Well, there’s the obvious reason that I really enjoyed this game (until the crappy end), and the characters were vivid and very real, and I came to care about them.  I liked the universe and the various cultures, and I really liked my Shepard, and the elaborate backstory I’d created for him.

Reason number two — I was really annoyed by the terrible ending, and I wanted to get the bad taste out of my mouth by giving a different conclusion.

And I realized last night as I was writing a bit on the story that there was a third reason, something that had been in the back of my head, and hadn’t come to the fore until I was musing about the fact I have a Shepard who is deeply damaged both mentally and physically by his experiences.  Why did I do that?  Why did I make him so fragile?  Give him PTSD?

 

 

****************************Here be Spoilers Be Warned**************************

 

There’s an DLC called Arrival that I downloaded and played, and it ended up giving me nightmares and keeping me awake for several nights.  A gaming buddy pointed out that it was a story on rails, and you had no real way to alter the outcome which was crappy, but I found it powerful because your Shepard is faced with a horrendous decision.  To take an action that will keep the Reapers out of the galaxy for perhaps two years, giving people time to prepare, but to accomplish that you have to allow an asteroid to destroy the Mass Effect Relay, and the resultant explosion will lead to the deaths of 400,000 Batarians.  

In Mass Effect the Batarians are sort of bad guys.  They have slaves.  They enslave a lot of humans.  A Batarian bartender tries to poison you in Mass Effect 2.  Which is probably why the game designers made this a system that was being colonized by Batarians figuring the player wouldn’t mind so much.  If it had been a human colony the decision would be all the more gut wrenching.  I still found it gut wrenching and nightmare inducing, and I said to a friend.  “Shepard is going to need a lot of couch time after this.”

In fact Admiral Hackett tells Shepard that he must come to Earth and stand trial for what he’s done.  I was really excited to play that download, but naturally they didn’t write that add on.  That would require an exploration of consequences, and you wouldn’t get to shoot anything.  People would just talk.

I’m a total geek about this game so I belong to the Bioware Social network, and I was following fellow addicts on Twitter, and I found the reactions to Arrival… disturbing.

Some shared my discomfort, some were mad about the “story on rails” (a fair knock), but some were blasé to the point of callousness.  One person even presented his Shepard’s reaction this way.  “So what did you do today, Commander”  Shepard yawns, studies his nails.  “Oh, I killed 400,000 Batarians and stopped a Reaper invasion.  You?”

I stopped following that conversation.  I found it, frankly, chilling.  By the time Mass Effect 3 has ended Shepard has had to make horrendous life and death decisions.  He/she has tried to broker peace, and bring together warring races, but friends have died, and you are given a truly hideous choice at the end of the third game.  (You can find my rants about why this was such a terrible ending elsewhere on my blog).

The point being no normal human could come through this unscathed emotionally and psychologically.  The physical is easy.  Good medicine can heal the hurts, but what’s been done to Shepard’s soul has to be faced and addressed.  So my story became about a deeply broken man who only through the love of his partner, and the support of his friends finds some peace and healing.  I don’t let him be a “Big goddam hero,” as Zaeed would say.  I make him a suffering human because I think there has to be a cost to violence. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love a good action movie, or an exciting action sequence in one of these games.  But… It shouldn’t be pain free, and resorting to violence should never be presented as the first or even the preferred choice.