Note: I will avoid Mass Effect 3 spoilers in this article, but I will link to them, so click at your own risk.

If the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy has underlined one thing with a neon marker, it is the fact that there is a huge divide between the people writing about videogames and the people reading about them. This is something that's been on my mind for a while, but hasn't been so starkly pointed out until now. The problem as I perceive it is the nature of the games industry, and the people covering it: Always looking forward, seldom looking back, or taking the time to thoroughly analyze a game. There is not enough actual critique in mainstream games coverage, especially reviews.

Mass Effect 3 plays into this in an obvious way: The game is sitting on a metacritic average of 93/100, which the site classifies as "universal acclaim." Skim the reviews, and look at how many of them actually call out the ending, which, as has been repeatedly and thoughtfully critiqued, is quantifiably bad? Of course, this opinion isn't shared by everyone, but there is simply no denying that the ending, taken at face value, makes no logical sense, or at the very least, has many, many plotholes that cannot be explained. At best, it is a tonal U-turn for the franchise that disregards established facts in its fiction in favor of asking some pretty vague philosophical questions that don't tie in to the main themes of the franchise particularly well. Even Bioware writers have come out to criticize the ending, apparently.

People have come out to defend the ending as well, so it's not fair to say that the conversation has been entirely one-sided, with only disappointed fans coming out of the woodwork. We've been hearing from both sides. So what's the difference, where is the disconnect? You're always going to leave some people disappointed. Games end badly all the time, or at least in ways that people don't like. Metal Gear Solid 2. Prince of Persia (2008). Halo 2. Deus Ex: Human Revolution. People move on. Certainly no ending has sparked as much fervent discussion as this one. I'm getting to that, but let's look at the defense.

'Gamer entitlement' is a phrase that comes up time and time again. Sometimes it's valid. You can't read comments about any sort of DLC announcement without some people chiming in to say "this should have been free" or things of that nature. What gamers are doing here is voicing their discontent with an ending that, for all intents and purposes, is broken. It's not just a matter of people not getting what they expected, but people have been lied to by Bioware leading up to the release numerous times. There's no other way to put it. Pre-release quotes about the ending have promised fans things that the specifically wouldn't get, only to end up getting exactly that. If gamers feel entitled, it's because Bioware delivered something exactly opposite to what they said they would. At this point, it's not entitlement, it's being a responsible consumer to call out the company in question for failing to deliver. Going to the Federal Trade Commision is going a little far, though.

If you've read some of the criticisms of the endings I linked to, among many others, it should be clear that solid, logical points have been made. Yet I see these same arguments popping up a lot: "You wouldn't ask an author to change the ending of a novel", or "fans just wanted a happy ending", or "Mass Effect 3 is the ending! If you liked the game, you liked the ending."

The first is a patently ludicrous comparison. Games are an interactive medium, and Mass Effect is a series all about player choice, which has been delivered satisfyingly, for the most part, right up until the endgame of Mass Effect 3. The second is just deliberately misleading, as the articles will point out. Thirdly, Mass Effect 3 may be the ending of a trilogy, but it's still a story with a three-act structure. Arguing that simply because Acts 1 and 2 are fine, it's okay if Act 3 is mostly nonsensical, well... No. The ending is the last thing players see, it's obviously very important. The ball was dropped. To add insult to injury, the very last thing players see is a message encouraging them to check back for future downloadable content. We can't speculate what that will be, but Bioware's recent comments seem to suggest they'll definitely do something about the ending. Whether that was the plan all along, as certain theories postulate, seems increasingly irrelevant, and even unlikely, unless Bioware is simply playing dumb.

Thirdly, the reactions from writers. This is the disconnect. Writers being writers, whether writers of fiction or reviews, are inherently opposed to the idea of someone else coming in and changing their work. They look at Bioware's responses to the ending criticisms, and the idea that maybe they'll change it due to feedback, and they freak out. For most writers, authorial intent is everything. Especially in a field like reviewing, where changing the text can change the tone and thus the intended message of the writers. Here's the thing: Video games aren't reviews, they aren't book, and they aren't movies. They are commercial products and they can be changed after the fact. Bioware themselves have gone so far as to say that they and the fans are co-creators of their stories. By extension, shouldn't it be incredibly cool that fan feedback can lead to a change in the narrative that so few fans are happy with? Fortunately, some writers do think so.

Lastly, the problem with the gaming industry, as I stated before, is that it's constantly forward-facing. I don't think that enough writers care about deconstructing and analyzing the games we consume, and that's a shame, because there is a lot to be learned from all this. Mass Effect 3 does a whole bunch of things right in wrapping up a trilogy and making it feel like your choices from the past two games matter. It fumbles at the end in a big way, but a trilogy with this kind of scope and scale his simply never been done before. The tragedy is that unlike the writers of Lost, or seemingly, Assassin's Creed's meta-story, Bioware didn't write themselves into a corner, and were in a position to wrap up their story in a satisfying way for most people.

The upshot is that they still are. Games are not static things, and in my opinion that's something to be celebrated.

Thanks for reading, and share your thoughts!