Yes, More "Mass Effect"

WARNING! All links and everything after the jump carries a MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING!

"Bob, WHY do you keep talking about this??" Because it's still THE story in this particular realm, that's why.

In any case, Devin Faraci of BadassDigest is the latest web-personality to weigh in on the controversial finale of "Mass Effect" - apparently he didn't get the memo that movie critics' opinions on video games aren't to be taken seriously, either. He does, however, bring the thus-far rare perspective of someone who - whether he is officially a "true gamer" or not - has played through the entirety of "Mass Effect" and actually really likes the ending. It's an extremely thoughtful piece (I don't always see eye-to-eye with Devin, but he knows his shit) that gamers would do well to consider:

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!
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Money quote, from Devin: (boldface mine)
"In the end Mass Effect 3, like any other narrative video game, is a story being told to us. We have some control over the peripheral business but the meat of the story belongs to BioWare. This is the tale they’ve been telling. This is the culmination of what they’ve been doing since the beginning of Mass Effect. And I love it. This is true scifi, a story that examines the nature of conflict and humanity through the prism of imaginative, speculative fiction. I’ve never played a game where the decisions I made felt so powerful in the abstract; I wasn’t worrying about whether or not one choice would give me a better power up, I was worrying about the moral and ethical implications of the choices. And after all of that the final choice was so obvious, so true to what had come before, that I was kind of irritated at how slowly old Shep moved."

Now, let me get myself into a bit of trouble here: I'm wondering if it's more than coincidence that some (please, please, PLEASE note that I didn't say "ALL" or "MOST") of more interesting writing about video games coming out lately is coming from people - like Devin or FilmCritHulk - who come more form a film/literature background.

That's pretty close to blasphemy, I realize. Gaming has a fierce inferiority complex when it comes to movies - desperately wanting the visuals and narratives of games become more "cinematic" while stidently insisting that the interactivity of the medium makes it some kind of superior-evolution to stuffy old "passive" cinema. And I don't mean to suggest that one medium is innately superior on either the production or commentary side...

...BUT, a lot of the recent "big issues" in game-criticism ("Other M's" perhaps-unwittingly sexual-submission symbolism, "Arkham City's" casual sexism, "Mass Effect's" unusual ending, etc.) are actually narrative issues; and let's be real here: Film has been dealing with full-blown narratives for over a century and film writers have thus been dealing with them for their entire education and career; while gaming and thus game criticism has (with the niche exceptions of PC Adventure titles and JRPGs) barely been dealing with full-blown narratives for a decade or so. And even film didn't get there right away - it took a looooong time for a big-budget, wide-release movie to be permitted to end as abstractly as "2001" did; and even the magnificient "Psycho" is forced to follow-up it's intensely-awesome reveal with a horrible, clunky, dead-weight expository sequence where police veeeeery carefully lay out exactly what was wrong with Norman Bates, and why he is/isn't a transvestite, etc lest the audience go home without - what's that word? Closure?

What's the takeaway from that? I dunno. Maybe that gaming-culture would do well to not immediately dismiss criticism/commentary simply because it comes from outside "The Community;" I suppose.