Deadly Premonition, Mass Effect 3, Bioshock Infinite: Three Choices, No Choice?

Bioshock Infinite, Ken Levine's newest stab at bringing some life to the AAA gaming landscape, has spent the last month enjoying impressive critical and public acclaim. As a game, it is a machine as well-oiled as you could hope to ask for, a first-person shooter etched from thoughtful gun combat and a Vigor system that complements it stylistically and ludically in equal portions. There has been some streamlining, but we're in a gaming climate that streamlines as a matter of course, especially by a franchise's third iteration. Narratively, Infinite hosts a plague of discontents, ameliorated partially by the game's insistence on exploring them through the story's subtext. To simplify drastically, Levine claims through Infinite that narrative video gaming will always be subject to a series of technological restrictions. It's a wonderful idea for a game to grapple with, but it doesn't always work out. Leigh Alexander has done an excellent job at delineating some of the friction that Infinite encounters as a narrative-based game, but some of her arguments are predicated on the notion that the original Bioshock unified narrative and gameplay seamlessly. It is unrealistic to expect every act of brutality in a game of this genre to maintain a sense of commodified mortality; for all that atmosphere and all those piquant Objectivist flourishes and all the hullabaloo about “Would you kindly?”, the first iteration is still a game where you mow down underwater zombies in the hundreds. 

Mass Attack 3: The Democracy of Whining

This post is about the reactions to Mass Effect 3's ending and not the ending itself, so unless you consider the knowledge that the game had a controversial ending to be a spoiler, then you should be safe. But then if you're a gamer who's not aware of this shitstorm by now then you probably don't know how to read so why are you even here?

It isn't as if bad endings are particularly new to video games. Three decades ago, when the form was still in its infancy, it was par for the NES course to be rewarded with "CONGRATURATIONS! YOU ARE GREAT" and a jarring return to the start screen. Even once gaming had moved away from its typically bare-bones narratives, there were still disappointments aplenty to be found amidst the epics. Who remembers the ending of Fable? And though I never played Knights of the Old Republic 2, a trip to Youtube reveals a game that culminates in a visually tedious ten minute conversation, a twenty-second cutscene, and then credits.

Obsidian, however, somehow managed to dodge the public flogging that Bioware has endured lately. Once held on high for their expansive, open-world RPGs, they're currently being pilloried all over the Internet for their handling of Mass Effect 3. Sure, few people were happy about KOTOR 2's famously rushed ending, but things died down soon enough. The fan outrage this time around is unprecedented; relatively level-headed expressions of disappointment, such as the Retake ME3 charity, were quickly co-opted by those rabid folk drawing attention to themselves by filing complaints with the FTC or boasting that they were able to get a full refund from Amazon after completing the game. Few concrete results came from all of this sturm-und-drang, naturally, as Retake ME3 degenerated into a mess of confused and angry gamers and the FTC doesn't care about Mass Effect 3.