White Human's Burden: Mass Effect Andromeda

It is probably too early for me to review Mass Effect Andromeda. There is quite a bit of story I have yet to encounter, nor have I drilled that deeply into some of the less obvious mechanics. However, I've landed on half the available worlds already and done the big plot thing on most of those so...

I can't help but be thinking of protagonist effect. Especially in games, there's a terrible tendency for nothing to get done unless the player avatar does it. This doesn't always mean they are recognized as The Chosen One in-story; in several of the Medal of Honor types the player avatar is at best a buck private -- what happens instead in these is that anytime a sniper needs to be taken out or a door opened all the sergeants can think of is demand that he be the one to do it.

(In other places this is a gameplay/story segregation fail. For instance, the player avatar might be just one of a squad trying to move through an area. The thing of it is, they win through -- or don't -- the moment the player avatar hits the invisible checkpoint. In many, many other cases, the story may treat the player avatar as being just one of many, but in actual play they might have done most of the fighting while the AI friendlies were still milling around.)

The original Mass Effect trilogy didn't do too badly at making the centrality of Shepard organic to the plot. First, the Commander starts as an "N7"; a top 99th percentile soldier. Then the Commander is hand-selected for elite Spectre status (a reports-only-to-the-Council special agent) and due to various events political and otherwise achieves it. So Shepard believably has both the prowess and the freedom to go to places with a problem and solve it for them. (Presuming, of course, that said problem can be solved by emptying magazines in its direction. Fortunately, the game largely delivers same.)

Later events up the Chosen One status; first Shepard stumbles across a broken Beacon left by the extinct Prothean precursor race, meaning he had first-hand knowledge about the World Threatening Problem. His success in trying to stop this threat are visible enough (eventually) that various people continue to give him the freedom to go about it his own way. Even the ending is a recap of the start; due to his abilities his squad is in the vanguard, and thus when someone breaks through to the final McGuffin it isn't that much of a stretch that it's Shepard again.

Mass Effect Andromeda is somewhat less elegant about this. In the game, another former N7 -- who also has a unique link with an extremely helpful AI -- has more-or-less created the idea of The Pathfinder, a single individual who leads the way for the colonization effort, doing the primary exploring and making many of the tough choices about when and where to attempt a settlement. Helps that he was a key organizer of the whole "colonize the Andromeda Galaxy" plan. Means he could credibly write his own job description, and largely sell people on it.

Unfortunately he dies on his first mission. Perhaps because there is no time to make a different choice, he invests that trust in one of his children, along with the special link to the AI that gives him some of his abilities.

The somewhat less believable part of this is that essentially all of the Andromeda Initiative survivors appear so shell-shocked by a series of terrible setbacks they've become unable to make decisions. Well, to be fair, the people who could make decisions did...they chose to leave (becoming yet another faction you meet later in the game). They pin all their hopes on The Pathfinder when he finally shows up -- and then, although rather less enthusiastically -- on his hand-chosen successor when he dies.

Sure, Sarah/Jack has a lot of training, and has the special set of AI codes, but even he or she is quite forthright about this being a ridiculous amount of responsibility. Still, this awkwardness is overcome by the game, both with the very probationary way they are treated early on, and their own professed worries, and, eventually, enough things that go right to win them a slow and grudging increase in confidence. It is still ridiculous just how many things The Pathfinder turns out to be responsible for.

The place where the game really falls down is with the Angarans. Long story short, they also had a cavalcade of disaster. First The Scourge, a Negative Space Wedgie that turns all the planets in easy reach down to only marginally habitable. Then the Kett arrive, slaughtering and enslaving. The first thing Ryder does is -- thanks again to the Magical AI -- start turning back on the forerunner magitech atmosphere machine-thingies that start reversing the effects of The Scourge. This is something the Angarans had been trying to do, but despite studying the stuff for hundreds of years they never made much headway in figuring out how it worked. Apparently they never had Sudoku on their planet.

(There's a gamification aspect to this. Most of what Ryder does is wave an Omni-Tool at the stuff, which is presented as letting the magitech AI do its thing. But a key part to turning on the towers is through the player playing a mini-game of Complete the Rows.)

If that wasn't bad enough, to earn the trust of the Angarans Ryder agrees to help fight the Kett. And single-handedly takes out a key fortress the Angarans had been throwing themselves against since the Kett arrived. Okay, sure; they got a rare chance at it because a code was intercepted, but how is it Ryder is in strike distance and no-one else?

In the television show Stargate Atlantis the protagonists go around doing things and shaking things up but this works for several reasons. For one, they are outsiders. That doesn't, however, give them a gift of insight to help solve other people's intractable problems. What it does, is make the Milky Way people dangerously naive. Most of the peoples they have run into have found ways to survive the Wraith incursions. Within days, however, the Atlantis crew shot the wrong Wraith and permanently upset the status quo. Now all the old ways of coping are failing.

More importantly for this comparison (the Pegasus Galaxy situation is unique) is that the Atlantis crew have...Atlantis. As in, the most advanced tech around. And this gets mercilessly pointed out by most of the people they meet. The Atlantis crew wins in places where no-one else could -- and at the end of it, the people they helped go, "Hey, if we had those cool toys we would have done it ourselves. And done it a lot better, too."

I find I can suspend a certain amount of disbelief for a the right kind one-man army. People do have a wide variety of skills and genetic aptitudes, after all. Bruce Lee's hands really were that fast. Especially in a less realistic game I haven't a huge problem going along with the player avatar being just that much better than anyone else. It does help, though, if there's an in-game reason. Otherwise you start feeling like the Only Sane Man. I had that experience in later play throughs of Tomb Raider 2013. "She's just one girl!" shout the Solarii as you mow them down. Yeah. One girl that can hit the side of a barn...unlike you lot.

This is pretty much where I was with Ryder. Her stated background in-game isn't super-soldier. She's defended an archaeological camp against pirates and slavers, she says at one point. And went hunting with her dad, I think. And okay, there's the AI boost that for various reasons only she and dad got. But past that, she's using the same weapons the Kett are using and she and her two friends are typically mopping the floor with squad to platoon strength adversaries. For all intents and purposes, it really is a world of cardboard for her. It makes you, through your avatar, feel less like you are skilled or lucky, and more like the rest of the world is incompetent.

(This is not something you could help by setting the game on "hard" mode. You'll still have to overcome the same ridiculous numbers. You'll just fail at it more often and spend more time in loading screens.)

I'm left on the fence whether it is worse to have a hero of clearly ordinary skill who wins despite the outrageous odds against it, or a hero who is so clearly superior it is hard to feel for them. Between, that is, the ludicrously lucky schmo or the unlikeable Superman. I've been reading a lot of Greek myth and particularly the Homeric "heroes" are rather notable in that theirs is a heroism of doing, not of trying. They are almost inevitably part god, and given godly gifts, and sometimes infused with even more power. Theirs is not a struggle, but a demonstration of superiority. I find this difficult to laud.

Still, one has to remember that the bulk of The Odyssey is about a man who struggles to overcome hardship. It reminds one that one of the great Spider-Man moments was not when he beat up Galactus or something, but a moment he was nearly crushed under a great weight...and refused to give in, taking an entire page to finally struggle free.

But back to the problem. Besides the way Ryder plows through opposition, and the way the alien tech proves so easy to manipulate, the number of steps and the overall effort is so very very little. This is a problem of gamification, of course. But it is also one of trying to make a game with a hundred-plus hours of play around too little plot to support it.

You can finish the Mass Effect trilogy in as little as forty hours, if you don't mind losing most of the galaxy on the way to your pyrrhic conclusion. But this is made up of one overall story arc, split into three distinct acts, each of which falls into four to six major episodes each. Mass Effect Andromeda doesn't give the same sense of overarching story and theme. It just feels like a bunch of fetch quests. If you do three similar ones, then suddenly there's a great victory and an entire alien race is calling you a hero from the stars.

You can pretty much sleep-walk through a couple of easy fights, drive or walk blindly from one pop-up quest marker to another, make no decision tougher than whether to answer a question in a manner that's funny and warm or professional but quirky, and come back to the Nexus to hear people singing the praises of the new Pathfinder who can do what they couldn't do over a decade of work.

There's even quests on the Nexus where you slide by on either the ridiculous latitude you get as Pathfinder or the magic AI. In the latter, there's a saboteur you catch because no-one else has the crypto-key to everything and a magic scanner to boot. In the former, you get to judge a murder case because you just arrived and are presumed impartial and because you are (deep breath) Dah Pathfinder no-one is going to question it.

(The Nexus is the big space station that's in-world supposed to be the meeting place and support facility for the colonization effort, and in-game functions as a hub that you actually don't need as ninety percent of the game functionality is available on your ship. And even then, I have yet to bother climbing around the ship to use the crafting stations. I just grab one at whatever alien I'm visiting at the moment. They all work the same.)

Now, this could be made workable. The big flaw is not that desperate confused and scared people -- who just got their asses kicked in what was essentially a civil war as everyone with a strong opinion went and left in a huff -- would turn to a newcomer who still has idealism, who comes in with fresh supplies and new hope, and has been vested with a reputation of being able to accomplish the impossible (a borrowed vest, but still). It is the way it is carried out in game.

The stories are awful, the underlying mechanics far too obvious ("A quest giver will appear and ask you to go to a point on the map and return. Bad guys will attack at least once.") It makes the rest of the Andromeda Initiative look stupid. But worse, it makes the local inhabitants -- indigenes that the Initiative really should have predicted when they planned this massive colonialist effort -- look worse.

You can make your Ryder any color you like (in an interesting mechanic, your choices for the kid reflect back to parent as well as sibling). The point is not that (the default) Sarah is white, or even that she's human. It is that she as the protagonist is functionally the same as the white dude in those unfortunate movies and books where apparently the natives had never figured out irrigation, or making peace with their enemies, or how to play basketball until the hero came along.

(Image from a Polygon article, showing how natural dad Alec can look even when taken far from the default appearance).

Hack it out

Oscar Wilde once removed a comma. I just removed a book. That's actually less progress than he made, but at least it's progress.

One tiny step at a time I'm getting closer to my outline. It is frustrating. Perhaps the worst part of outlining is the pressure to get it done. As I told a fellow sound designer once, there's a point at which the effort of optimization becomes itself sub-optimal. You can procrastinate forever trying to find the perfect plan.

The trick is knowing when you stop. Another circle in the N-dimensional Venn Diagram that makes up the goals and structures of a story. The nasty thing about writing is that unlike, say, trying to work up a microphone plot and a speaker hang, there are vanishingly few beginning constraints. The theme, the plot, the style, the world; all are up for grabs.

Really, a big part of plotting and outlining is letting go of the paths not taken. The only progress is in how small you can shrink the circles, how many options you take off the table. That also makes it nearly impossible for anyone, even another writer, to help you with the process. It is difficult to explain whatever parameterization you may have already achieved on these wibbly-wobbly balls of character arc/narrative density/extended allusions/world building stuff. It is even harder to defend the reasoning behind any of these choices. So when the person who is trying to help says, "Why don't you just do this?" it would almost inevitably require rethinking a choice made many branches ago, and by re-making it cause changes to cascade across everything you'd hoped you had already nailed down.

I took a look at Scapple, a planning software from the same guys who make Scrivener. It is cute but too limited. It allows you to make text blocks or images that can be linked with lines in the honored photographs-and-bits-of-string model. Something which has been asked for in Scrivener but proves difficult to conceptualize how it could actually be integrated usefully.

For me it is insufficient. Scrivener at least allows me to create an index card where a brief description can be drilled into a full-length text or even a nested file structure. With split screen, you can even unpack a card or folder whilst still displaying the hierarchy above it.

Unfortunately you can't unpack two branches and compare material within them while still viewing their place in the overall file structure. Really, I think a lot of these schemes fail on the problem that the data of writing is generally text, and text is graphically inefficient, and it would be tough to find the monitor space to display anything but the most trivial layer of what is a deeply fractal data set.

Another way of viewing the data set is of multiple threads, or multiple slices. A physical progression, a mental evolution (say, solving a mystery), and a character arc may be happening simultaneously, but not all of these elements start, crest, or conclude at the same points. So one scene might contain bits from all three, or none at all.

The best I've seen from various software packages is keyword tracking. Some even have ways of linking to a live timeline, or a map, so the evolution over time or space is implicitly carried along these keyword links. Alas, this doesn't help all the other arcs you might want to track. Even tracking where you've dropped background information and world building the reader needs to know is a difficult task.

I think what might work for me is if I could hyperlink; if I created a folder containing discrete scene particles of each major moment in an arc, I could have those aliased from folders representing scenes or chapters while remaining editable in their original relationship.

So I've defined a lot of the top level of The Enceladus Calyx. The length, the time I'm willing to invest until First Draft, the general flavor, the subject area. Those are all things that can't be changed because they define the project itself. Next down are elements I have enough planning time invested in I'd really rather not change; the protagonist and a bunch of supporting cast, the bones of the plot, locations, several set-piece scenes.

As in my other novel (other other novel?) I'm trying very hard to do only general research until the outline is locked, at which point I can focus in on smaller more specific questions. Instead of having to learn everything there is about the Hess, I just have to reconstruct Bad Münster am Stein-Ehrenberg.

Given the above, everything revolves around the titular antiquity and that's been my struggle for the last couple of weeks. The places the calyx has been, who has seen it, who has held it, form the whodunnit part of the plot. What the characters, including my protagonist, know about the calyx and its journey and how they react forms the basis of the functional plot; this is what generates everything from dialogs to fight scenes. What the calyx says about definitions and ownership of antiquities and Antiquity forms the themes I am working. And of course it would be nice if it all fell within what is actually true in the current-day antiquities market.

So everything influences everything. It's a fuzzy logic problem that's grown into a giant hairball.

The big progress I made today is there is no longer a book signing and there is no living author. That saves me from having to flesh out the author and figure out where he fits in (instead the book was written by the recently deceased collector of antiquities who was already in my character list.) That also means there's less attention on the book, meaning the gallery is about Dead Guy's tantalizing pre-UNESCO collection of antiquities.

That gets me way more than is possible to explain in any terse fashion. It means that a key early scene can be framed more cleanly around the experience of my protagonist defining her relationship with the role she finds herself playing. It means that the scenes in Germany allow it to be, well, Germany; not a stand-in for issues in contemporary America. It means there is a lot more discovery to be had when she returns to Athens. It also gives the gallery something to legitimately display and sell.

It hasn't solved the problem that I've shoved too much action into the front end and I'm still looking at a sagging middle. But still...it has moved me one step closer to being able to wrestle with commas, instead of with abstractions and labels attempting to stand in for tens of thousands of words of text.

What do you get if you feed the bunnies?

Answer? More bunnies. (Apologies to "The Trouble with Tribbles.")


The "Athena Fox" story is stuck on the outline. I'm doing a narrative outline for this one. The other thing that's new is I'm determined to solve most of my problems in the outline and before committing to more development. And right now the outline is stalling at the end of Act I. There's thematic directions I haven't nailed down yet.

So perfect opportunity for other plot bunnies to announce themselves (that, and I've been reading analysis at Kotoku about what went wrong with the Mass Effect series, particularly Andromeda, and fanfiction set in that universe).

The fanfiction I went looking for and found a couple interesting examples of is stuff that takes the basic elements (the core conflict, large parts of the world-building) but starts the story in a different place. Often, in a much earlier place. I'm reading one now where Earth was destroyed hundreds of years before the story began, with the most thriving part of Humanity's survivors being a client race of the Turians. In another, Wrex crash-lands on Earth before we even get to Mars, and takes it on himself to prepare Humanity to defend itself against being taken advantage of by the more advanced species who will be along eventually.



Okay, so here's one plot bunny. First, the Reapers are acting as they are described in almost everything but the massed assault they launch in Mass Effect 3 (even in that game, they continue their old games of working behind the scenes, manipulating, creating divisions, making their enemies fight amongst themselves and turning their own hierarchies and command structures against them by indoctrinating key figures). In any case; they wiped out Earth some hundreds of years ago, just as humanity was discovering their first Mass Effect Relay and was about to move out among the stars.

The Charon Relay is still encased in ice, making it costly to explore the system. Eventually, of course, someone does. Perhaps elements of the Migrant Fleet, still looking for a new homeworld after the Geth kicked them off Rannoch (and, yes, in this story that is explicitly a result of Reaper intervention. It was the Reapers that made possible the chain of unlikely events that sabotaged any ability of the Quarians to stop the Geth problem before it even arose.

They find enough in the ruins of Earth to marvel at the variety of cultures that had once thrived there. They also find the Prothean ruins on Mars...and, if that exists within the continuity of this story, the plans for the Crucible.



For the second Plot Bunny we are on Mars again. This time, humanity is thriving. As in the game, though, they aren't considered competent enough to explore Prothean ruins on their own. That, and again as in the game the Asari had pushed through Council agreements for equal sharing of all finds (despite keeping one of the best ones secret on their homeworld and using what they'd learned from it to become one of the three most powerful races).

And...it falls together all too neatly. Ruined Prothean base full of secrets, and a young and unsure human archaeologist. And in the Doctor Whitman role, an arrogant but naive Asari researcher (sort of a tautology there.) Throw in Batarians or Vorcha or even Cerberus seekers after the same buried secrets as cannon fodder, and you've even got the Prothean Beacon effect for your possessed-by-ancient queen angle. But, hell, I've worked with that plot before. I'm tired of it.



I prefer the third bunny, which is actually just a slightly older version of a bunny that's appeared before. Humanity is new on the scene, grudgingly allowed to visit the Citadel but of even lower status than Volus and Elcor (but not Vorcha...nothing's lower than Vorcha). Their universities have sort of devolved into "read everything the Elder Races deign to share with us" rather than original research.

Our Shepard stand-in might be an engineer, or an academic interested in the Protheans, or who knows. Anything but military. She hooks up with a Quarian on his or her Pilgrimage, a Quarian who is also way too fond of asking the kinds of questions nobody else wants asked. This isn't -- mostly -- a desperate tale of survival like the above, or a lot of gun-play in the corridors. Even if a better setting might be Omega, the sprawling, aging space station version of Mos Eisley. This is in fact heir to the other half of game play in the Mass Effect series, that is, conversations. Lots and lots of conversations. Exploring, asking questions, proposing ideas, trying stuff that hasn't been tried before. It is two young people with a surprising and strong between-species friendship who with humor and intelligence proceed to shake up everything.

And, yeah. In all these ideas the true nature of the Crucible and the Reapers is totally up for grabs, because if you are already going to change the timeline, why stick with something so stupid that so lacks integration with the rest of the trilogy anyhow?

Marauder Shields

I've been reading some articles, as well as an excellent webcomic (Marauder Shields, taking off from a meme that spread around the Mass Effect community shortly after the third game released). And I am thinking the problem is largely one of framing. I offer this not as a rant or a way to blame a company that has moved on to newer things, but as a way all of us that try to tell a story can learn from what went wrong.

##

Not to say the original release wasn't flawed. It was. One story going around (none of the behind-the-scenes details are really exposed through anything other than rumor and off-the-record quotes) is that the budget was slashed and they were given only a month to finish. This may have had something to do with their purchase by EA.

And it wasn't because of a lack of player choice, per se. After all, in Mass Effect 1 you don't have a choice to join Saren and let Sovereign  destroy the world. There are many smaller choices but the overall plot arc remains the same. In fact, several fan-made patches solve the Mass Effect 3 ending in the same way; they remove all choice from the final mission. Shepard gets to the Citadel, the Crucible fires, Reapers are destroyed, end of story.

The problem with the original release is that in none of the choices was it particularly clear what happened. The team had put so little in the way of animation or even explanatory dialog all players were really able to grasp is the Catalyst said some crazy stuff then Shepard got to decide what color the galaxy blew up in. f you chose "Destroy," the Crucible lit up red and the mass effect relays exploded...and you went to credits. If you chose "Dominate," the Crucible lit up blue and the mass effect relays exploded...and you went to credits.

Okay...it was a little better than that, but it wasn't until Bioware was dragged kicking and screaming back to sink a little more money into actually finishing the game that it became at all obvious what this final choice meant, and what it meant to the rest of the galaxy, for all the races Shepard had worked to save, and for all the people Shepard had worked with over three long games.

And it is also not to say the ending isn't illogical.

Again few details escape corporate secrecy, but the story is that the original direction the series was going to go had been leaked and to preserve the game experience for the player the producer ordered it changed (he also is rumored to have hated the original idea). At some point the original writer left entirely, and according to some stories floating around the new script was created secretly, without consultation with the rest of the design team, and with only a month to work.

Which would certainly explain both the way it doesn't seem to fit the universe as previously presented, has huge logic holes that a longer discussion might or might not have been able to fix...and why it fails in the main point I am leading up to in this essay.

That point being one of story-telling. Of preparation, of thematic unity, and of training the player.

##

A little more digression. Framing is the problem here, and there is also framing around what it is that happened to the game. The original gloss by Bioware was that the players didn't get the ending they wanted. And some people bought into this; there is still the idea that the game chose to end with hard choices and sacrifice and the players pulled a hissy fit because they wanted to win everything and have the last frame being Shep and Liara strolling off into the sunset (Or Garrus...but anyhow!)

So the discussion was presented as one of artistic integrity, as well as a sort of Millennial Baby complaint about people who couldn't stand a little realism in their games.

And...look. You can't crow about artistic integrity when all you had was an explosion and three sets of color filters. That's not a unique artistic vision that is being attacked, that's just lazy (not lazy on the side of the artists and writers, of course; lazy on the side of the game company who thought they could ship it like that and were soundly shown otherwise.)

With the Extended Cut, and with time to ponder, the ending is artistically defendable and can be made to work within the whole. I have played two of the available endings (one of which was only made available after fan outcry) and I found them both a satisfying ending to the character arc I had nourished for those two specific play throughs.

There is still heated discussion about those three endings. But this is good. When you read the online discussions, discussions which hotly debate the ethics, the support in story, the real-world implications, you discover that the majority of players have found and are (reasonably) satisfied with one of the four choices. It is great that there is so much disagreement about which one, and what they really imply, because that means the writers succeeded (at last, and after being funded to go back and clarify what it was they had tried to say on too little budget and too little time) to produce something that people could really get their teeth into.

Even the Indoctrination Theory is holistic here. Indoctrination is a fan theory that the entire last scene of the game -- everything involving the nattering annoying StarChild -- isn't actually happening, but is a battle within the mind of Shepard as the Reapers try to brainwash him into going along with their plans; either the Dominate plan the Illusive Man was Indoctrinated into believing, or the Synthesis plan Saren was Indoctrinated into in the first game. Or Destroy -- which in some versions of Indoctrination Theory, is the Reapers convincing Shepard to blow up the very weapon he had hoped to use to stop them.

There's no official support for it, of course...but it works within what is shown and is an acceptable, logical, cathartic conclusion to the game experience to some players.

##

So here's the real failing. The ending(s) is tacked on. And it feels that way. I explained part of that in a previous post; about how the final scene breaks with the conventions that had been established up to that point. It feels rushed, it feels railroaded, it feels incomplete. Even with the Extended Cut it has these failings. But mostly, it doesn't follow the established flow of the game.

The lesser of the two problems here is that the events are unprepared for. Fiction thrives on revelations, but they must be satisfying revelations.

Take Mass Effect 1. The Citadel, the giant space station that is the largest meeting place of all the Council races, the political, economic and military hub of the Council, the de-facto hub of the Mass Effect Relays that allow interstellar travel...is revealed in late-game to be a honey pot established by the Reapers.

Shepard, and the player, are surprised to learn this. But they are not shocked. Why? From the first moment you land on the Citadel you are made aware there are mysteries there. You are told right off that no-one really knows who made it (probably the Protheans, but...) You encounter the mysterious Keepers, who maintain it, who speak to no-one, who live and work in the multiple levels of the structure no other Council race has ever visited.

Heck, the other end of the Illos Conduit is right there in a public park and people tell you they have no idea why the Protheans put a scale model of a Mass Effect Relay there....and if you stand close enough to it...you can feel it humming.

Same for the (rather less impressive) revelation of the Human Reaper at the climax of Mass Effect 2. It has been well-established what the Collectors had been up to before that. Or even the "Leviathan" DLC; there is a race of giant beings who go back to before the Reapers and have kept themselves hidden through something that looks a lot like Indoctrination. Surprise; they built the Reapers.

The third game has, however, as many things that come out of nowhere as it does things that are satisfying and logical when you encounter them. Mordin's cure for the Genophage -- absolutely prepared for (largely during Mass Effect 2, both in the main campaign Tuchanka mission and in his optional Loyalty Mission.) Even Kalros, the giant Thresher Maw, is something you accept as being something you really should have seen coming -- Thresher Maws have been a thing, and especially a thing deeply connected to the Krogan, since the first game....and are you seeing a pattern here?

The StarChild, Kai Leng? Invented for the third game and they totally feel like an ass pull. In fact, pretty much everything about the Crucible and the way it is finally used, all the way down to the London Conduit, comes out of absolutely nowhere.

The really sad thing is how many of these elements could have been seeded. Even then, even with only one game to go, they could have been slipped in more organically than they were. There was one thing,the game tried very hard to prepare the ground for. It did not succeed, perhaps because it was too far in cross-purpose to what had been shown before. Or perhaps merely because that one thing was slid in sideways, inorganically; established supra-narrative when something so important needed to be tied implicitly to actual play.

(It is just one more sign of the hamfisted nature of this that a random kid that appears for all of thirty seconds in the early part of the game is supposed to be the symbol that Shepard latches on to, and that the Catalyst takes the form of. They pick this, instead of, say, Mordin Solus, who the player spends hours with and either watches his heroic sacrifice...or is forced to shoot him himself. Or any other of a dozen names that are a lot more meaningful to Shepard...and to the player.)

Basically, they told instead of showed. Through two games Shepard had never surrendered. Not even death could stop him. He fought to convince others the Reapers were real, and he fought to keep them from returning. In the third game, the Reapers arrive...and he gives up. He stops believing he can win, he starts obsessing about the people he couldn't save, and he make his final decisions from a position of hopelessness.

But this isn't ever established in play. This sort of thing is almost always a mistake when it comes to games. Constructing an inner world is difficult enough without having a player who constructs an outer world through actual play. Take, as a belabored for-instance, Tomb Raider 2013. I've played through that game role-playing Lara as a reluctant warrior, terrified by the violent situation she has been thrust in. And this is gameplay. I put the difficulty up full, I crouch behind cover making maximum use of sniping and booby traps. Even with Sam in danger she has to force herself to proceed.

I've also played that Lara as pushed to the brink and angry as hell. That is, fought up-close and personal, wading into the enemy with ice-axe flailing, as well as taking huge risks moving through the world. Both of these are functional approaches within the structure of the game. Each has different advantages and other follow-on effects (you get hit less from cover, for instance, but you gain more points and progress faster with the close-in approach).

The Mass Effect series is built from the ground-up as a role-playing system, where the player decides the background and career of their Shepard, their specialization, their skills, even their gender and skin color. And also their approach to problems; along the Paragon/Renegade axis, or in a more complicated and nuanced fashion.

This is exactly the wrong sort of game to inform the player in cutscenes that Shepard is finally succumbing to PTSD. And this is especially the wrong way to inform the player that the final victory will be pyrrhic at best.

Do it in game play. It is that easy; have people Shepard cares about and is trying to help get killed within actual play. They come so close with the resolution on Rannoch. On Rannoch, you almost have to chose between letting the Quarians destroy the Geth they originally created, or letting the emergent intelligence of the Geth defend themselves with genocide. Thing is, though, if you play very well...if you do everything right...you can save both.

If the game is going to establish that as the reality of its world, then the final act of Shepard's life can't be to kill the Geth for good, no chance of finding a better solution. You can make that the default, you can make that the ending that most players achieve, but if you've established that the player can earn a better victory on Rannoch then you need to accept as designers and writers that the player can earn a better victory on the Citadel.

Or deal with your darker vision and make sure you've established it, in every scene -- not just in cutscenes where Shepard can be forced to flinch and miss, but in actual play. Instead through the game, even if you haven't made that nth percentile, even if you don't make peace between the Geth and the Quarians on Rannoch...you keep winning. You make alliances. You rescue friends. You kill Reapers.

It is one of the worst bits of gameplay/story segregation ever foisted on a player.

##

The bigger error, however, is one of preparation in gameplay. And it is a problem throughout the last parts of the game, not just within the last choice made. Throughout the series Mass Effect worked around what you might call a morality system, a variously-constructed two-part meter inherited in part from their previous Star Wars games Knights of the Old Republic and sequel.

Choices -- choices made generally in dialog -- map (though not always neatly) to what are called Paragon and Renegade outlooks. You could gloss them as Diplomacy versus Expediency.

Here's the reason I wrote this essay, however. At the final moment of play, at the top of the Citadel, Shepard is given three choices. These are physical choices, but...look at them:

On the right is the Destroy option. Go this way and shoot a relay (more obvious symbolism, as many of the Renegade options, especially the Interrupts, result in you shooting something) and the Crucible kills the Reapers...along with every other Synthetic in the galaxy and much of the technology civilization is using, up to and including the cybernetics keeping Shepard alive.

In the dialog wheel, Renegade options are always on the lower half, and marked in red. This option is to the Right and just look at it.

To the left, which for any culture that reads left-to-right maps conveniently to "top," is the Dominate option. Shepard holds out his hands to two bars (as if making peace) and takes control of the Reapers, forcing them to his will.

Thing is, there are more meanings folded into Paragon and Renegade than I touched on above. The Renegade is expedient, but can also be accused of violence for its own sake. They are in many ways the "Lone cop who doesn't play by the rules" archetype. Paragon plays by the rules, but sometimes too much. You are taking the path of justice and it is sometimes cold. Even...controlling.

Here's an example from play. On Novaria, a company world, you are stuck during a lock-down of the main colony. A businessman offers a way out; evidence against the corrupt colonial administrator is in the process of being grabbed by the cops. If you can snatch the evidence he'll blackmail the administrator and as thanks give you his garage pass. Do this and you proceed with the mission.

However, as you are securing the data you are approached by an undercover operative who asks you to turn the data over to her. You can chose to betray your contact and trust the wheels of justice will move swiftly enough that after the administrator is taken away you'll get a pass to get out. This is the true Paragon path; upholding the law and doing what is right but at the risk of losing everything...and despite the hardship it may cause to innocents.

Or you can turn the data over to the corrupt administrator! Both businessman and undercover investigator are hauled away and you get a cash bonus. As well as the pass you need to proceed with your mission. This is less expedient and more mercenary but really, the main reason to do it is for the lols. Really, in a lot of options Renegade maps to "be a bastard."

So, so far, the game has well prepared these two color-coded choices. It could have improved them by using more Paragon/Renegade like language to describe them, or by making sure they agreed with the other semiotics (such as having them appear in the correct places on a dialog wheel). It could, in short, have been better prepared and better established but it is in keeping with how the player has been trained to respond and as to what to expect.

Here's the bigger problem; there's a third choice. It goes right down the middle. It isn't color-coded at the Citadel but in the following cut scene is color-coded green. It is, according to various evidence both internal and external to the game, the preferred, even canonical ending.

This is...wonderful...in several ways. It offers a third option. It offers a way out of the cycle of conflict, domination, and the cycles of synthetic uprise and destruction the Catalyst claims it is trying to stop. It is semiotically placed as right down the middle....

...But this clashes with every other semiotic the player has been given. In no other place in the game is there a third option presented in this fashion, and it certainly is never done so with a green coding or a center position (in the Dialog Wheel, center left is "ask for clarification" and center right is exit...usually Shepard's terse "I should go now.")

And, no. None of this maps to the purported inevitable conflict between organics and synthetics (a conflict, mind you, that not just the entire series but numerous specific instances in the third game have proven is no more intractable than the long mistrust between Krogan and Salarian.)

In fact, the two special slots in the Dialog Wheel (two slots I've been calling Paragon and Renegade for convenience but are more properly called Persuade and Intimidate) function in exactly this take-a-third-choice manner. Over and over in the game, you are asked to let the crook escape or let him shoot the hostage....or -- and they are not always offered, and are rarely offered in convenient opposing pairs but are more often in isolation -- snap-shoot him to save the hostage, or talk him into putting his gun down.

What is especially illuminating is that in the final scenes of Mass Effect 3 the developers seem to have forgotten how the system worked at all! After you've defeated the insufferable Kai Leng in standard combat, he crawls back to his feet and sneaks up on Shepard in a cutscene. There's a Renegade Interrupt offered; if you take it, Shepard snaps his fancy sword as he tries to strike, then stabs him to death with her Omni-tool.

If you decline that Interrupt, a Paragon interrupt is offered. If you take that, Shepard dodges his sword....and stabs him to death with her Omni-tool. No; you don't get to take him prisoner, or do the "you're not worth it" routine. This isn't even a Han Shot First difference here; in both cases the fight goes down the same. The only difference is the Renegade Interrupt is cooler.

Later, a Renegade Interrupt is offered to shoot the Illusive Man. If you don't take it...he kills Shepard. Game over. This is not how Interrupts work! In all of the previous hundred hours of game play, they have never been plot-critical. There's a Paragon Interrupt during the Mordin Solus recruitment mission while you are trying to get directions from a sick Batarian. If you take it, Shepard gives him some Medi-gel. You get the information you need either way; the only difference is the Batarian may say, surprised, that not all humans are the bastards he thought they were.

In another case, a Krogan warlord is pontificating about how he is going to rule the galaxy...from a position above an exposed fuel line. The Interrupt makes the ensuing fight a little easier, but the main reason to do it is that Shepard gets to do something bad-ass, James Bond quip and all.

They are not quick-time events and have not previously been used that way in the game.

If the game wanted to lead you to discover a way beyond the cycle of destruction, a way to achieve a real lasting peace between organic and synthetic life, it should have done the groundwork. It should have established this thematically. And it should have worked this into the established conventions the player had been working with for over a hundred hours of gameplay.

Even, just having something green you could open. Or a center Dialog Wheel option that was other than clarification/exit. Anything to establish this for the player in a previous scene or two.

But it failed in every way possible. The conflict between the Geth and the Quarians was nicely explored in both the second and third game. You understood how the conflict came about, but it was never painted as inevitable. Merely as a cascade of mistrust and misunderstanding. No, actually it is much worse than that. Here is Shepard's own interaction with the Geth:

He fights them as a faceless enemy in Mass Effect 1. In Mass Effect 2 the Geth send an emissary and explain that the Geth only want peace, and only a small number of them joined with Saren and the Reapers (a partnership that worked out poorly for them). Shepard invites the Geth emissary, Legion, onto his ship and works with him to oppose the Reapers and the so-called Geth Heretics aligned with them.

In the third game, it is underlined through memory excerpts how the Geth only acted in self-defense, with the Quarians attacking from a mixture of fear and...guilt. And of course, on Rannoch, you can help the Geth achieve individuality outside of the Collective and even make peace with their creators.

The same evolution is experienced with EDI. Shepard's first experience with her is as an LI on Luna that went haywire and killed everyone there. Shepard deactivated it, but Cerberus picked it up and used it -- with appropriate overrides -- as the new Normandy's electronic warfare suite. When the Normandy was taken by the Collectors in Mass Effect 2 Joker disconnected the overrides and gave EDI control of the Normandy to effect a rescue. Throughout Mass Effect 3 EDI continues to grow, and Shepard (well, depending on player choices) supports her gaining more free will and beginning to establish her own moral code -- knowing full well the danger this entails.

Even the Reapers, when presented with the idea that they are machine intelligences -- synthetics in the language of the game -- respond that they are much, much more than that.

So, no. This supposed core conflict is not developed in any way in the game. It is a statement made by fiat in the last twenty minutes of play. In the same way, any axis of inevitable conflict versus potential resolution is never presented in a clear way that will eventually resolve into the final choice Shepard is allowed to make.

It is, in fact, much worse than that.

The Catalyst presents Synthesis as another option -- an option no better and no worse than Control or Destroy. And it doesn't explain what it means. Thing is, what has the game shown us previously in terms of integration of organic and synthetic life?

The first thing Shepard encounters are the husks on Eden Prime. These are battlefield corpses turned into terrifying yet also pitiful rotting zombies covered with blue circuitry. At the end of the game Shepard has a final encounter with the rogue Council agent Saren, who urges cooperation with the Reapers and has had much of his body replaced with similar technology. There is no cooperation, of course; the Reapers intend the destruction of organic life, and they take control of Saren's mind. When (and if...Paragon Interrupts y'all!) Saren breaks free of their control, he choses to shoot himself rather than serve them any longer. At which point the Reaper takes control of his corpse and uses it to fight Shepard.

Indoctrination, mind control via technology, is shown over and over in the series and is always horrifying. This is also a way the game indicates that Domination is a really nasty option. Particularly in the third game Cerberus has been intentionally shoving cybernetics into their own people to turn them into slaves. Their leader, the Illusive Man, is all about Control, absolute domination...and through the technology he has implanted in his own body has become another unwitting slave of the Reapers.

So, yeah. This is what the game has actually shown of any fusion of technology and humanity. This is not a way to lead the player gently into picking Synthesis as the best game ending...much less accepting that it is so (especially when all they actually saw was a green-tinted explosion spread out over the galaxy).

(Here's some more places the symbolism is a mess. When the Catalyst is explaining the first two options Shepard has a vision of them being executed. For Dominate, The Illusive Man is shown striding to the two levers and taking control. No better is the symbolism for Destroy; what Shepard sees here is Anderson, an old soldier and her mentor, doing the deed. In an earlier scene The Illusive Man claims that Anderson is a simplistic destroyer, "seeing everything over the barrel of a gun" but he is much more intelligent and caring than that. End result is the symbolic affect is nil. Or perhaps leans a little towards hinting that Destroy comes closer to the choice that provides the greatest good to the greatest number.)

There are two borderline cases. If you make peace on Rannoch, team member and old friend Tali will tell you in a minor bit of dialog that she has Geth "programs" (sort of atomic units of their gestalt consciousness) running on the environmental suit she wears, and they are helping her to get healthier and stronger. She is, that is, sharing with synthetic life in a rather intimate way.

The other, and more obvious, borderline case is Shepard herself was raised from the dead with implanted technology. Which looks ugly in the early parts of Mass Effect 2 and makes her friends wonder if she is still the Shepard they knew. The game comes so close here to actually exploring this properly. Very late in the third game, on the Cerberus base, Shepard can chose to view some records of her resurrection and confront again the question of whether being fused with technology has changed her.

But it is underplayed, under-expressed; rarely commented on in any part of the game, and has absolutely no effect on gameplay ever. At no point does the game really confront this idea of whether something like a synthesis can be experienced in a positive manner. Instead, in the last minutes of gameplay, the player is told by a thoroughly unlikeable NPC that Synthesis is Good Now, so it is okay to chose it. And you wonder why so few players did?

(The only game play connection of Shepard's own surgery is a strangely orthogonal one. Her scars will fade in time...if she plays towards the Paragon side of play style. The more Renegade choices she makes, the more the scars will stand out; at larger values of Renegade her eyes will begin to glow a technological red. At absolute best this is yet more indication that Synthesis is not a Good Thing -- especially not for someone who is trying to find the diplomatic solution that provides the greatest good for the greatest number.)

So, yes. Between the Reaper behavior, the story as developed through game play of every other synthetic intelligence, the presentation of technological fusion, any attempt at thematic unity falls apart in a jumbled mess.

In short, none of the options presented at the end of the game grow out of the game as played in any way, thematic, logical, story, structural, or in play mechanics. It feels pasted on because it was. And players had full right to complain.

Weighing in...three years late

So, Mass Effect 3. Particularly the ending.

Yes, it was a good decision to add more footage to the original release. Yes, there were some poor plot decisions made; a resolution that poorly prepared for the several violations of the themes and established lore of the series it made. And some poor directorial decisions that made it even more annoying than it was already.

But you know, there's two things that they could have done that wouldn't have added much more effort, would not have changed the way the end unfolds, but would have felt vastly more satisfying.

First and simplest. The majority of the truly plot-critical choices, particularly in the rest of Mass Effect 3, require either Paragon/Renegade options (unlocked via in-game reputation earned through play), or a Paragon/Renegade interrupt (sort of like a Quick-Time Event but unlike most such, they actually work).

(There are two Renegade Interrupts that are so damned satisfying even the most die-hard Paragon Shepard player will take them. Head-butting a Krogan is one...and you know damn well what the other is if you've played through Mass Effect 3.)

As the game stands now; assuming you have a high enough Readiness value (more on that in a moment), the Catalyst explains it had a system (the Reapers) which worked fine for it for cycle after cycle but events of this cycle have proven it is no longer a viable solution. So it offers three, albeit equally unpalatable, options. The way the dialog and even the setting frames these choices, they are there from the start of the conversation. All you are able to do from here until the end of the game is chose one. No other action matters.

Here's how it would work in a more Mass Effect style:

Shepard arrives at the Citadel/Crucible interface and engages the Catalyst in conversation. The Catalyst admits in the course of this conversation the Reaper strategy is no longer viable. Shepard urges it to consider new options. If Shepard's Reputation is high enough and/or if certain things had been done prior in the game; saving the Geth, say, or reversing the genophage, or even doing the Legion loyalty mission back in Mass Effect 2, then better options are unlocked in the typical Paragon/Renegade special dialog options.

And if you take the third option, that can be a Renegade (or Paragon?) Interrupt.

At the end of it you still end up with some tough choices that may feel like pyrrhic victories. The point of this change is you feel like you earned them. And by approaching them through truly interactive dialog, instead of via the SpaceChild nattering on like it ate a freshman philosophy class and hadn't digested properly.

See, this is a key part of every other interaction in Mass Effect as well; Shepard is given a situation with two equally bleak outcomes but is able through sheer strength of what he is come up with a better option. Dozens of times he's talked down a Mexican Standoff instead of letting it turn into a blood bath. This should feel no different.

Yes; I understand the writers were trying to make a point that sometimes there is no great solution. Sometimes even Kirk has to face up to a Kobyashi Maru that he can't cheat out a win on. But throwing it at the player with no preparation is just shitty writing. Give Shepard the wriggle room to properly explore just how bad the options are and chose to make that sacrifice. Don't just force him to chose which garbage hole to throw the universe in after spending hundreds of hours trying to save it. Be tough but make it feel fair.

##

Okay, so here's the second thing they could have done. Takes a wee bit more time to do. First let me point out that all of the scenes of the final confrontation between the allied fleets and the Reapers around Earth, from arrival to the docking of the Crucible, is about a minute of non-interactive cut scene.

So let's not even think about the pipe dream of getting the make the kinds of choices you made during the Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2, where the person you assigned to each task or team had a dynamic effect on how that played out (and could cost you not just that person but others of your friends as well). Take that off the table.

Let's just look at the various ship models appearing, the cockpit scenes that are shown, the role-call that Joker gives from the bridge of the Normandy, and the close-up engagements that may or may not be shown in the game as shipped...err, as belatedly patched. Now change what is shown depending on half dozen variables. This is actually less effort than it looks like, because if your readiness is low you get creamed anyhow; the scenes collapse to being basically the same set of Reapers tearing the shit out of the Alliance core and the Crucible.

But as you get into the higher readiness, which also fairly well maps to specific in-game decisions, you'd get; a scene where a Quarrian fighter pilot has eye drones on his tail...and they get dropped by Geth fighters. Or a Reaper beam is about to take out the Destiny Ascendant...and an Elcor heavy freighter sacrifices itself to block the shot. Or a Reaper is suddenly swarmed by Leviathan uncloaking around it.

All of these would be goddamn incredible payoff for your work earlier in the game. They would be cheer out loud moments. And entirely in keeping with the rest of the game. Take, oh, say, how Counselor Udina's attempted coup plays out in Mass Effect 3. If Shepard had met and recruited the dying assassin Thane Krios back in Mass Effect 2, Thane pops up out of nowhere to give an epic takedown to the insufferable hitman Kai Leng. This kind of payoff is constant, throughout the games, from the tense meeting with the Virmire survivor while Shepard is working with Cerberus in the second game (a meeting even more complicated if Shepard had romanced him or her), to Jack showing up as a teacher to young biotics (and struggling to keep her potty mouth under control!) Even minor side characters have moments. This is what makes those choices worth making, and makes the world feel alive.

Look, fans have done re-cuts, using assets from elsewhere in the series. It isn't that hard. And, hey; the Destiny Ascendent shows up in the final battle of Mass Effect 3 under the right conditionals, that being that you saved the Council back in Mass Effect 1! So put a couple of other clips in there that get trigged depending on what you did so all of that work gathering War Assets doesn't end up with a single number and a pre-rendered fight scene.

Massive Bunnies

Just finished a replay of Mass Effect 3, with the "Leviathan" and "From the Ashes" DLCs installed.



I’ve enjoyed many games, and many game moments (often, surprisingly small moments — like crafting at the forge in the rain in an early play-through of Skyrim). A smaller number have games have left an emotional impact. Bioshock, for instance — a strong, emotional and worthy ending (that was brutally undercut when instead of leaving you on a credit page to complete your catharsis, it quit and dropped you to the desktop.)

Tomb Raider 2013 stayed with me only in the intense frustration over so many missed opportunities and how badly the game sabotaged itself.

And then there's Mass Effect 3. An intense, emotional ending for a three-game series; no wonder it engendered such strong feelings among players, even after the too-brief, too-uninformative original was replaced with the Extended Cut DLC.

The other thing Bioware patched in after massive (heh) player complaints was a "third option" — also a source of heated discussion among fans, as some (like I) believe it is the “best” ending for certain ways of approaching the protean Commander Shepard.

The revised endings don't change the nature of what happens. It still remains three unpalatable choices foisted on you by an uncaring AI, three choices that seem to fly against much else that has been presented in the game to that point. The Extended Cut does, however, have sufficient gravitas to be a proper ending of a game (the original was practically a slide show with three optional color filters).

Thing is, the continuity that makes these endings even possible is new. It was created after the original writer left. And there are many places where the seams are visible. Worse, the two DLCs I mentioned above open up more of the back story and in some ways contradict even more what is forced upon you in the canon endings.

Basically, all of this makes the missed opportunities more obvious. And hence my Plot Bunnies for the day.



#1 Reignite. Start with the canon “third option” ending. Shepard rejects the stupid choices and shoots the catalyst in the face. The Crucible is destroyed. Earth falls and with it the last hope of stopping the Reapers from cleansing the galaxy of advanced life.

Except that, canonically, the Protheans lasted for another thousand years past this point in their own cycle, holding off the Reapers until their final bastion — and the Protheans fought alone. They hadn't managed an alliance of every major race. They hadn’t even built the Crucible.

Not only that, but the Leviathan have survived in hiding since the first Cycle. Of course now the Reapers know they are still around. On the other hand, these original creators of the Catalyst, the original model for and the race responsible for the Reapers, has reached an end of hiding. They are powerful enough to kill a Reaper...and they know the Reaper's secrets.

Shepard was left alone and gravely injured in the burning wreckage of the Crucible at the end of the game. Thing of it is, Shepard’s been in tight spots before....

So this is an “after we lost” story, a story of resistance, with all the heartache and loss that entails. A rather grim story, all told, which is why I also have another:



#2 Indoctrination. A leading fan theory is that all the events on the Citadel after Shepard rides the London Beam are illusion, brought on by Reaper Indoctrination (mind control). The three choices are at best a side game, trying to distract Shepard (at worst, they are trying to mislead him into either accepting Indoctrination fully, or helping the Reapers to destroy the Crucible.)

Shepard figures it out which is why he shoots the Catalyst (in true Hollywood fashion, breaking the illusion). Not so strange, this; both Saren and The Illusive Man were able to temporarily shake their Indoctrination, and Shepard's got Prothean downloads in his skull from two damaged Prothean beacons and mind-melds with...well, not just several Asari, but Leviathan and a living Prothean.

So Shepard breaks free and stands at the controls of the Crucible finally free of any illusion or control. To understand what is really going on and to pull the kind of solution that only Shepard Magic could make possible. After all, he brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth...

But that's a bit short, really a one-shot. So there's also...



#3 Shepard Fixes It. Roll the clock back, back to just after the Turian War, when Humans are the new guys on the block, only grudgingly allowed access to the glorious Citadel. Humanity is supposed to be learning how, not why. Absorbing the reluctantly shared knowledge of the Elder Races, not trying to strike out on their own.

Enter Andrea Shepard, a young civilian engineer constantly in trouble for asking questions. That being, any question that starts with “why..?”

But there are an awful lot of questions someone should really be asking. That someone — that is, someone from a younger race, someone that has her canonical descendent’s uncanny ability to Get Things Done, someone that finds herself not just asking but getting the often surprising (and scary!) answers to questions like “Who built the Citadel and what do these Keeper creatures actually do?” Questions like “How did the Asari get so damned advanced?” and “Could these myths and rumors about Leviathan actually have a basis in fact?” And “We found the first Mass Relay on Mars. I wonder if there’s anything else there?”

And even, "Whose bright idea was it to make weapons eject their own heat sinks?"

This is before Cerebus becomes the giant secret-hiding stumbling-block it would be in later years. Before humanity has had a chance to really meet Krogan and Quorrian and learn from them without the Elder Races building their own prejudices in.

For me, part of the joke is my playing as an Engineer Shepard (tech specialist over biotic powers or strict combat abilities) and finding out just how much of a cakewalk the game can be when you get enough points sunk in it. By the end of the game I'd just toss an automated turret on to the field and hunker down behind a wall until it was finished.

Canonical Shepard could unravel the conspiracies of a rogue Spectre, track the Collectors to their hidden base and destroy it, uncover the secrets of the Citadel, find the last Prothean bastion and the hidden Prothean AI on the Asari homeworld, confirm the Reapers and fight three of them on foot, and even locate the Leviathan who have been hiding for millions of years.

And, yes, civilians starship tinkerer Tali vas Normandy and archaeology geek Liara T'soni could mop the floor with elite Blue Suns mercenaries in the canon game (it does help being a daughter of one of the greatest Asari Matriarchs). A fast-thinking civilian Shepard who has a cool hand with a soldering gun could very well accomplish, well, miracles....



All bunnies free to go to a good home. I have other things I need to write...as much as the bunnies might bite.

Adrift on the High C's

I've got the second-octave C (the one that falls above the treble stave and is the highest note for which fingering is usually given in standard trumpet instructional materials.) But it isn't secure yet.

At least I'm getting practice in, even if it is only thirty minutes a day. I keep thinking of new songs I'd like to try recording, but actually putting tracks down is all but stalled out (I do have another take at the lead trumpet for the Hellboy cover, but I haven't even stuffed it into Reaper.)



In writing, I had to tussle through a nasty Dorian problem, but solving it also gave me some idea how to make up the missing page count. Basically, my character is going back to Athens and this time engages more deeply not just with the history/archaeology (aka, does a lot of museum hopping) but also with cultural context.

This is also what I think of as "second week" tourist stuff. The first week you spend in a new place is all, "I have to climb the Eiffel Tower! I have to visit d'Orsay!" You are basically in full tourist mode. In the second week you've sort of figured out where things are and how to get around and talk to people and you have time to sit in front of a patisserie in Montmarte, drink coffee and people-watch.

Or, putting it another way, the second week is when you do laundry. You are still an outsider, of course. You are still a tourist. But there's a different engagement with the place. This is one of the bigger downsides of the If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium problem.

It's funny. My character is going into the Acropolis Museum just as I did; not terribly informed on Classical antiquity. My excuse is I was (and to an extent still am) tightly focused on the Late Bronze Age. Hers is that she only had a week to plan.

But yes, I'm reading Donna Zuckerberg's book as well, still finishing the Medici one, and gorging on podcasts mostly from the History of Ancient Greece podcast. I still have many, many questions. German dialects. Italian railroads. YouTube monetizing. I have decided that some of the historical figures in the story are going to be fictionalized; prominent among them, a pastiche of William Luther Pierce who is more of a collector and less, err, obvious as a white supremacist.



Thing of it is, I'm shy of hours what with the holidays, a couple of winter maladies, and a special project that ended up getting me less billable hours than I gave up to do it. At least I got a new digital caliper out of it. I'm not even quite making the time to get the writing and the music done, not at the speed I'd like, but I am starting to think I should be making use of my TheShop membership while I'm still paying for it, and cranking some props out to bring a couple bucks back in and pay off the credit card debt of my own Athens stay.

High and Low

Picked up a Yamaha tenor recorder. So not a SATB consort yet...those Bass recorders are way too expensive. But still enough to do some of that four-part recorder harmony writing. The fingers are way far apart, even with the key on the last hole. The one that kills me though is the thumb hole; I am so used to having my thumb positioned behind the top hole.

Meanwhile the trumpet is going high. Working with the pixie mute did something to my embouchure and suddenly I can go right up to that high C and maybe a little beyond. The slots do get very close together up there and I need more practice to be confident in finding them.

Oh, yeah, and started using the slides to get the part I've been practicing to be in tune. Forgetting that I'm using the plunger on that and that means no slides (the slide/support hand is out front holding the mute).

Almost recorded another draft of that part today but I was too tired to go out to the shop. That machining project is worrying me now. At least the other two parts I need aren't as bad as the first one, but I've still got the first one chucked in the mill while I try to take the stock down to the right thickness. There's a lot of metal involved. Took an hour just to rough-cut the block from the stock I purchased.

Today wasn't a total waste, though. I got some plotting done on the "slightly less" research novel. The character I'm calling "Herr Satz" is coming along, the Carabinieri posing as a slightly-dirty art dealer is coming along, and I've got a new Big Bad. The reception scene at the art gallery is getting more and more complicated; pretty much everyone there is putting on a mask and has some agenda, and few of the conversations have less than two levels.

Also moving research into the Scrivener file so I don't have to keep opening browser windows. Worked up a full page on the Enceladus Calyx itself, the titular artifact. Well...it is definitely Enceladus, even though it is a Late Geometric piece and thus is a few hundred years the Gigantomachy becomes a motif in art or writing. And is definitely a krater, but the calyx form also shows up a little later. As does true black-figure decoration, alas; the human figures that appear before the full flower of the Orientalizing period are both silhouette and rather abstract.

Yeah, research. My experience with the last few writing projects suggests that there's roughly the same number of words in the work files and in the final text. As for the full historical novel, I've already read on the order of 100x the number of words that will appear in the final text. I'd be happy to get it down to a ten-to-one ratio of words read to words produced, but even that seems to be a pipe dream.

Material Estimates

Sudden big project dumped at me at work. Great timing, what with the holidays onrushing. Plus I'm in the middle of a big writing push. Doesn't help that they need it by middle of next week and they haven't even delivered all the drawings yet.

All in all, I've been staring at the partial plans for two days now trying to figure out how I'm going to machine the damned things. As happens so often it comes down to work-holding, and I have yet to come up with a really elegant way to hold a thin rectangle so I can turn it down to a disk (the last similar thing, I held it against the chuck face with the pressure of a live center, and that's a wee bit scary.)

And I'm in the same place in writing. I worked up a chapter plan and my gut instinct says I'm coming way short on the word count; between 30-40K total. I do mean to decompress, but there's a point where it becomes padding. And that's not the worst of it.  In the current plan, all the places where I can really pad (up to forty percent of the final text) are before the adventure-as-such kicks in. I think it is a lot of fun with both Penelope being a tourist, and discovering the ramifications of playing her YouTube character Athena Fox in a live situation, but she hasn't even seen the McGuffin yet.

Among the stranger ideas I've had is to do the original web video series as a B plot. On the plus side, that means I can explore the character of Athena Fox as Penny originally created her, and I can also show Penny doing the work; the research, and the physical stunts, that she can later call upon. On the negative side, I've seen this sort of thing done before and done badly. 

On the third hand, though; these could be an excuse to really, really do a no-research story. These would be globe-trotting artifact looting ancient technology babbling adventures. But of course part of the fun (besides setting up ironic echoes for the real-life events later) is being creatively wrong.

Just as Penelope's first scene is her giving a lecture on the Acropolis on the Acropolis, a lecture full of The Greek Miracle and other dead white men stuff and missing so much of the larger context (plus getting a few basic facts wrong), the fun of the Athena Fox adventures would be her blithely reading an inscription in Linear A or conflating King Minos with King Midas.

Which would...probably take a little research to come up with some good ones. I'm cursed.

On the terrace, with a cutlass

I lost track of the other point I meant to make in the last post. And that is how ridiculously easy it is to justify a certain kind of set dressing in-story. I set up up a situation in my last fanfic where Teal’c — having promised “not to go shooting up the place” — ends up defending Croft Manor by making use of the museum’s-worth of ancient arms and armor displayed in the lavish halls. To the extent that the mercenary leader responds to the increasingly bizarre reports he’s getting on the radio with, “Is this a SITREP or a game of Clue?”

But that was just for the amusement factor. Since I'm doing a story in Athens about antiquities smuggling it would be both far too tempting and far too easy to end up with a climax that's drawn straight from one of the duels in The Illiad. Bronze armor and all. But I don't want to go there, not with this. I did a whole set of short stories in which I played this game and hopefully that got most of it out of my system.

(I'm trying to think of a clearer example of what I'm talking about, this sort of taking a theme and putting it on everything. Say the plot de jour is a pirate treasure. It would just so happen that the only marine salvage vessel they could get their hands on was an old sailing ship, it would just so happen that one of the bad guys lost an eye and a leg in the Gulf War, and it would just so happen that a major chapter takes place on Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

Sure, classical subjects are going to come up. People are going to quote Homer. But they'll also quote modern authors, and talk about the current economic woes of Greece, and use FaceBook.



And that sort of segues to my current issue. My plot is getting pedestrian. Sure, there's some amusing stuff happening; my protagonist is going to almost fall from the Acropolis, be thrown from a ferry boat, and try to wrestle a giant mook (he's about to smash the titular antiquity). But I came up with this idea as a way of excusing or at least smoothing an acceptance (okay, let's be honest; my acceptance) of both some pseudo-archaeological discoveries and some crazed stunting around. Plus the conceit that untrained amateur without legal standing is going around discovering things and fighting crooks and whatever.

I don't want to do a story that only verges on the implausible then drop the reader into a sword fight on a submarine as it sinks into Atlantis in the next book. If I mean to write more than one, I'd like to avoid as much "early installment weirdness" as I can.

Even if I’m dry of ideas right now for some new action. In fact, all I can think of at the moment is...to look towards The Odessey for inspiration.