Mass Effect Review
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But does Mass Effect presage the future of transmedia narrative interactive and flexible in its canon from the very outset? I'm doubtful, due mostly to this particular game's potential lack of accessibility.
You see, the game is a combination third person shooter/video roleplaying game. From the first genre we have a system of pointing, shooting, seeking cover, and moving in real-time combat much like other contemporary games; the controls reminded me at times of Kane & Lynch. From the RPG genre we have elements of gaining experience points to (level up) characters, and then customizing how those characters' skills develop by assigning bonus points to attribute scores. Another major RPG convention is in its inventory management what one friend of mine, a Digipen student at the time, described as the defining characteristic of videogame RPGs. You're constantly finding, buying, sorting through, and selling weapons, armor, and upgrades. The RPG elements can probably get a little tedious for players used to the simple (pick it up and use it) approach of most shooters, but to Bioware's credit, some elements can be customized to take some of the nit-picky management out of players' hands (e.g., by allowing the game to assign points for you as you level up).
Between all of these different videogame genre conventions and functions, you have a great deal of control over how you handle any situation and a great deal of buttons to keep track of. This game actually makes use of every single button on the Xbox controller at one time or another, sometimes doubling up uses on a single button depending on context. And heck, I even found myself wishing I had more buttons sometimes I wanted to queue up more than just one (quick access) preset for certain functions I used a lot, reducing the amount of time I spent navigating menus to choose what abilities my characters would make use of in the heat of combat. Moreover, this is decidedly a single-player game, which cuts down significantly on broader/mainstream appeal. As we see from Halo, the Wii, and Guitar Hero, reaching bigger audiences with gaming is currently a matter of exploiting social play.
Is the hardcore gamer market big enough to sustain Mass Effect's approach as the format for (blockbuster) fiction? Well, it'll probably work wonders for Bioware, which was previously just making the more or less same kind of game off someone else's intellectual property. If they're going to make big-budget games with epic narrative scope one way or another, might as well do it with content they own themselves. It's hard to imagine this franchise taking off much beyond gaming subcultures the way that Star Wars is a moneymaker far beyond the hardcore geek audience, though. The level of involvement to familiarize oneself with the core of the series is just too high for most audiences to bother with.
Maybe the (interactive canon) implied by Mass Effect is beyond what we'll see in the future of (blockbuster) fiction more broadly, then, though I do wonder if this will have major implications in videogame fiction in the future. After all, the hardcore audience is still nothing to sneeze at, and Bioware knew who it was shooting for when it threw in a Leeroy Jenkins joke and happily adopted a (Mature) rating. I suppose the future of the (flexible canon) in gaming may depend in part on how well Mass Effect 2 does.
