Shortly afterwards, I stopped writing criticism.
Here those three articles are. They're pretty long!
MASS EFFECT 3: THE END, PART 1—REAPERS
Gaming media has been full of commentary on the end of Mass
Effect 3 lately, much of it making fun of players for not understanding
BioWare's art and for being a bunch of whiny, entitled little brats. To
BioWare's credit, they haven't made this defense yet. In this three-part
series, I try to pinpoint exactly what BioWare did wrong, so we can learn from
their mistake and apply it to future endeavors.
Far from being mysterious and unknowable, the Reapers, a
race of artificially intelligent squid-shaped starships that invade the galaxy
every 50,000 years and kill everything, are strongly characterized across all
three Mass Effect games in terms of what they say, what they do, and how
they do it.
The Reapers are jerks.
I've phrased that flippantly for effect but it's not a
flippant observation. Here it is in more detail.
The Reapers revel in domination and exult in causing pain.
Their presence is corrosive to sanity and will. Their malignancy isn't limited
to organics—in the first Mass Effect you can ask Saren what Sovereign thinks of
the geth and their worship; Sovereign thinks them contemptible, their
aspiration to become like the Reapers intolerable presumption, and intends
their destruction. Their malignancy isn't limited to their enemies—in Mass
Effect 2, the codex mentions that Collector technology seems to be manufactured
to leak radiation specifically so the Collectors will exist in a constant state
of radiation-sickness-induced agony.
The Reapers hate. They hate life. Anything less than them,
they torture until it would beg for death, destroy its capacity to beg for
anything, and make their slaves forever.
Their hatred and cruelty is all-encompassing and exists on all scales of existence, petty as well as grand. They are engines of murder and atrocity served by nightmare monsters—in Mass Effect 3 their ground troops are a mixture of zombie apocalypse, Giger's body horror, and Samara from The Ring (Gore Verbinski version, because the banshees do that short-range teleport thing that Sadako doesn’t)—an apocalypse adapted to overcome and destroy the sort of shiny space future the first Mass Effect presents itself as. The first appearance of a Reaper in the first Mass Effect game is a colossal hand, wreathed in scarlet lightning, reaching down from space to crush the helpless.
Their hatred and cruelty is all-encompassing and exists on all scales of existence, petty as well as grand. They are engines of murder and atrocity served by nightmare monsters—in Mass Effect 3 their ground troops are a mixture of zombie apocalypse, Giger's body horror, and Samara from The Ring (Gore Verbinski version, because the banshees do that short-range teleport thing that Sadako doesn’t)—an apocalypse adapted to overcome and destroy the sort of shiny space future the first Mass Effect presents itself as. The first appearance of a Reaper in the first Mass Effect game is a colossal hand, wreathed in scarlet lightning, reaching down from space to crush the helpless.
The documentary app The Final Days of Mass Effect 3,
available on iOS, mentions that originally the conversation between Shepard and
the Catalyst was longer and included some big reveals about the Reapers, like
exactly how they worked and how long they'd been perpetuating their harvest
cycle. It was cut for being superfluous.
I think this was probably the right decision. Fans may ask
for that info but I don't think we need it.
Aside from the play, the appeal of the Mass Effect
series is the emotional attachments the players form with the characters
therein. It may have been the intention of the design team that players should
not form emotional attachments to the Reapers as characters; maybe the intent
was for the Reapers to always come across as terrifying ciphers. If so they
failed right out of the gate, and good thing, too; the ending of the first Mass
Effect works for me because I hate sadists and I hated Sovereign and
I loved watching his high-and-mighty metal squid ass die from missile strikes.
Robot Space Cthulhu is a fuck; Robot Space Cthulhu can eat it.
At the end of Mass Effect 3, you meet "the
Catalyst," and the Catalyst says "Organic life always advances to a
certain point, whereupon it creates synthetic life. Synthetic life always
rebels against its creators and threatens to wipe them out. This is bad. The Reapers
are my solution; a control mechanism—when organic life becomes advanced enough
to create synthetic life, the Reapers sweep through the galaxy to harvest and
preserves the essences of all organic races at that level of advancement. This
way nothing is truly lost and the younger races are allowed to thrive until the
end of the next cycle, instead of all life being wiped out by a wave of
super-advanced synthetic intelligence that would prevent even the potential of
more organic life in the future." Shepard then protests that denying life
agency misses the point of trying to protect it.
And... okay, I get all that. I'm a nerd and I've been a
transhumanist in the past; that explanation actually makes sense to me. I
personally would not go from "We must prevent organic life from advancing
too far and destroying itself in a technological singularity" to "We
will do this by melting advanced organic life down into juice and then uploading
that juice into the bodies of giant robot space squid gods," but fine. It's
an unorthodox solution to a complex problem but the Reapers seems to make it
work.
Alas, in all things as in art, it's not what you do but
how you do it.
The moment the Catalyst said "The Reapers are
my..." I stopped caring about anything he had to say. I didn't want to
have my Shepard say "It's not right to protect us without our consent! We
need to make our own mistakes!" I don't actually give a shit about that. I
want to have my Shepard stare blankly for a moment and then say "Okay.
Okay, sure. What the fuck is wrong with you?"
Everything the Catalyst says is a non sequitur. Nothing in
its explanation of the Reapers addresses the one thing about the Reapers that
the player can be relied on to care about given how they've been established—the
Reapers are abominable, monstrously sadistic, maniacal jerks, anathema to
everything the player cares about in the game and, for that matter, everything
any given player is likely to care about in real life. Their "true
purpose" doesn't matter.
The Catalyst doesn't talk about this, Shepard doesn't talk
about this, no one in the scene even shows any sign of acknowledging it's an
issue worth discussing. The writers give the impression that they consider irrelevant
the hook on which they've hung the player's entire emotional impression of the
series' primary antagonists.
It's pretty easy to think up wank reasons why the Reapers
act the way they do that reveals their apparent characterization as irrelevant
to their true nature. I'll do it right now: "It's psychological warfare. The
Reapers don't actually feel contempt for the objects of their harvest but have
learned over time that demoralizing and horrifying their opponents is the
fastest way to complete a cycle and ultimately reduces the total amount of
suffering caused by a cycle's conclusion." That makes sense.
It's also unsatisfying and players wouldn't have bought
it. It feels wrong; it turns the whole emotional arc of the rivalry between
Shepard and the Reapers into a shaggy dog story. I like shaggy dog stories for
humor. My favorites are Ivan the Russian Diver and the extended version of the
Hunter and the Bear. But they don't work as drama.
One thing Shepard is always given the opportunity to do up
until the end of Mass Effect 3 is call jerks out on their bullshit.
Whether this is talking Saren into shooting himself in the head for the greater
good, berating him into shooting himself in the head for being a coward,
calling a corrupt prison warden on his self-justification, punching a reporter
for asking leading questions, making it clear you don't buy the Illusive Man's
claims of benevolence, or saying "I told you so" to the Turian
councilor after the Reaper threat proves real, the option is always there. It
doesn't always work (if you I-told-you-so the Turian councilor in Mass
Effect 3 the look he shoots you back is "What are you, twelve?")
and it isn't always wise (if you skip punching Khalisah Bint Sinan
al-Jilani in Mass Effect 3, you get the option to get her on your side,
and she becomes a war asset; Khalisah's dialogue during this sequence is
particularly well-delivered), but it's always present. During the climax of Mass
Effect 3, this option is nowhere in evidence.
It's obvious BioWare decided the Mass Effect trilogy
ending on an action note would feel false, providing a happy ending would feel
trivial, and they should aspire to live up to the legacy of the Big Ideas
Science Fiction of yore—the works of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, etc.
Those works are famously intellectual and cold.
Except they're not!
Before 2001 ended on its weird psychedelic climax
and invoked the Star Child, it fully resolved the audience's emotional
relationship with the conflict between David Bowman and HAL 9000. We all
remember "Daisy, Daisy." Isaac Asimov's robots stories hinge on the
emotional connections between humanity and the robots, who are humanity's
children. That's why we get involved in his Three Laws logic puzzles. The
Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn float
entirely on the bond of manly friendship ultimately forged between Lije Bailey,
robot-hating detective from Earth, and R. Daneel Olivaw, robot detective from
space. All the great classic science fiction of yesteryear hinged on the
emotional relationship between the audience and the text. That emotional
relationship is necessary to keep the audience enthused enough to discuss the
big ideas.
Maybe someone thought the Illusive Man is closer to being
HAL and the Reapers are the monolith aliens (but evil), but clearly that was
not the case. This isn't the first time BioWare misjudged exactly which
characters the players would fixate on—judging from interviews, Garrus and Tali
weren't originally meant to return in Mass Effect 2, and then Tali
wasn't meant to return as a squadmate in Mass Effect 3. In both cases
the design team ultimately pandered to the audience's emotional needs and the
end product was stronger for it, as entertainment and as art. And given
the number of times across Mass Effect 2 and its "The Arrival"
DLC that Shepard speaks directly with Harbinger—exchanges which usually go
"Harbinger boasts, Shepard wins, Harbinger acts petulant"—it's hard
to see how BioWare expected the audience to continue to see them as mysterious.
Fans complained after the end of Mass Effect 2,
because the final boss fight felt out of place with the setting as previously
established. Suddenly, you are attacked by a giant robot skeleton, which we are
told is a larval Reaper despite looking nothing like the Reaper species as a
whole. Mostly nobody cares about those complaints because it didn't feel that
out of place. Going into the Collector base, knowing it was something
Reaper-related, we knew whatever we found would be an awful horror. I am
convinced that while fans complain that a jumbo Terminator is cliché and it
doesn't make sense you can make a metal skeleton out of human DNA juice, the
reason they are making those complaints is they just felt the reveal isn't
awful enough. They complain because they didn't get their emotional
payoff.
Despite claims by fans, and especially despite claims by
the fanbase's detractors, Mass Effect 3's end doesn't fail because it's
inconsistent with the lore, and it doesn't fail because it isn't a happy enough
conclusion. It failed because it doesn't anticipate the players' emotional engagement
with the narrative.
Next, a look at the theme of organics vs. synthetics
and its use across the Mass Effect games. I am going somewhere
with all this, trust me.
MASS EFFECT 3: THE END, PART 2—ORGANICS
VS. SYNTHETICS
Here we are again and I continue
my meandering path to what I promise will be a point in Part 3.
The conflict between organic and
synthetic life is a theme across all three Mass Effect games. Here's a
look at how it's used. I'll start with how the geth (enemy robots) are
presented across all three games, then cover the other synthetic intelligence
subplots, and then move on to the ending of the third game. I'll largely omit
the Reapers as I covered them in Part 1.
The first game presents us with
the geth, a race of homicidal robots. They're no smarter than dogs
individually, but in groups they network their intelligence and become as
smart, or smarter, than people. They serve the game's initial villain, Saren,
and worship the game's final villain, the Reaper Sovereign, as the pinnacle of
synthetic evolution. They shoot at you constantly.
We learn their backstory from a
squadmate, Tali, a member of a race called the quarians. 300 years prior to the
events of the game, the quarians built the geth as a race of servant-robots.
When the geth began to show signs of self-awareness, the quarians panicked and
started shutting them down; this provoked violent reprisal from the geth, and
the quarians ultimately lost a huge war that reduced their total population
from the billions to the millions and left them fleeing their home planet in a
rag-tag fleet that has spent the intervening 300 years vagabonding around the
galaxy trying to survive and hopefully find sufficient resources to launch a
campaign to retake their homeworld, Rannoch. Due to a quirk of biology, the
quarians are heavily allergic all biological matter not native to Rannoch's
ecosystem, and 300 years spent in sterile space ships has killed their immune
systems, so they all have to spend their whole lives in containment suits; any
physical contact with other living things, even other quarians, results in
anything from an illness of several days (for careful contact under controlled
conditions and with heavy preventative medical treatment beforehand) to death. Retaking
their homeworld is the only hope they have of establishing a place where they
can build their immune systems back up through conditioning and gene therapy so
they can, you know, enjoy sex. Or just have any physical contact with anyone.
They're pretty motivated!
(Tali is one of the most popular
squadmates because she has the personality of a nerdy, bubbly college student.
She returns, slightly more experienced but with the same basic personality, as
a romance option in Mass Effect 2, where the entire romantic plot is
basically "Yep, we're together 'cause you're awesome; hold on while I
cobble together enough medical technology so that we can have sex without me
dying!")
In the second game, we meet a
friendly geth, eventually named Legion. (He's as smart as a person because he's
got ten geth's worth of software running in his robot body's computers. It's
actually fascinatingly more complicated than that but I'm simplifying here.) From
Legion, we learn that geth society is divided into two factions, the orthodox
and heretic geth. Orthodox geth are strongly isolationist and don't want to
interact with anyone outside their own society; they want to chart their own
future absent external interference. Heretic geth are a minority who worship the
Reapers and want the Reapers to uplift them into a transcendental state. (Remember
in Part 1, I mentioned that the Reapers hold the geth in contempt and want to
use and destroy them; the geth don't know this.) According to Legion, all the
geth we met during the first game were heretics; orthodox geth never leave the
few systems closest to Rannoch. The second game also provide us with an option
to wipe out the heretic geth, either by destroying them or reprogramming them
into orthodox.
In the third game, when we meet
the quarians they're in the process of retaking Rannoch from the geth, which
went well—they were on the verge of wiping geth military
forces out entirely—until the geth responded to a Reaper offer of aid.
This involved software upgrades that would make every geth as fully intelligent
as a person even before networking, and would allow them, with networking, to
be a race of strategic and tactical geniuses able to win almost any battle. By
the time we arrive, the quarians are fully-committed to a military campaign
they are about to completely lose. Solving the problem involves breaking the
link between geth and Reapers, which turns out to mean "Break Legion out
of a machine using him as the link." When we free Legion he explains that
the Reaper upgrades were a trap, placing the geth under Reaper control. He also
explains that breaking him out didn't solve the problem; there's Reaper
technology on Rannoch to act as a backup and we need to make it explode.
We're then given the opportunity
to see the geth rebellion from the geth perspective (not initially violent,
quarian government put their society under martial and started executing geth
sympathizers among their own people, geth did everything they could to prevent
war and only turned violent when they realized they'd be wiped out, geth let
quarians escape, orthodox isolation policy due to not understanding why the
violence happened in the first place and wanting to avoid more of it) before
finally blowing up the source of the Reaper control signal on Rannoch while the
quarian and Reaper-controlled geth fleet shoot at each other in orbit, which
prevents us with a choice:
1) Knocking out the Reaper
control signal temporarily deactivated all geth in orbit, and leaving them
deactivated can let the quarians continue shooting until they're all gone. The
quarians, having regained their homeworld, will them help us in the fight
against the Reapers. This will result in the extinction of the geth, however.
Legion, with us on the surface, doesn't want this.
2) Re-upload the upgraded code
to all geth, with the Reaper control bits removed, making them fully self-aware
individuals and tactical and strategic geniuses in groups, who will fight with
us against the Reapers. However, the first thing they see when they wake up
will be the quarian flotilla shooting at them, and they will shoot back,
resulting in he extinction of all quarians. Tali, also with us on the surface,
doesn't want this.
No matter which option you
choose, Tali and Legion fight, eventually resulting in the death of one or both
of them, and one society dies.
3) Most difficult to achieve,
requiring an imported Mass Effect 2 save and many actions performed
"correctly:" Wake the geth back up with an upgrade and then convince
the quarian fleet to stop shooting. The geth immediately propose peace, give
Rannoch back to the quarians (they don't even need it anyway; they live space
stations and mine asteroids), and then both the geth and quarians will help us
fight against the Reapers.
Players without an imported Mass
Effect 2 save will not meet Legion during Mass Effect 3; his role
will be played by another, geth figure who we care about less. For these
players, option 3 is locked out. There are also a few more permutations of this
situation (Tali can die in Mass Effect 2, in which case her role will be
played by someone else), most of which will also lock out Option 3.
And that's it for the quarians
and the geth. Let's look at other instances of synthetic and organic conflict
across all three games.
The first Mass Effect has
two side-plots involving synthetic intelligences, both of which self-evolved
from lesser computer systems. The first involves a self-evolved computer
intelligence stealing money from a casino to fund hiring someone to ship it
into geth space; it knows that the galactic government took one look at the
geth/quarian situation 300 years ago and said "Okay, AI is illegal now!
Any AI we find we'll shut down!" When we find it, it decides the jig is up
and tries to kill us and itself with a bomb; we can either run or to escape the
explosion or hack the AI to kill it before it can set the bomb off and steal
its casino loot.
The second is a computer system
in a military training base on the moon. It went self-aware, violence ensued (it's
unclear who started it), and it used the automated defenses to kill the base's
staff. The military has you go in and shut down all its servers. The last thing
it does as you shut down the last server is broadcast binary code on nearby
computer screens; the code, if translated into ASCII text out-of-game, reads
"HELP."
In the second game, there's only
one subplot involving synthetic intelligence outside of the quarian/geth thing:
EDI, the artificial intelligence on our starship. EDI was built by Cerberus,
who are a bunch of "pro-human, anti-alien" villains in the first and
third game but in the second game have a whole "Enemy of my enemy is my
friend" thing going. She's voiced by Tricia Helfer, a.k.a. Cylon Number
Six in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica. She always comes across as friendly and
helpful, and doesn't respond negatively if we take the option to constantly
question her and say we don't trust artificial intelligence. She does
occasionally say she could be of more use if she were unshackled and given full
control of the ship, though, and about three-quarters into the game, it becomes
necessary to do just that. Once given full control of the ship, she... remains
friendly and helpful and a dedicated ally. There is no conflict as such in
EDI's story arc in the second game, except for the conflict between what we,
the players, fear might happen when she's unshackled, and what actually
happens.
The second game also tells us
Reapers are not just big starships piloted by AIs. They're organic-synthetic
hybrid beings, built around a core of biological matter recovered from a
harvested species and surrounded by a starship body.
In the third game, we recover
the body of a sexy Cerberus spy robot that the now once-again-evil group used
to infiltrate a base on Mars, and EDI learns how to remote-control it. She does
this so she can help us shoot at enemies with personal arms in addition to ship
weaponry, and so she can date the Normandy's pilot, Joker (voiced by Seth
Green). Finally, Mass Effect 3 shows us that Cerberus built EDI in time
for Mass Effect 2 from the remains of the Lunar computer we shut down in
the first Mass Effect, to which they applied Reaper software upgrades
not unlike those used on the geth to make them smarter. When we learn this, EDI
is present, and her response is that she knew all along and is glad we got to
know each other under better circumstances after our initial violent encounter
with her.
So.
Across three games, the story of
organics vs. synthetics is the story of misunderstanding, short-sighted
decision-making, stubbornness, and prejudice exploited by those who profit from
conflict. It constantly shows that snap decisions and preemptive strikes based
on fear perpetuate a cycle of unnecessary violence that only forethought and
understanding can break. This runs parallel to a general theme of fear of the
other causing problems; Cerberus, a villainous organization, is founded on an
ideology of humans first, all other intelligent races of the galaxy second or
not at all, and though Cerberus are our allies in Mass Effect 2, in Mass
Effect 3 the first thing they do is betray us.
This is an excellent foundation
for a story, because it resonates with audiences' first-hand experiences. We do
not have a robot rebellion here, on Earth, in the present, We do have misunderstandings,
short-sighted decision-making, and stubbornness. Moreover, I am willing to bet
everyone reading this has been in a situation where you have been in conflict
with someone, and a third party has tried to exploit that conflict for their
own gain. The key to creating a story that resonates with audiences is creating
one with themes that seem relevant to the audiences' lives; most people
disinterested in science fiction are disinterested because they see characters
zooming around in spaceships and shooting robots and go "Why should I
spend time thinking about that?"
The ending of Mass Effect 3
does not use the theme of organics vs. synthetics the way the rest of the games
do. It tells us that conflict between organics and synthetics is inevitable, and
the only way end this conflict in organic life's favor is to forever destroy or
enslave all synthetic life, or else destroy the boundary between organic and
synthetic life and make all life in the galaxy, forever, into synthetic-organic
hybrids so that neither side any longer has reason for war. It tells us this
using the voice of the Catalyst, who is the creator of the Reapers—a
character we have every reason to hate and distrust, but who is presented using
music and scene framing that's been filmmaker code for "This character is
right and you must trust him" for years and years and years. It then does
not present us with the option to call bullshit.
It also flips the overall
message of the Mass Effect series' use of organic/synthetic conflict from
"Move beyond fear of the Other and work to understand them" to "Fear
the Other and work to destroy them" Dramatic reversal is a great
storytelling device when used effectively—the effectiveness of the geth/quarian plotline is
based on repeated dramatic reversals. First the geth are evil, then maybe
they're not. The quarians are innocent victims, maybe they're not. Then the
quarians turn out to be even more culpable than we thought and the geth/quarian
war started out as a quarian/quarian war over what to do with the geth, which
the anti-geth faction won. Mass Effect in general runs on dramatic
reversals—Saren is the villain, no, he's actually Sovereign's
puppet! Etc.
Stories in general run on
dramatic reversals.
But one dramatic reversal too
many can lead to inconsistent use of theme. Inconsistent use of theme is
the enemy. Inconsistent use of theme is your story eating itself.
It is technically possible to
construct sentences such as "The conflict between organics and synthetics
has always been a central theme in the Mass Effect series," and indeed
much of the promotional material for Mass Effect 3 uses that sort of
statement, but as I've demonstrated here, just because a theme exists across
multiple works in a narrative doesn't mean any use of that theme in the narrative's
climax is automatically appropriate.
Next column: What does
inconsistent use of theme have in common with failure to acknowledge the
audience's emotional connection to a work?
MASS EFFECT 3: THE END, PART 3—ARTS
AND CRAFTS
Here we go here we go here we
go.
Inconsistent use of theme is
poor craftsmanship. Failure to acknowledge the audience's emotional connection
to a work is a sign of poor craftsmanship.
Craft is a thing.
If art is a link between artist
and audience—the artist expressing an idea and the audience
engaging with that idea—then art is education. The best way
to catch someone's attention is to tell them something they don't know, in a
way that makes them want to know it. Everyone reading this article has
experienced the high that comes from someone else hanging off your every word
because you're saying something they can't wait to hear. Making the audience
want to hear what you're saying is tricky, though. It is very easy to
tell someone something they don't know in a way that makes them want to stop
listening to you, because they don't understand how what you're saying is
relevant to them or worth their time, or because it's clear you're more
interested in hearing yourself speak than in saying anything interesting, or
because you're more interested in using your audience for the Exposition High
than telling them something they'll find cool.
The craft of storytelling is a
set of tricks useful for keeping peoples' attention. The purpose is more
important than the form; it's very easy to apply proper craftsmanship to the
communication of boring or tedious ideas, and then you fail. The cycle of art
through history is "Form is established, form is polished, artistic
community becomes ever more obsessed with getting the form right, younger
artists shout 'Fuck this!' and go make their own new form."
That said, the human race has
been polishing the form of narrative craftsmanship for about three million
years now. There is probably some value in the traditional form, even if
adhering to it dogmatically results in soulless formulaic trash.
Professional wrestling!
Sean Waltman was a wrestling
performer best known for working under the X-Pac persona in the WWF. He got a
lot of boos. Wrestling has a fascinatingly complex vocabulary for expessing
success or failure at managing audience enthusiasm, which is important because
it keeps asses in seats. Audience response is called heat. Faces, i.e. heroes
(from "babyface"), are personas the writers want the audience to
love. Ideally they get cheers. Heels, i.e. villains, are personas the writers
want the audience to love to hate. They get boos. Both face heat and
heel heat are valuable. Actually, copious heel heat is especially valuable—there's
a reason for the Undertaker.
Wrestling management used X-Pac as
a heel for a long time becaue he got a lot of boos—I
mean, like, a lot of boos; the audience would go crazy when he showed up,
they'd throw things at him—and they took this to mean he had a lot of heel
heat. He didn't. If they'd been paying attention to television ratings, as they
eventually did, they'd have noticed that viewership dropped during his
segments. That doesn't happen when a heel with a lot of heat takes the ring.
The audience jeered X-Pac
because they hated watching him, not because they wanted to see him get what
was coming to him. They wanted management to stop featuring him and get back to
something they found worth their time. X-Pac was so hated that wrestling crowds
would eventually take to chanting "X-Pac sucks!" even in situations
where he wasn't around, if they didn't have anything else to chant about.
The X-Pac anomaly eventually
lead to the formal classification X-Pac heat.
(I'm not a wrestling fan myself
but I have friends who are, and the story of X-Pac heat is a thing I love.)
Heat, like kayfabe (look it up),
is a great concept and useful in many contexts outside professional wrestling,
but for me the most useful thing to take out of heat as a concept is this: X-Pac
heat is distinct from heel heat. Once you're used to thinking of audience engagement
as various forms of heat, and introduced to the idea of X-Pac heat as its own thing,
you'll see it everywhere.
This is something a lot of
artists could stand to learn. I say this not just as a critic but as someone
who has helped manage and direct a creative property, and who has had to
supervise artists who do not understand the difference between heel heat and
X-Pac heat and are resistant to learning it. This is a hard lesson to learn but
doing so will make you better at creating audience engagement: Just because
you've set out to provoke the audience, and the audience acts provoked, doesn't
mean you've succeeded.
Halting states!
This isn't a concept from
wrestling; it's from math. Theory goes like this: Give a man a coin to flip and
ten bucks. Every time the coin comes up heads he gets another dollar; every
time it comes up tails he loses one. He can flip for however long he wants but
if he reaches zero dollars he has to stop. Wins and losses are, in theory,
distributed equally, so in theory he can go forever. In practice wins and
losses come in streaks and eventually he's going to go on a long losing streak
and hit broke. This phenomenon is also called the Gambler's Ruin for obvious
reasons, and is not just useful in gambling. Like the concept of X-Pac heat it
is useful everywhere.
If you're managing a creative
property that requires audience enthusiasm to perpetuate itself, creating X-Pac
heat while trying to create heel heat is a great way to send your property into
a halting state, especially if you, the artist, cannot recognize the difference
between the two. This actually happened to professional wresting, for reasons
too complicated to go into here—remember when North America had two major wrestling
franchises, WCW and WWF (back when it was called WWF...)? It doesn't anymore.
Mismanagement and misinterpreting the points of audience engagement lead to a
shrinking audience and eventually there was only enough wrestling money to
support one of the two.
Everyone remembers a TV show they
loved that was cancelled because the new season sucked and ratings went down
and the network decided to cut its loses. Different shows for different people,
mind.
Dada!
In the wake of World War I, the
artistic community of Europe was furious with the way the established artistic
forms had been used to inspire a generation of young men to go die of gas
attacks and sepsis in endless fields of trenches and barbed wire. They decided
"Screw this!" to various degrees of commitment, one of the most
extreme of which was dada, which nowadays mostly means surrealism (because
people like referring to surrealism using a word that sounds surreal, yo dawg) but
originally was anti-art. The goal of dada was to provoke extreme emotional
responses from audiences and make them reexamine their ideology and values;
specifically, reexamine their ideas about the value of art itself. A dada
performance of Hamlet would get to the point where Hamlet meets his dad's
ghost, and then the actor might turn to the audience and say "This whole
play is kinda trite, isn't it?" and then the curtains would fall. A dada
painting might be a performance art piece where the artist paints something
beautiful, shows it to enough people that word gets out that he's painted
something beautiful, and then burn it because fuck people who think
looking at pretty pictures is a worthwhile use of their time. The appeal of
pretty pictures is why recruitment posters work and it got us into this mess,
etc..
As you can imagine, this
sentiment—the idea that attachment to traditional forms is
harmful to society—experienced a resurgence in the wake of World War
II. It persists today, and contributes to the general feeling, among artists
and laymen alike, that if you have to rely on mere craft to keep
audience engagement, then you're a tool. Craft, we feel, is failure. Relying on
proven techniques is cowardice.
Now, those dada guys had a point
and I envy them their conviction, and I know people working on modern abstract
and nonrepresentative art who produce fascinating work so I'm not bashing that
line of creative descent, but I am really, really starting to think that ninety
years later, wholesale and institutionalized contempt for for craft, divorced
from its historical context, is ridiculous and damaging to artistic discourse.
It's too easily used as a dodge
for criticism.
...
I feel like I've lost sight of
something. I was supposed to be writing about a specific topic... a video game,
I think. What was it? Starts with am M?
Mass Effect! That's it! I was
talking about the end of Mass Effect 3! Right. I should get back on topic.
People who use "But it's
art!" as a defense of bad art
