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:

• 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.

The siren song of the Renegade

After some multiplayer with AcademyofDrX that came out of the blue, I've decided to take my Renegade in to rescue the Turian Primarch. There's something about her that makes me think she wants to be the first into the galactic battle, and that she wouldn't let the Paragons get in ahead of her.

The difficulty is that the amount of time I have to spend running around looking for things suits my feckless Paragons much better than it does her. . .

And hello, Garrus! Thought I'd lost him in this career.

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.

"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."

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?

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.