Falsename said:
...Remember that games don't belong to you, they belong to those creating them. All you can really do is hold on tight and hope whatever you're expecting lives up to the standards you're wishing for. Mass Effect 3's ending fix was a once in a lifetime thing, and it shouldn't open the flood gates to demanding changes to published games. Only because of how great the game was, did we allow ourselves to take 'action'.
Merry Christmas
Hey False, I've been reading your points in this thread, and I agree with 90% of them. And I saw you were critical of MovieBob, which is good, because as much as
I still appreciate
some of Bob's input, he was an ultra douchenozzle in how he handle the Retake Mass Effect thing.
What I find interesting is that you ultimately choose to adopt one of the arguments used by Bob and Kotaku and others.
"Remember that games don't belong to you, they belong to those creating them."
I mean, this essentially boils down to the "artistic integrity" thing.
There are two problems with this argument that I can identify:
1. Just because something is art, this does not mean it is immune to criticism.
Objectively speaking, as a narrative, the ending is broken and bad. You can find anywhere on the net serious treatments of the ending by film critics, literary critics, game critics. And it's all bad. Even IGN and Kotaku, who were on the payroll of game publishers, who gave the game perfect scores, admit that the ending is not good. The only people who seem to defend the ending are people who like to be different on the internet. No one who I've seen defending the ending as "good" or as a successful narrative has made a good argument, and I've looked for it. I'm still looking for it.
So we can all certainly sit around and moan about how bad the ending was. Exactly the same way we can sit around and moan about the Star Wars prequels.
2. Games, especially triple A titles made by big publishers, are commercial art and not "art" like a Picasso, an independent film, or an independent game.
There are a few reasons why this artistic integrity argument is invalid.
First of all, Bioware even admitted that there artistic integrity isn't worth anything, because they immediately gave up on their endings and patched them free of charge. They did this because they are making a corporate product, and not art. Consumers of their product were dissatisfied, so they changed it. Picasso didn't change his art style when he was criticized, and Charlie Chaplain kept trying to make silent films after movies started being made with sound. Bob Dylan didn't back down when he changed his style up and lost all his old fans. Artists don't cave to popular opinion to simply make money or recuperate loses.
Second of all, because the game is published to make money for a publisher and not to make an artistic statement, it is more akin to commercial art. Mass Effect 3 has more in common with the Logo of your favorite sports team, or a brand logo. The controversy of the endings, and the subsequent changes made to them, reminds me more of what happened to Tropicana [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0] when they tried to change their logo then anything that has ever happened in literature, art or film.
Third of all, the demand for a change to the endings made by Retake Mass Effect was reasonable because the corporate producers of the product Mass Effect intended to release multiple changes and additions to the game for profit post release, i.e. DLC. So, changing the game isn't "ruining artistic integrity" regardless of how much integrity they had in the first place, because
they were already planning on changing the game anyway. Many Retake Mass Effect people even stated they would pay for a new ending. Mass Effect is not like the Mona Lisa, or a film, or a song, because no artist has patched the Mona Lisa, Bob Dylan never patched a song, and most film makers don't patch their films (with the exception of George Lucas, who everyone now identifies as being more of a corporate shill than an artist because of it).
These are the reasons why I reject the argument that it was totally unreasonable to even have a discussion of changing the endings because of "artistic integrity" or because the game somehow belongs to Bioware.