This morning, I finished Mass Effect 3. It took me two hours to do the final section, about the length of your average movie these days; only about half of that time was spent in gameplay. I’d taken much of the previous afternoon getting to that point in the game, doing the penultimate mission and beginning the last. I’d expected to write a post today about how finishing up a great game leaves me feeling like I do when I finish a great novel: shell-shocked and calm as if an overwhelming noise had finally ceased, filled with a sense of limitless possibilities and connections, wanting to say “wow.” Instead, entirely to my surprise, I found myself tearing up at the end, especially when the main character, Shepard, says goodbye to her romantic partner (which in my case was Garrus). And I’ve been in a bit of a state ever since, and for that matter before, too, feeling unexpectedly glum when I shut the system off yesterday and having little Mass Effect dreams through the night and into the morning.
I’ve always been struck by the loneliness of my preferred genre of games, the “sandbox” or open-world game. There never seem to be quite enough people in them, and the people that are there don’t feel real enough to justify all that open space. It induces a kind of agoraphobia, with you as the lone sentient thing in this already sparsely-populated landscape filled with beings that don’t really offer the kind of human warmth and companionship you need to feel like there’s more to the world than just you. Games have gotten better at this, largely by limiting the space you can occupy; the Assassin’s Creed series pack a lot of people into narrow city streets, and Mass Effect picks a small number of people for you to interact with but gives them rich narratives and populates those few occupied spaces in the game with these well-rounded creations.
Still, in my favorite games of this type, you always end up alone at the end. Most of your companions die, and then you walk out into the emptiness, or even actually die yourself. Once you’ve completed the main storyline of open-world games you are left in “free roam” mode, which means you can do whatever you want but none of it matters. No one has anything interesting to say to you anymore. Your character is alive in the sense of the narrative, but is functionally nothing more than one of the ghosts in Grover’s Corners.
But maybe this loneliness makes a sort of sense. We are all of us alone at the end, and most video games are, after all, about death. That’s frequently thrown at the form as a criticism, but of course most pop songs are about love and most TV shows are about families, and that doesn’t diminish either of those. Death – both killing and being killed – are endemic to the form in an apparently deep way. There’s a way to talk about death without it all feeling quite so lonely, but games aren’t particularly interested in it. (One thing they could steal from novels would be telling a story from multiple, equally-weighted perspectives, as games like LA Noire and Heavy Rain have tentatively begun to do.) You put in an enormous amount of effort, and then there’s nothing more to be done. You have reached the literal end. As in our most self-centered fantasies, the world ceases to exist when we do.
So why did it all hit me so hard? Part of it is me, of course; stories about running out of time, about having done everything you can and still never doing quite enough, or of seeing whatever good you’ve done occur only posthumously – those have hit me hard, lately. But it’s the game form, too. Any work of art asks you to put in some effort in order to have the experience at hand, whether it’s time or consideration or sustained attention. Games ask you to perform little tasks, and I like performing little tasks. They break up the time. But they also string me along, getting me to invest more time in this story and these characters. When we lose someone in real life, it’s painful because of all the connections we’ve forged over the years, and when we become involved with characters in novels, it’s because we’ve had such a sustained exposure to them. Games’ length make them able to forge incredibly strong connections, it seems to me, and so it’s all the more wrenching when it all ends so badly, as it always seems to. As a series, Mass Effect appears heroic at first but, but by the end – hell, by the second game – it is undeniably a tragedy. In the final sequence, you stand alone, asked to make one more decision, just as you have throughout the game, and of your three options, two end with your death – and those are the good endings. You have grown very close to Shepard, or at least I did, and the thought of her not meeting her friends again hurts, a little, just as it does when we see Bjork’s choice at the end of Dancer in the Dark. It’s silly, but it’s art. And like the best art, it moved me as if it were real. I don’t exactly know if I can defend it, but I also don’t entirely know if that matters.