player-protest. The true difficulty is in my opinion that so much of Mass Effect is so good, so far beyond anything we've played before, that the bits that are run-of-the-mill RPG fare and run-of-the-mill sci-fi fare really hurt.
Ending this thing in a way that lives up to the heights to which Mass Effect has soared, especially on the very first try and in the development situation in which the Mass Effect 3 team must have found themselves, was almost certainly an impossible task. Thank goodness they're getting another shot. There are things they won't be able to fix, of course, like the sheer number of times you're told that "This is it," which eventually made me feel like some terrible Reaper-writer was shooting a red ray of exposition into my skull. But I can certainly see how some new cinematics would make a big difference.
The quality issue is obscuring, however, more interesting problems of choice and irrevocability. To those I shall return.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Fresh Renegade for VGHVI, 15 March: plan
To enliven the conversation tonight in our VGHVI playversation about Mass Effect 1 and 2, I'm going to start a new renegade, as a kind of prequel to Hasty's career, which actually began only in ME2. But I'm going to use the Genesis DLC, at least as an opening gambit, because I've been fascinated by the idea of that sort of performance materials since I heard about.
So: the plan is to create a Fresh Renegade, who might be a plausible antecedent for Hasty, and see if the performance process reveals to me anything about the transhistorical nature of the epic hero, always recreated at the same time afresh and as a variation on his ancient self.
So: the plan is to create a Fresh Renegade, who might be a plausible antecedent for Hasty, and see if the performance process reveals to me anything about the transhistorical nature of the epic hero, always recreated at the same time afresh and as a variation on his ancient self.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Pragmatic Paragon, 14 March: ABOR
"ABOR" stands for After-Bardic-Occasion Report. It's an assignment I use in my (Gaming) Homer course; it seems to get modern bards like my students to the heart of the performative side of digital practomime pretty directly. Here's mine for today's session.
Pragmatic Paragon really does feel like he’s my real character, because especially of his face, which I had to reconstruct due to the face importing glitch; Perfect Paragon is based on the same character, ultimately, from ME1, as this pragmatist, but I went with the default face at the start of ME3 when hit with the import glitch on Perfect's creation.
Spent some time with the new search and recover mechanic, and actually like it--the “real first” playthrough thing has merit; just as being lost on Hasty Renegade destroyed my appreciation of the landscape, having to figure out the changes in the exploration system on Hasty destroyed my engagement, and thus any pleasure in my performance, of those initial fumblings through the galaxy-map. Now on Pragmatic, though, it feels, well, pragmatic to recover some salvage.
ME3's search and recover mechanic is more straightforward than mining in ME2, which I grew to love but which was very time-consuming. The changes have an upside and a downside, I think (I miss the way my controller shook when I hit a rich vein), but the basic mechanic is the same, and something well worth thinking about especially in relation to my character-performances.
I took this note: cannot figure out the loadout screen for the life of me; then I put in some time and figured it out. Either it's horrendously-designed, or I'm getting old, but I even eventually was able to master the weight mechanic, which gave me a small "aha" moment at the very least about the fact that I had gone from a spammer of Singularity to a waiter-for-Singularity-to-recharge.
A final verdict for now on "real first" performances--that is, second performances in which you get things right for the first time: all in all, there is some value in encountering performance materials for the actually first time, just as there is some value in sight-reading music--or sight-reading homeric Greek, for that matter.
The virtuosic peformances that nourish our souls, though, always come later.
And then there's Garrus being dead, through my obtuseness, in this career. “Where would Garrus have been?” asks Liara. “Right in the thick of it,” Pragmatic responds. Irrevocability. Does this moment exist this way if there are no performance materials where Garrus is alive? Not a chance.
Topics for analysis suggested by this session's peformance:
Pragmatic Paragon really does feel like he’s my real character, because especially of his face, which I had to reconstruct due to the face importing glitch; Perfect Paragon is based on the same character, ultimately, from ME1, as this pragmatist, but I went with the default face at the start of ME3 when hit with the import glitch on Perfect's creation.
Spent some time with the new search and recover mechanic, and actually like it--the “real first” playthrough thing has merit; just as being lost on Hasty Renegade destroyed my appreciation of the landscape, having to figure out the changes in the exploration system on Hasty destroyed my engagement, and thus any pleasure in my performance, of those initial fumblings through the galaxy-map. Now on Pragmatic, though, it feels, well, pragmatic to recover some salvage.
ME3's search and recover mechanic is more straightforward than mining in ME2, which I grew to love but which was very time-consuming. The changes have an upside and a downside, I think (I miss the way my controller shook when I hit a rich vein), but the basic mechanic is the same, and something well worth thinking about especially in relation to my character-performances.
I took this note: cannot figure out the loadout screen for the life of me; then I put in some time and figured it out. Either it's horrendously-designed, or I'm getting old, but I even eventually was able to master the weight mechanic, which gave me a small "aha" moment at the very least about the fact that I had gone from a spammer of Singularity to a waiter-for-Singularity-to-recharge.
A final verdict for now on "real first" performances--that is, second performances in which you get things right for the first time: all in all, there is some value in encountering performance materials for the actually first time, just as there is some value in sight-reading music--or sight-reading homeric Greek, for that matter.
The virtuosic peformances that nourish our souls, though, always come later.
And then there's Garrus being dead, through my obtuseness, in this career. “Where would Garrus have been?” asks Liara. “Right in the thick of it,” Pragmatic responds. Irrevocability. Does this moment exist this way if there are no performance materials where Garrus is alive? Not a chance.
Topics for analysis suggested by this session's peformance:
- Narrative combat difficulty: most importantly, I think the friendly critics of this approach don't understand how bad I am at combat. Perhaps a very good example of the absolute essentiality of peformance in making rulesets legible--or, to put it another way, how it's the instanced performance of the player that we can and should read, rather than the ruleset itself.
- Absence of dead characters: having Garrus just not be there, in a place where he "should" have been there, is really very jarring. I need to unpack that "should."
- Different faces on my paragons: in what way does it matter what my character looks like, when that appearance mechanic is so completely isolated from the rest of the mechanics of the practomime? Is there a sense in which I myself, the player, constitute a link in the game's ruleset between the appearance mechanic and the rest of the ruleset?
Pragmatic Paragon, 14 March: planning
My plan for today's session: take the Pragmatic Paragon in where the Hasty Renegade went yesterday; don't get lost this time; see whether not getting lost makes me feel more heroic.
Pre-session question: what is the importance of the second playthrough? Is there a sense in which a second playthrough is actually somehow a "real" first playthrough? Focus for that question: the issue of getting lost. Because I spent so much time being lost in my Hasty Renegade session last night, it feels like today's Pragmatic Paragon session will be my "real" introduction to the performance materials.
Is there then a "rehearsal" dynamic at work in practomime that I haven't noticed yet?
Pre-session question: what is the importance of the second playthrough? Is there a sense in which a second playthrough is actually somehow a "real" first playthrough? Focus for that question: the issue of getting lost. Because I spent so much time being lost in my Hasty Renegade session last night, it feels like today's Pragmatic Paragon session will be my "real" introduction to the performance materials.
Is there then a "rehearsal" dynamic at work in practomime that I haven't noticed yet?
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The triumphs and sorrows of Hasty Renegade
I always forget that whatever career I play first, the dominant feeling of much of that career will be frustration, as I run around trying to figure out where the next objective is. Thus, as I moved towards the completion of an important diplomatic cum military mission to rescue a Turian VIP, I spent ten minutes running in circles shouting "Why don't I have a map? Why don't I have a map?"
I did, thankfully, arrive in the nick of time.
One thing I notice looking at the "War Situation" through my Renegade's eyes; I feel real despair based on the amount of time it will take to build the resources, and the learning curve involved in figuring out how to do so. Along with that feeling comes the idea that it's well to encounter these odds with this character: she's tough enough to take it, and tough enough even to lose. I have the feeling that I wouldn't want to let my Paragons try to find their ways through this maze of mechanics.
It's this interference of player concerns and performative concerns, of course, that I'm trying to analyze. I take my inspiration from the way the bards of Iliad and Odyssey (particularly the latter) let their own concerns as bards shape their tellings of the stories of their heroes. Immersion is nice, but if we want to understand how it works, we have to see it in the context of performances by players who live outside the world into which their performances immerse them; pretending that there's some, I don't know, "Magic Circle" that prevents my frustrating at not having a map from mattering within the gamespace would be silly.
I did, thankfully, arrive in the nick of time.
One thing I notice looking at the "War Situation" through my Renegade's eyes; I feel real despair based on the amount of time it will take to build the resources, and the learning curve involved in figuring out how to do so. Along with that feeling comes the idea that it's well to encounter these odds with this character: she's tough enough to take it, and tough enough even to lose. I have the feeling that I wouldn't want to let my Paragons try to find their ways through this maze of mechanics.
It's this interference of player concerns and performative concerns, of course, that I'm trying to analyze. I take my inspiration from the way the bards of Iliad and Odyssey (particularly the latter) let their own concerns as bards shape their tellings of the stories of their heroes. Immersion is nice, but if we want to understand how it works, we have to see it in the context of performances by players who live outside the world into which their performances immerse them; pretending that there's some, I don't know, "Magic Circle" that prevents my frustrating at not having a map from mattering within the gamespace would be silly.
The sieve of reflection
As this new way to blog about living epic emerges, one thing that seems to make sense is to intersperse occasional reflective posts that will function as a sort of intellectual sieve, and help figure out what if anything from from the past day or so of play is worth keeping around for analysis.
Some candidates:
Some candidates:
- Hasty Renegade has always had a very interesting relationship with Garrus, and so seeing him alive last night (I was truly convinced that he was one of the four I'd lost in this career) was a really narratively significant moment, but in a way that took me out of the diegetic situation, since Hasty Renegade herself obviously couldn't have forgotten that Garrus was alive. In an ideal medium, perhaps, it would be possible for me to play in such a way that my surprise at seeing Garrus somehow did get communicated into my performance, but that wouldn't change the bifurcation of performance and player--the reason this moment was interesting and potentially enlightening for my understanding of my performance and of who I am becoming as a result of it was that my extra-performative surprise resonated with the feeling I've always attributed to Hasty Renegade of professional admiration of Garrus from a distance, tempered with a healthy dose of rivalry. Since they're both snipers, they very rarely go on missions together, and when Hasty Renegade explored Garrus' dialogue tree in Mass Effect 2 I was conscious of reacting with a mixture of sympathy and renegade-ish disdain for his letting his emotions get the better of him no matter how much he pretended not to be. This dynamic is potentially interesting in the way it provides a perspective on interaction between inside the story and outside the story through player-performance.
- "Nonrepresentative" keeps bubbling to the top of my mind. My question is "Nonrepresentative of what?" My preliminary answer "the tradition." For me at least this seems to be the first direct evidence of communication of a tradition that in the days of the bards was associated above all with two things: professionalism, and the Muses. To tell me that my Mass Effect 3 performance is nonrepresentative is to tell me that I lack a relation to some font of game-performance inspiration. Many blog-posts in that vein, I think, to come.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Planning my performances
Career 3 ("Perfect Paragon") is going to be my cautious/highly-elaborated career. I'll take every assignment, search every bit of space that seems to have a reasonable likelihood of yielding materiel to help the cause.
Career 1 ("Hasty Renegade") is going to be my "How much can I salvage?" career. I'll go straight for the jugular and continue her tradition of cutting corners in the interest of getting results.
Career 2 ("Pragmatic Paragon") is going to be the career I try to play for verisimilitude. I'll attempt to react quickly, in accordance with my ideas of what I myself would do, in the interest of trying to find my "real" relationship to the character, outside of the kind of analysis I want to try to do on 1 and 3, and more importantly among the careers.
That said, it probably makes sense to play out career 2 before I do the more involved 3 and 1. Right now, I'm in Perfect Paragon, cautiously exploring the galaxy map and considering the Cerberus outpost Admiral Hackett has advised my PC to deal with. I'll probably see if I can take care of that, then switch to Pragmatic Paragon.
I'm still on Narrative combat.
Career 1 ("Hasty Renegade") is going to be my "How much can I salvage?" career. I'll go straight for the jugular and continue her tradition of cutting corners in the interest of getting results.
Career 2 ("Pragmatic Paragon") is going to be the career I try to play for verisimilitude. I'll attempt to react quickly, in accordance with my ideas of what I myself would do, in the interest of trying to find my "real" relationship to the character, outside of the kind of analysis I want to try to do on 1 and 3, and more importantly among the careers.
That said, it probably makes sense to play out career 2 before I do the more involved 3 and 1. Right now, I'm in Perfect Paragon, cautiously exploring the galaxy map and considering the Cerberus outpost Admiral Hackett has advised my PC to deal with. I'll probably see if I can take care of that, then switch to Pragmatic Paragon.
I'm still on Narrative combat.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
"A nonrepresentative Mass Effect experience"
Those are the words with which Mass Effect 3's description of "Narrative" difficulty closes, in the game's options-menu.
When one of my students, already tens of hours into the game on Thursday (when I was perhaps an hour in on career paths 1 and 2), told me about the two "Narrative" settings--which I hadn't seen, and hadn't read about since I have such a hard time distinguishing hype from actual news that I no longer read about games ahead of time unless (see HALO) I'm critically invested in the hype itself--I wanted to cancel class and drive home instantly to set my game on these settings and see how it made me feel.
I still haven't used the "No Decisions" dialogue option, located under a section of Options labelled "Narrative," which, if I understand correctly, turns conversations into cutscenes, but I played for an hour yesterday with the "Narrative" combat option.
I loved it. When a homeric bard sang a battle-lay, the spears went straight through the warriors' hearts, unless the battle were a very distinctive one--you know, a boss-fight. The bards knew that their practomimes made their audiences feel more heroic that way, just as makers of westerns and war-movies know that enemies always die quickly.
I suspect, by the same token, that I'll hate "No Decisions" dialogue, which, at least according to my initial reaction to the idea of the mechanic, would have the opposite effect on my feeling about the performance-materials of the game. I plan to save one of my careers, turn that option on today for half an hour or so, then load the save and say goodbye to "No Decisions" dialogue forever. I can't imagine that BioWare isn't tracking how many people are using which options, so I'll be very curious as to whether we either hear anything about the statistics or, maybe more importantly, "No Decisions" dialogue returns in future games.
"Narrative" combat is not new; both BioWare and Bethesda games have always had ways to make things easier on older players' aging reflexes. What is new is calling the lowest setting "Narrative," and characterizing that setting as "nonrepresentative." I can't wait to unpack this mechanic further, but one wonders whether the first bard to sing about Achilles' withdrawal from battle, and the first bard to sing about Odysseus lying, cheating, and stealing his way home, were similarly characterized as "nonrepresentative."
When one of my students, already tens of hours into the game on Thursday (when I was perhaps an hour in on career paths 1 and 2), told me about the two "Narrative" settings--which I hadn't seen, and hadn't read about since I have such a hard time distinguishing hype from actual news that I no longer read about games ahead of time unless (see HALO) I'm critically invested in the hype itself--I wanted to cancel class and drive home instantly to set my game on these settings and see how it made me feel.
I still haven't used the "No Decisions" dialogue option, located under a section of Options labelled "Narrative," which, if I understand correctly, turns conversations into cutscenes, but I played for an hour yesterday with the "Narrative" combat option.
I loved it. When a homeric bard sang a battle-lay, the spears went straight through the warriors' hearts, unless the battle were a very distinctive one--you know, a boss-fight. The bards knew that their practomimes made their audiences feel more heroic that way, just as makers of westerns and war-movies know that enemies always die quickly.
I suspect, by the same token, that I'll hate "No Decisions" dialogue, which, at least according to my initial reaction to the idea of the mechanic, would have the opposite effect on my feeling about the performance-materials of the game. I plan to save one of my careers, turn that option on today for half an hour or so, then load the save and say goodbye to "No Decisions" dialogue forever. I can't imagine that BioWare isn't tracking how many people are using which options, so I'll be very curious as to whether we either hear anything about the statistics or, maybe more importantly, "No Decisions" dialogue returns in future games.
"Narrative" combat is not new; both BioWare and Bethesda games have always had ways to make things easier on older players' aging reflexes. What is new is calling the lowest setting "Narrative," and characterizing that setting as "nonrepresentative." I can't wait to unpack this mechanic further, but one wonders whether the first bard to sing about Achilles' withdrawal from battle, and the first bard to sing about Odysseus lying, cheating, and stealing his way home, were similarly characterized as "nonrepresentative."
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Why I want to trace these Mass Effect careers
Here's what I'm most interested in. To what extent does one career actually make my performance either 1) substantively different (by "substantively" I mean different in what gets coded into a save file) or 2) emotionally different--that is, in the way it feels to me--in another career, and why, and how? I can already see that an irrevocable decision made in one career makes it feel very different to make a different choice in another career, even with something as simple as the Normandy's surgeon.
I suppose that in the back of my mind there's a looming question of a nearly odious nature: with Mass Effect 3, has BioWare created a work unlike any previous work of art in the combination of the plasticity of its performance materials and the irrevocability of the most important choices it affords?
I suppose that in the back of my mind there's a looming question of a nearly odious nature: with Mass Effect 3, has BioWare created a work unlike any previous work of art in the combination of the plasticity of its performance materials and the irrevocability of the most important choices it affords?
Mass Effect career 3 choices
I don't know if this will be valuable even to me, but why not?
- "Acquired war asset" Diana Allers (journalist)
- Went to hospital before council to see Ashley (couldn't even bear not to do this on my Renegade; on that career it's Kaiden, not Ashley, who's alive, and I'm considering romancing him)
- Saw Dr. Chakwas alive (dead on my other careers, I think) in the hospital. Took her as Normandy's surgeon. Can't deny that that felt awesome. In particular, it felt awesome precisely because Chakwas is dead in my other careers, and that I didn't take a surgeon at all in career 2.
- Thinking I may start a fourth career to see what the default for the non-player of the first two games is like.
- Went into Bailey's office before council and saw my old journalist nemesis. Saul Tigh as Bailey is something I'd love to spend some time thinking about.
- Discovered, and made extensive use of, the X button to get through long cutscenes.
- Did not use Renegade power on journalist nemesis; was typing and failed to use Paragon power and so had to re-load and go through hospital and council again.
- Bought all volumes of poetry at hospital Sirta terminal.
- Took the Paragon power, and am overjoyed. Asked journalist-nemesis, to whom I'd been nice in ME and whom I'd punched in ME2 to "keep asking the hard questions."
Am using the voice commands as much as possible in this career. I still need time, I think, but being able to perform a version of the lines is really interesting, and may be a literal game-changer for me.
Living Epic--making it really live?
Yet another idea for re-purposing this blog in the wake of my activity on Play the Past: keeping track of my actual living of epic, beginning with Mass Effect 3.
My ME3 careers:
- Female renegade, soldier, sniper with fully-developed adrenalin rush. She cut corners in ME2 and ended up losing four of her companions. Romanced no one.
- Male paragon, adept, spammer of Singularity. Messed up at the end of ME2 and similarly lost four companions. Romanced Liara in ME and no one in ME2.
- Male paragon, adept, spammer of Warp. Got the 100% ending of ME2. Romanced Liara in ME and Jack in ME2.
Here's why I think this will be worth doing: I don't know of any other accounts of multiple parallel performances specifically directed at analyzing the performance materials and their relation to the actual performances.
The first thing I'm interested in talking about is the "Narrative" combat difficulty, which, I'm told by the game itself, gives "a nonrepresentative Mass Effect experience." It may be nonrepresentative, but when you're playing 3 careers, it's really great.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The BioWare style: manifest identification (sketch 6)
This post introduces my argument about the relationship of the BioWare performance-slider to the BioWare RPG’s modularity of theme. My thinking when I stated to write this sketch was that this section of the chapter could prove a nice way to package my conclusions, as I also put the argument itself together. The creation of the meaning-effect of the games through the relationships of their sliders to their modular themes seems to me to be the absolute essence of the BioWare style. While I do that final synthesis, I was hoping, I would be able to accomplish two other goals: first, to triangulate the differences of the three games the chapter is supposed to be about; second, to bring in other styles for comparison, to demonstrate that the BioWare style is distinctive and that it can be usefully described as I have described it, in terms of the analytic methodology of composition by theme pioneered by Lord for traditional oral epic. That last bit will prove tricky whenever and however I manage finally to do it at length, but it may well be the most enjoyable: I’m convinced there’s a major contribution to be made both to the study of these individual games and to the study of the RPG in general by demonstrating that a thick description of the way an RPG handles composition by theme provides a critically revealing index of the role that the digital RPG has played and can play in culture.
But although I still want to close the chapter I’ve been sketching towards with some version of that argument, it’s become clear as I’ve proceeded to exceed the word limit for the chapter, with no end in sight, really, of what I’d like to say not just about BioWare RPG’s but also about Bethesda, Square Enix, Lionhead, and Atlus RPG’s, just to name a few, that there’s a project here that my training would ordinarily make me think of as a book: specifically the type of book called a monograph, which is basically a scholarly article that got too long for its own good. The problem is that nobody publishes monographs any more, because, generally, monographs just aren’t profitable, because they’re useful only to other researchers on the topic, and then only for perhaps a single footnote, if that. Add to that the problem that nobody publishes me (well, not nobody, but the market for this stuff would only be described as “limited” by a very generous observer) and you’ve got an occasion for me to kick over the traces and say “Here (yes, here, on my blog) is where I stand.”
That is, I think I’m going to try to write the book here, by drafting the kinds of sketches I’ve been drafting, then refining them gradually into a more organized and articulated structure. The experiment of drafting a chapter intended for publication here on the blog has encouraged me to think that other bits of this new sort of blogograph might find their way through the peer-review process and become “real” scholarship. That’s not to say that I think the chapter I’m sketching here will get accepted; rather, it’s to say that I feel reasonably confident that the process of blogging these sketches has led me to a chapter that I feel comfortable submitting to a traditional peer-review. Readers of Living Epic won’t see the back-end scholarly stuff unless the chapter gets accepted and published, but it’s very easy to do that back-end stuff by pounding on the blog posts in a series of Google Docs for a few days, with an added dash of Zotero goodness.
Enough front-matter. My focus in this post shifts from KOTOR to a broader comparative view of KOTOR, Dragon Age: Origins (DAO), and Mass Effect, as a way of beginning to discuss both the essential shared elements of re-composition in the three games and the differences that reveal the way the style has manifested itself not as a single set of ludics but across several different ludic systems. I begin with a consideration of the difference between Mass Effect’s version of the slider and KOTOR’s, then use that discussion to open a three-way comparison of analogous moments in the three games.
I’ll be arguing that modularity plus sliders equals a particular kind of meaningful identification. I plan to demonstrate that the re-compositional thematic ludics of the BioWare style allow players of BioWare RPG’s to form a specific kind of identification with their player-characters: an identification that enacts a subjectivity manifestly negotiated between the game’s thematic system and the choices the player makes within that system. The player of a BioWare RPG relates to his or her PC through the enactment of modular themes and the manipulation of sliders, with the result that his or her performance enacts a visibly unique claim to selfhood.
Through the manifestation of that negotiation, the player gains the special impression of individuality and of fullness that distinguishes the BioWare style. Whereas the homeric bards and their analogues in Yugoslavia performed their thematic recompositions in relation to a public occasion and a public role, the player of the BioWare RPG performs him or herself to him or herself, gaining a self-identity that we may describe theoretically in the terms I use above, of a subjectivity of manifest negotiation. I’ll try to show that manipulating the modular themes of the game in relation to the game’ sliders peforms the player’s subjectivity as not only capable of saving a world worth saving, but also as capable of making that salvation meaningful outside the game.
The Renegade/Paragon slider in Mass Effect can serve, in comparison to the light/dark slider in KOTOR and the party-character sliders in DAO, as the emblem of this meaningful identification: the negotiation of dialogue choices involved in performing a particular version of that slider produces a manifestation in the “Squad” screen of what kind of human the player’s Shepard is. Because the cultural topic of the game is the status of the human race vis-a-vis the other races of the galaxy, what the player sees on the squad screen is a visual index of a numerically determined relationship between his or her performance and the meaning of that performance with respect to the cultural topic. That is, the player’s identification with Shepard--the way he or she is performing Shepard as an extension of him or herself--is visible as a negotiation on that squad screen, a screen the player must visit every level if he or she is to continue playing the game.
KOTOR and DAO share the essence of this ludic performance of manifest identification. When we compare this effect to the light/dark slider in KOTOR, we see the essential similarity of the two systems; although the DAO system differs in that the sliders are not centrally located, it is similarly essential to continuing the game that the player visit the party-characters’ individual screens with great frequency (at least those of party-characters the player has chosen to adventure with), and each party-character’s approval/disapproval slider is displayed prominently on that screen. Just as in Mass Effect, the player sees a visual representation of a quantitative index of the relationship of his or her performance as the player-character to the in-progress cultural meaning of that performance of the game.
My plan for the next sketch of what I’m now thinking of as a never-to-be-published book not to be titled The Epic Styles of Major Developers of the Digital RPG: Realizing the Ancient Potential of Traditional Oral Epic in a New Age of Performative Technology is to push further in my argument about this special, manifest kind of identification in the three BioWare games under discussion with reference on the one hand to traditional oral epic performance and on the other to the “modularity plus sliders” system of the games.
Concerning comments: I'd be incredibly grateful for any corrections and/or refinements you'd care to suggest about this chapter-in-the-making--Google Buzz is my preferred discussion-place now, so comments are turned off here. You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!
But although I still want to close the chapter I’ve been sketching towards with some version of that argument, it’s become clear as I’ve proceeded to exceed the word limit for the chapter, with no end in sight, really, of what I’d like to say not just about BioWare RPG’s but also about Bethesda, Square Enix, Lionhead, and Atlus RPG’s, just to name a few, that there’s a project here that my training would ordinarily make me think of as a book: specifically the type of book called a monograph, which is basically a scholarly article that got too long for its own good. The problem is that nobody publishes monographs any more, because, generally, monographs just aren’t profitable, because they’re useful only to other researchers on the topic, and then only for perhaps a single footnote, if that. Add to that the problem that nobody publishes me (well, not nobody, but the market for this stuff would only be described as “limited” by a very generous observer) and you’ve got an occasion for me to kick over the traces and say “Here (yes, here, on my blog) is where I stand.”
That is, I think I’m going to try to write the book here, by drafting the kinds of sketches I’ve been drafting, then refining them gradually into a more organized and articulated structure. The experiment of drafting a chapter intended for publication here on the blog has encouraged me to think that other bits of this new sort of blogograph might find their way through the peer-review process and become “real” scholarship. That’s not to say that I think the chapter I’m sketching here will get accepted; rather, it’s to say that I feel reasonably confident that the process of blogging these sketches has led me to a chapter that I feel comfortable submitting to a traditional peer-review. Readers of Living Epic won’t see the back-end scholarly stuff unless the chapter gets accepted and published, but it’s very easy to do that back-end stuff by pounding on the blog posts in a series of Google Docs for a few days, with an added dash of Zotero goodness.
Enough front-matter. My focus in this post shifts from KOTOR to a broader comparative view of KOTOR, Dragon Age: Origins (DAO), and Mass Effect, as a way of beginning to discuss both the essential shared elements of re-composition in the three games and the differences that reveal the way the style has manifested itself not as a single set of ludics but across several different ludic systems. I begin with a consideration of the difference between Mass Effect’s version of the slider and KOTOR’s, then use that discussion to open a three-way comparison of analogous moments in the three games.
I’ll be arguing that modularity plus sliders equals a particular kind of meaningful identification. I plan to demonstrate that the re-compositional thematic ludics of the BioWare style allow players of BioWare RPG’s to form a specific kind of identification with their player-characters: an identification that enacts a subjectivity manifestly negotiated between the game’s thematic system and the choices the player makes within that system. The player of a BioWare RPG relates to his or her PC through the enactment of modular themes and the manipulation of sliders, with the result that his or her performance enacts a visibly unique claim to selfhood.
Through the manifestation of that negotiation, the player gains the special impression of individuality and of fullness that distinguishes the BioWare style. Whereas the homeric bards and their analogues in Yugoslavia performed their thematic recompositions in relation to a public occasion and a public role, the player of the BioWare RPG performs him or herself to him or herself, gaining a self-identity that we may describe theoretically in the terms I use above, of a subjectivity of manifest negotiation. I’ll try to show that manipulating the modular themes of the game in relation to the game’ sliders peforms the player’s subjectivity as not only capable of saving a world worth saving, but also as capable of making that salvation meaningful outside the game.
The Renegade/Paragon slider in Mass Effect can serve, in comparison to the light/dark slider in KOTOR and the party-character sliders in DAO, as the emblem of this meaningful identification: the negotiation of dialogue choices involved in performing a particular version of that slider produces a manifestation in the “Squad” screen of what kind of human the player’s Shepard is. Because the cultural topic of the game is the status of the human race vis-a-vis the other races of the galaxy, what the player sees on the squad screen is a visual index of a numerically determined relationship between his or her performance and the meaning of that performance with respect to the cultural topic. That is, the player’s identification with Shepard--the way he or she is performing Shepard as an extension of him or herself--is visible as a negotiation on that squad screen, a screen the player must visit every level if he or she is to continue playing the game.
KOTOR and DAO share the essence of this ludic performance of manifest identification. When we compare this effect to the light/dark slider in KOTOR, we see the essential similarity of the two systems; although the DAO system differs in that the sliders are not centrally located, it is similarly essential to continuing the game that the player visit the party-characters’ individual screens with great frequency (at least those of party-characters the player has chosen to adventure with), and each party-character’s approval/disapproval slider is displayed prominently on that screen. Just as in Mass Effect, the player sees a visual representation of a quantitative index of the relationship of his or her performance as the player-character to the in-progress cultural meaning of that performance of the game.
My plan for the next sketch of what I’m now thinking of as a never-to-be-published book not to be titled The Epic Styles of Major Developers of the Digital RPG: Realizing the Ancient Potential of Traditional Oral Epic in a New Age of Performative Technology is to push further in my argument about this special, manifest kind of identification in the three BioWare games under discussion with reference on the one hand to traditional oral epic performance and on the other to the “modularity plus sliders” system of the games.
Concerning comments: I'd be incredibly grateful for any corrections and/or refinements you'd care to suggest about this chapter-in-the-making--Google Buzz is my preferred discussion-place now, so comments are turned off here. You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The Bioware style: theme and modularity (sketch 3)
Spoiler warning: this post contains a plethora of spoilers for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), Mass Effect, and DragonAge: Origins. If you haven’t played any of these games and you plan to do so, and you would like to do so without knowing what’s to come, reading this post will have a deleterious effect on the realization of that plan. Concerning comments: I'd be incredibly grateful for any corrections and/or refinements you'd care to suggest about this chapter-in-the-making--Google Buzz is my preferred discussion-place now, so comments are turned off here. You’re most welcome to follow me on Buzz, here; you’ll find this post there, too, with any luck, and I hope to discuss it with you there!
The last post was about the light/dark slider in KOTOR, and before I proceed to talk (kind of) about cutscenes, as promised, I want to note that in the final version of this chapter I’ll pay much more attention to the Mass Effect and DragonAge sliders, which present very welcome complications to KOTOR’s slider. I’ll be sketching that part of the chapter in a few weeks, once I’ve had a chance to refresh my memory of those games.
My plan for this post had been to talk about the cutscenes in KOTOR, and to relate them to the cutscenes in Mass Effect and DragonAge, since unlike the sliders the composition of the cutscenes is quite similar among the three titles, and also quite distinct from other RPG-styles’ compositional dynamics.
As I moved along in my two research-playthroughs of KOTOR though, in which I’m playing both a light-side PC and a dark-side one, trying to keep them in parallel while still exploring as many of the different performance possibilities as I can, I realized that while it’s certainly possible to slice off the cutscenes and talk about them as an example of the way the Bioware style represents an occasion for a particular kind of composition by theme, the thematic nature of the cutscenes in these games is actually tied into the more embracing modularity of the games as wholes. When a set of dialogue choices in KOTOR leads to a cutscene in which an NPC does something that’s partly immutable and partly a result of the choices made by the player, the cutscene is functioning as an integral part of the much broader modular design of the game. For example when the PC chooses a dark-side option like telling an alien that he’s inferior to a group of mean human boys who are taunting him, and the party-member Carth Onasi, a decidedly light-side figure, demurs in a vignette of cutscene dialogue, the player has invoked that cutscene as an aspect of a system of modularity that along with the integral nature of the sliders discussed in my last post could be said to be the most fundamental thematic tools of the Bioware style.
On the other hand, modular cutscenes that run at specific times--the simplest example may be the dreams the PC of KOTOR has after pre-set events like saving Bastila after the swoop race--are simply formulaic, and take their place in the overall composition without need of comment except to point out their formulaic nature.
We’re now getting into topics that can prove out, at a technical level, the theoretical value of the comparison between player-performance in the digital RPG and bard-performance in traditional oral poetry. It’s worth quoting Albert Lord in his famous and foundational article “Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos” to demonstrate just how precise this comparison can be:
When you realize that the nature of the digital RPG means that its themes are repeated a potentially infinite number of times, the power of the contrast that corresponds to the comparison and actually gives the comparison its bite also starts to reveal itself: while Parry and Lord and those who have come after them have worked on fossilized texts, the digital RPG (along with other, related kinds of games) presents an opportunity for living study of this kind of creative practice--an opportunity that Parry and Lord had only through talking to the Southslavic bards, an opportunity we can have only in faint echo in those precious passages of Homer in which the bards sing about what it means to be a bard. The digital RPG reifies what in traditional oral poetry can’t be reified--the training of the bards in the formulas out of which themes, and epics, were built.
I plan to argue that the Bioware version of the system of formulaic recomposition affords the player of KOTOR, Mass Effect, or DragonAge a particular kind of range of possibilities for thematic composition. A key element of that particularity lies in the role of the sliders discussed in my last sketch; an equally important element lies in the modularity of recurrent elements like dialogue cutscenes, battles, forced entrances into installations and caverns, and even visits to planets or towns--both generally (the party comes to a new town and has to go to the tavern/cantina to hear the rumors) and particularly (the party goes to the planet Manaan in KOTOR).
The themes of homeric epic are elements like assemblies of lords, sacrifices, and single-combats. As Lord details exhaustively in The Singer of Tales, young singers learned the formulas first, and then the themes, just as new players of Bioware RPG’s learn, say, the user-interface and then the basic elements of a quest like DragonAge’s Orzammar section, before learning to shape their performances according to their creative inclinations.
In both cases, the virtuosity and pleasure of the performance, for player and audience alike, come from the application of personal creativity to the thematic materials provided by the performance-system. So much is true of a wide variety of digital RPG’s, and of games of certain other genres as well. But the Bioware games under consideration are distinctive in deploying a high degree of modularity in at least three easily-definable areas: imaginary-spatially-differentiated plot incident, party-character choice, and dialogue-choice. All three of these games, that is, feature well-defined choices between places to visit, party members to take on such visits, and what to say to the NPCs met there. Any player of these games knows what I mean by “well-defined”: above all, each of these games features a decision-defining map screen of one kind or another, in which the player chooses the next destination; each features a party-selection screen, and each features a kind of dialogue in which each utterance-selection screen functions as a separate cutscene.
To put it comprehensively if simply, the player of these Bioware RPGs enacts his or her performance by fitting together, in the ludics of the game, places, characters, and dialogue according to the heroic identification figured by the game’s sliders. The player does this composition with reference to their often unconscious knowledge of and growing virtuosity in the systems of ludics that define the games. In choosing with whom to adventure, where to adventure, and what to say, the player of a Bioware RPG re-composes not just the narrative but also the part of him or herself embodied in the player-character, until in the end, at such moments as the choice between the legacy of Revan and the freedom of a new self (KOTOR), whether to protect the council (Mass Effect), and whether to put Alistair on the throne (DragonAge), the player is able to demonstrate his or her mastery not just of the ludic system of the game, but of an entire imaginary galaxy--or magic realm.
Despite the superficial similarity to games like Bethesda’s Oblivion (just to choose a single example among a great many), in which saving the world and rising to the top of the world order figure just as prominently as they do in these three Bioware games, the Bioware games, because of their sliders and their modularity, put the emphasis on the player’s knowledge of the system, and the player’s clearly-defined ludic choices. The successful player of Oblivion has done (albeit vicariously) the deeds that lead to saving Cyrodiil, has found the items his or her character needed to find, has fought the necessary battles, but he or she has not had a hand in manifestly manipulating the themes and putting them together, as has the successful player of the three Bioware games under discussion. Bethesda games, to choose the most obvious examples, don’t feature decision-defining maps or party-selection screens.
There’s more to be said, obviously, about the relationship between heroic sliders, modular performance, and the overarching narratives of the games (which are in fact describable themselves as themes, since the “reach the final battle and save the galaxy/kingdom from the mindless forces of evil” theme structures all three games). In the next sketch, I plan to try to put them all together; after that, I imagine that I’ll be able to use subsequent sketches to gather evidence to support and to tweak my argument.
The last post was about the light/dark slider in KOTOR, and before I proceed to talk (kind of) about cutscenes, as promised, I want to note that in the final version of this chapter I’ll pay much more attention to the Mass Effect and DragonAge sliders, which present very welcome complications to KOTOR’s slider. I’ll be sketching that part of the chapter in a few weeks, once I’ve had a chance to refresh my memory of those games.
My plan for this post had been to talk about the cutscenes in KOTOR, and to relate them to the cutscenes in Mass Effect and DragonAge, since unlike the sliders the composition of the cutscenes is quite similar among the three titles, and also quite distinct from other RPG-styles’ compositional dynamics.
As I moved along in my two research-playthroughs of KOTOR though, in which I’m playing both a light-side PC and a dark-side one, trying to keep them in parallel while still exploring as many of the different performance possibilities as I can, I realized that while it’s certainly possible to slice off the cutscenes and talk about them as an example of the way the Bioware style represents an occasion for a particular kind of composition by theme, the thematic nature of the cutscenes in these games is actually tied into the more embracing modularity of the games as wholes. When a set of dialogue choices in KOTOR leads to a cutscene in which an NPC does something that’s partly immutable and partly a result of the choices made by the player, the cutscene is functioning as an integral part of the much broader modular design of the game. For example when the PC chooses a dark-side option like telling an alien that he’s inferior to a group of mean human boys who are taunting him, and the party-member Carth Onasi, a decidedly light-side figure, demurs in a vignette of cutscene dialogue, the player has invoked that cutscene as an aspect of a system of modularity that along with the integral nature of the sliders discussed in my last post could be said to be the most fundamental thematic tools of the Bioware style.
On the other hand, modular cutscenes that run at specific times--the simplest example may be the dreams the PC of KOTOR has after pre-set events like saving Bastila after the swoop race--are simply formulaic, and take their place in the overall composition without need of comment except to point out their formulaic nature.
We’re now getting into topics that can prove out, at a technical level, the theoretical value of the comparison between player-performance in the digital RPG and bard-performance in traditional oral poetry. It’s worth quoting Albert Lord in his famous and foundational article “Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos” to demonstrate just how precise this comparison can be:
The theme can be defined as a recurrent element of narration or description in traditional oral poetry. It is not restricted, as is the formula, by metrical considerations; hence, it should not be limited to exact word-for-word repetition. . . . Regular use, or repetition, is as much a part of the definition of the theme as it is of the definition of the formula, but the repetition need not be exact. Strictly speaking, we cannot call an action or situation or description in the poetry a theme unless we can find it used at least twice.Substitute “the digital RPG” for “traditional oral poetry,” and the comparison begins to come into focus; think of the formula as the ludics of the game--unchangeable things like the act of choosing party members and the dialogue choices that are identical between performances--and “metrical considerations” as the coding of the game, and the precision and power of the comparison start to show themselves.
When you realize that the nature of the digital RPG means that its themes are repeated a potentially infinite number of times, the power of the contrast that corresponds to the comparison and actually gives the comparison its bite also starts to reveal itself: while Parry and Lord and those who have come after them have worked on fossilized texts, the digital RPG (along with other, related kinds of games) presents an opportunity for living study of this kind of creative practice--an opportunity that Parry and Lord had only through talking to the Southslavic bards, an opportunity we can have only in faint echo in those precious passages of Homer in which the bards sing about what it means to be a bard. The digital RPG reifies what in traditional oral poetry can’t be reified--the training of the bards in the formulas out of which themes, and epics, were built.
I plan to argue that the Bioware version of the system of formulaic recomposition affords the player of KOTOR, Mass Effect, or DragonAge a particular kind of range of possibilities for thematic composition. A key element of that particularity lies in the role of the sliders discussed in my last sketch; an equally important element lies in the modularity of recurrent elements like dialogue cutscenes, battles, forced entrances into installations and caverns, and even visits to planets or towns--both generally (the party comes to a new town and has to go to the tavern/cantina to hear the rumors) and particularly (the party goes to the planet Manaan in KOTOR).
The themes of homeric epic are elements like assemblies of lords, sacrifices, and single-combats. As Lord details exhaustively in The Singer of Tales, young singers learned the formulas first, and then the themes, just as new players of Bioware RPG’s learn, say, the user-interface and then the basic elements of a quest like DragonAge’s Orzammar section, before learning to shape their performances according to their creative inclinations.
In both cases, the virtuosity and pleasure of the performance, for player and audience alike, come from the application of personal creativity to the thematic materials provided by the performance-system. So much is true of a wide variety of digital RPG’s, and of games of certain other genres as well. But the Bioware games under consideration are distinctive in deploying a high degree of modularity in at least three easily-definable areas: imaginary-spatially-differentiated plot incident, party-character choice, and dialogue-choice. All three of these games, that is, feature well-defined choices between places to visit, party members to take on such visits, and what to say to the NPCs met there. Any player of these games knows what I mean by “well-defined”: above all, each of these games features a decision-defining map screen of one kind or another, in which the player chooses the next destination; each features a party-selection screen, and each features a kind of dialogue in which each utterance-selection screen functions as a separate cutscene.
To put it comprehensively if simply, the player of these Bioware RPGs enacts his or her performance by fitting together, in the ludics of the game, places, characters, and dialogue according to the heroic identification figured by the game’s sliders. The player does this composition with reference to their often unconscious knowledge of and growing virtuosity in the systems of ludics that define the games. In choosing with whom to adventure, where to adventure, and what to say, the player of a Bioware RPG re-composes not just the narrative but also the part of him or herself embodied in the player-character, until in the end, at such moments as the choice between the legacy of Revan and the freedom of a new self (KOTOR), whether to protect the council (Mass Effect), and whether to put Alistair on the throne (DragonAge), the player is able to demonstrate his or her mastery not just of the ludic system of the game, but of an entire imaginary galaxy--or magic realm.
Despite the superficial similarity to games like Bethesda’s Oblivion (just to choose a single example among a great many), in which saving the world and rising to the top of the world order figure just as prominently as they do in these three Bioware games, the Bioware games, because of their sliders and their modularity, put the emphasis on the player’s knowledge of the system, and the player’s clearly-defined ludic choices. The successful player of Oblivion has done (albeit vicariously) the deeds that lead to saving Cyrodiil, has found the items his or her character needed to find, has fought the necessary battles, but he or she has not had a hand in manifestly manipulating the themes and putting them together, as has the successful player of the three Bioware games under discussion. Bethesda games, to choose the most obvious examples, don’t feature decision-defining maps or party-selection screens.
There’s more to be said, obviously, about the relationship between heroic sliders, modular performance, and the overarching narratives of the games (which are in fact describable themselves as themes, since the “reach the final battle and save the galaxy/kingdom from the mindless forces of evil” theme structures all three games). In the next sketch, I plan to try to put them all together; after that, I imagine that I’ll be able to use subsequent sketches to gather evidence to support and to tweak my argument.
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