Mass Effect 2 (PS3)

I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 because it's the first seriously long game in ages that I've been thoroughly engrossed in and wanted to play non-stop. Heavy Rain was probably the last title that had that effect on me, but it really didn't take too long to get through, and according to my save game files I've spent over 40 hours playing Mass Effect during the last three weeks... There's another post I'm thinking of writing about my gaming habits and how game-play fits into my life but first I want to reflect on why this game sucked me in as much as it did.

I was interested in the first Mass Effect when it came out but I didn't have an Xbox 360, and my laptop wouldn't have been able to cope with it. I'd also heard a lot about it from my friend Paul, who went on to enthuse about the second installment. So when I heard it was coming out on PS3, I was already excited. An action-RPG set in the future where I get to command a space ship and my choices affect the way the narrative progresses? I was definitely intrigued. I've not seriously played an RPG since Baldur's Gate years ago (and no, I don't think the tongue-in-cheek Deathspank really counts...), but I guess that was the last time I got this involved in a game story. Incidentally, Baldur's Gate was also created by Bioware. Mass Effect is the kind of game where narrative really does count, but I think it's the relationships you have with the rest of your team that make the narrative matter. I was utterly engrossed in Heavy Rain but it didn't take long to play through (plus there is some debate on whether it actually is a game or not). And while Deathspank was engaging in an amusing sort of way, I didn't really care about what was going on, not enough to try and finish it or even to spend that much time playing it on my own. But in Mass Effect 2, I had to make all sorts of choices along the way in terms of how I interact with people and what I do next which I knew would affect how the development of the plot.

So I finished it last weekend, and even now I'm still wondering whether I made the right decisions. Obligatory SPOILER ALERT as I'm going to go on discuss some of the plot and how it panned out. I think one of the moments that surprised me was how I ended up interacting with a character called Grunt (see below). Grunt is a member of the Krogan species who was genetically engineered in a vat by a scientist who was trying to create the "perfect" Krogran.

Soon after awaking/recruiting him, it's clear he's having some sort of difficulty dealing with his rage (hardly surprising since, despite being fully grown, he's only been out of the vat for a short while - experiencing the Krogan version of teenage angst perhaps?) so off we go to his homeworld to figure out if there is anything wrong with him and he ends up having to go on some sort of rite of passage. Now the Krogans are a pretty aggressive race (I guess sort of like Klingons but more animal like) and even though I've played most of the game so far by choosing the paragon (i.e. good guy) options, I start to play it differently now. Because Grunt is Krogan, and I want the others to respect him (and his choice to be part of my team) - in fact I want to encourage Grunt to be the best Krogan he could possibly be. It's odd, but he sort of felt like my adopted child and I wanted him to connect with his culture... I know the plot is a little bit ridiculous (but it did start with me being resurrected from being dead), and I know that is an odd feeling to have about a character I regularly took into battle but I'm really not sure how else to explain why I started acting all tough and aggressive all of a sudden. The only other thing I can say in my defence is that behaving how I did just sort of made sense, it just seemed like the best way to communicate with the Krogans. When in Rome...

So that's one team member. There are several others, and after a while you start to realise you like some of them more than others. I would find myself going to visit people, after missions just to hear what they had to say, some more than others. For instance, I enjoyed both serious and hilarious conversations with Mordin (the Salarian scientist who sings Gilbert and Sullivan). You can even have pursue a romantic relationships with one of them, though this part of the game impressed me less. Partly because while you are allowed to have inter-species relationships with alien team members, you can't pursue same sex relationships (except perhaps with the Asari who, though they look female, do not have a gender). If you choose to play a female Shepard, you can still flirt with human Yeoman Kelly Chambers (but there is definitely no man-on-man action), even have dinner with her (after which she will feed your fish and so stop them from dying when you are off ship, lol) but it's not considered pursuing a relationship - so it's all sort of implicit (until perhaps the end of the game, where it just gets weird). What I mean by it's not "considered a relationship" is that don't get the paramour achievement for pursuing this, but you will if you get together with one of your team mates. The problem I have with this side of the game, isn't that you can engage in this sort of things or even that it's reduced to an achievement (pretty much all of the game is tbh). It's that after a certain period of time, it's the only way for you to interact with your team mates. If you are female, the women just keep saying they are busy, and if you don't pursue the romantic options the men start to do the same. I guess the only way to continue to talk to someone is to become physically intimate with them.

The other aspect of the relationship system is that certain options are only available if you have received enough paragon or renegade points. You get these points based on how you act within the game, and on how you interact with people. This seems to presume we either want to be "good" or "bad" but  sometimses situations are more complex than that and seem to call different kinds of behaviour, regardless of what you might actually believe. I know the game usually allows you to choose different responses but in order to unlock different options later on, it forces you to generally pick one mode over the other. At one stage, I sided with one character over another in an argument and I just didn't have enough points to resolve the issue. I kept trying to get more paragon points, just so I could try and sort things out, but that felt like a strange thing to be thinking during the game - I realised that I was considering my choices on the basis of whether it would give me enough points to convince Miranda to talk to me again. Perhaps the real problem here is that there were consequences to me not managing to get those points. You see, after the argument, Miranda was no longer loyal to the team, I guess she stopped trusting me. And so after the final mission, Miranda was the only person who didn't make it back alive... I really ended up feeling like I had failed her. Seriously, when did games start getting me to feel guilty about the choices I make within them?!

Even now I'm thinking about the decisions I made. Maybe I shouldn't have decided to kill the heretic Geth (an AI race, but some of members had sided with the bad guys in the first game). To me it seemed like the more ethical option - the other was to reprogram them i.e. brainwash them, but I figured they should be free to make a choice about what they believe, just as I made a choice about defending myself  and the galaxy against their beliefs. The game didn't agree with my logic, so I got renegade points instead of paragon ones, and so I still couldn't resolve the argument. Maybe I should have taken Miranda with me on the final battle, at least that way I could have protected her, instead of her dying with the other team. Or maybe I should have sided with her in the first place, instead of Jack - who honestly started to irritate me after a while.

So that's one of things I was going over after I played it - the other was about the decision I made to pass on the Reaper technology to Cerberus. The Reapers are the big bad in the game - they are a threat to the entire galaxy and it is clear I will have to face them again in the third game (the decisions I have made will also influence the story of Mass Effect 3). Cerberus is the organisation I work for and who resurrected me, led by the Illusive Man (voiced by Martin Sheen) but it is clear they are a bit dodgy and perhaps worryingly pro-human. I decided to pass on the technology because I thought it would give me an advantage next time, but now I'm wondering whether I've really just given Cerberus the tools to make humans the dominant force in the galaxy... Lol, I'm still debating whether to play the final level again so I can save Miranda and destroy the technology!

There were other moments in the game that got me thinking about moral issues - the genophage the Salarians created in order to try and restrict the Krogan birth rate, the decision by a human scientist to use his autistic brother as a subject for an experiment etc - and I think this is the sort of thing that had me hooked. I wanted to get to the next cut scene and find out what was going to happen next, but I also had to seriously think about the issues the game raised and what sort of character I wanted the Shepard I was playing to be. I guess this was the first game in a while where I thought I might be doing some of that projective identity thinking that Gee talks about. 

The actual combat was fine, not as hard as I thought it might be, and helped by the fact that I could essentially pause it whilst I picked my team's next attack/weapon. I actually started the game on the easiest option because I thought my lack of experience with shooters would stop me from progressing - but I changed this back to normal after the first couple of fights. Ultimately, it was the story and the choices I was presented with that I really cared about. And it is these things that will ensure I play the next installment. It wasn't all done perfectly, I actually kind of wish I hadn't chosen to go back to my ship and talk to people after the final mission. I was disappointed nobody had anything to say about Miranda's death (all there that happened was a little cut scene, showing a solitary coffin - her office being empty actually seemed more poignant). I also got annoyed with Grunt because he contradicted himself by telling me I shouldn't have given the tech to Cerberus, despite the fact that he encouraged me to take it at the time. Hmm, in fact they pretty much all seemed to think I had made the wrong decision, is that why I want to re-play it? And then there was Kelly. She was really visibly shaken after having been rescued from the Collector ship so her showing up in my cabin later in a revealing outfit to do a bit of "sexy" dance just seemed bizarre and out of character... Like a reward for horny teenage boys for having finished the game, rather than a genuine part of the story.

Despite a few small niggles, I seriously did enjoy playing Mass Effect 2. It was mostly very well put together, and there is something about knowing your actions will have meaningful consequences that makes makes the experiences all the more powerful. Will I replay it? Probably, but I haven't decided whether I'll redo the last level with my current character or try it again with a new one where I'll act completely different to how I did.  I also have the option of playing it again with the same character but now I'm all levelled up. All I know for sure is that I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3 :-)

Jane McGonigal's sermon on Productivity

On Sunday I went to a talk organised by the School of Life. They called it a sermon, it also took place in a what I think what used to be a church hall, and there were hymns. One of the hymns was Video killed the Radio Star, but we did actually have to stand up and sing along. It was all a bit random really in quite an enjoyable way and the reason I went was so I could hear Jane McGonigal talk about Productivity and games. 

She started off by talking about how a lot of our ideas about what it means to be a productive member of society are based on a combination of protestant work ethic (God wants us to be busy) and the rise of capitalism. Which seems to ultilmately lead to a lot of guilt when we end up doing things that don't seem to produce anything. So in this light, playing games for hours on end is really just a colossal waste of time, right?

Well, maybe not. After getting to write down a to-do list and then make it into a paper plane to throw into the audience, she went on to talk about the research she's done and how four things seemed to keep coming up in relation to question what do games produce; whole hearted engagement, hope for success, opportunities to develop social bonds and a sense we can be part of something bigger than ourselves. But if that's not enough for you, her findings actual map on quite well to research being carried out that focuses on positive psychology - the sort of psychology that focuses on how we can be happy rather than on all the things that can go wrong. According to research that will be published next spring (in Dr.Seligman's new book Flourish) we need the following:

1) Positive emotion (Pe)

2) Relationships (R)

3) Meaning (M)

4) Achievement  (A)

And just to make it easier for us to remember, Jane got some audiences members to spell out that acronym for us (thanks to GrahamBM for the Twitpic):

We all then engaged in a round of massively-multiplayer thumb wrestling to illustrate how playing games can achieve all four of those things. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of playing massively-multiplayer thumb wrestling, you're missing out ;-) Basically, though her argument is that by games can actually help solve wider social problems by increasing PeRMA. Through productive engagement in activities we find meaningful and that make us feel good, we can cement our social ties and feel part of something bigger. For those interested in these ideas more and about games how you could designe games that explictly address social issues keep an eye out for her book "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" which is out early next year.

There was a short Q&A session after the sermon, where one person asked how games were different to drugs. I thought this was a pretty good question as you do hear about how games are "addictive" and I guess, like drug taking, the activity is often be seen as completely unproductive. Jane responded by pointing out that drugs tend to be quick fixes, that take a toll on our bodies and end up leaving people feeling lower than before. In contrast, research has shown that the positive emotions received from playing games tend to spill over into other parts of our lives. Also, apparently there is some sort of gamer tipping point, where after 21 hours of play a week, most players realise that they aren't getting any more from the activity. (Note to self: I really should find what research she is referring to). Somebody also asked something about using games in education and Jane was keen to point out that she wasn't trying to gamify every activity but that even so, understanding how and why games appeal could influence certain underlying educational principles - which effectively sums up my own research. All in all it was a really enjoyable morning, and what better way to end than by drinking tea and eating space invader biscuits :-) (thanks to Katy Lindemann for the putting up the Flickr photo)

how much do I agree with all this? Well, quite a lot really but maybe not entirely. I really do think Jane McGonigal is doing an awesome job getting inspiring games out there and in talking positively about games. I think that games can definitely increase PeRMA and like that there is actual research backing this up. I'm not sure how much that will convince people who don't play games though, and I don't think it will convince them to play games. Especially, for those who start talking about how they heard about players in China or Korea who died because they didn't leave their computer for days, and about how it would still be much better for children to go outside and play. I'm not denying that for some people at least, games can become a problem, but like any activity you enjoy doing, surely there's nothing wrong with them being part of a balanced well-rounded life? I also think that for a lot of people who take games seriously, probably for a lot of people who call themselves gamers and see games as a social activity to share with friends, gaming is a major source of PeRMA and that's why they like it. I think what people don't realise is that even when you're playing something on your own, this can still feed into your social relationships if you have friends who are interested in what you're doing.

I suppose what I'm not sure about, is whether everyone who plays games gets the same benefits? So the aunt you get to play Wii Sports at Christmas, I can see how she would enjoy having a go, how it's a shared family experience and how the activity makes sense in that context even but will she really feel like she's achieving anything? Maybe that has more to say about how we much we value our experiences but when Jane said something along the lines that she has never met a pessimistic gamer, who didn't think they could succeed, I'm not sure I'd agree they don't exist. I mean maybe they would call themselves a gamer, but I've seen plenty of people put off from even trying something because they don't think they are good enough. And, I have given up on games myself when it's just gotten too hard... I definitely haven't finished all the games I have - what does that say about my ability to achieve things? Jane mentioned signature strenghts, but what if I'm noticing weaknesses instead?!

Maybe I'm taking it a bit too far, I do finish some games at least, I suppose the ones I get the most pleasure out of, so perhaps that's enough. But I am still curious about different types of players and how often people actually finish their games. The two main things I want to take with me from the sermon though, are to rethink my ideas about productivity and the fact that there is research out there about the positive effects of game-playing. Plus, I don't have to feel guilty about not writing my thesis yet, as there are plenty of activties I need to do first, including (though obviously not limited to) playing games, cos they increase my PeRMA quotient and make me flourish ;-)

Update: I forgot to add a link to the Gameful site - after thanking her for the talk and telling her a bit about my research, Jane suggested that I check it out once it launches. It seems to be a resource for anyone interested in making and using games that have a positive impact on people's live. You can find out a bit more about it on her blog here.

Sam & Max and my research

Again, it's been a while. I have the excuse of spending the last few months running my main data collection study, though I have also been playing games throughout. Maybe I've been quite busy, but maybe I also haven't felt like I've had a lot to say. Recently though, I've been thinking more and more about one particular series I've been playing and how I got back into it after being convinced to give it another go as a result of one of my data collection sessions.

Over the past few months, I've been asking participants to keep a set of gaming diaries and to come into the lab we've set up in the department to play games. They had to keep the diary for three weeks and come in on three seperate occassions so I could hook them up to various physiological equipment (to measure changes in muscle tension, galvanic skin response and heart rate) and observe them playing games. The sessions lasted about 2-3hours so all in all it was quite an investement from them. Even when all I could offer was a Amazon voucher just to say thanks, 9 people actually agreed to take part and for that I am very grateful :-)

Anyway, during the first two sessions I would ask people to bring in a game of their choice, preferably something they'd been playing. But for the final session I would pick a game for them. For my first participant - who is also a friend of mine but for the purposes of anonymity, let's call him Matt - I chose Sam and Max: Save the World . It's a point and click type adventure, with lots of puzzle solving where you play Sam and Max who Wikipedia describes as "self-styled vigilante private investigators, the former an anthropomorphic dog and the latter a 'hyperkinetic rabbity thing'" as they set about uncovering a hypnotism conspiracy.



I picked the game up ages ago for the Wii and though I played for a bit, I got stuck at one point early on and just never went back to it. I'm going to be honest here, while I wanted to choose something Matt hadn't played before (and that contrasted in pace to his own choices - survival horror/FPS), I also chose it because I thought he would find it boring. And I wanted to see whether all that physiological data I've been collecting would reflect that. I'm still working on the data so I'm going to have to save the in depth analyses for later on (and hopefully publication...) but he didn't find it boring. He liked it. That didn't mean he wasn't frustrated by some aspects of it, but he seemed to enjoy it. What really surprised me was that him liking it made me want to try it again. So I did, and I finished it this time. And then I bought the next series, Beyond Time and Space on Steam (because it wasn't on the Wii) and finished that. And then I played the latest series The Devil's Playhouse, and had to wait for Telltale to complete the last two episodes so I could finish that too.

So what happened? Why did I write the game off only so soon? What made me go back to it? How many other games do I have that I never really gave a fair shot? Looking back, I remember wanting to like Save the World but getting a little annoyed by all the dialogue and getting impatient with some of the puzzles. Even though I did think it was funny, I guess I didn't think it was funny enough to keep playing. So when I got stuck, maybe it didn't feel like there was enough incentive to go back. It was a good couple of years ago now when I got the game so I can't say for sure, but I also imagine that I got distracted by other games that I had at the time. So I forgot about it, until I started my study and had to come up with games for other people to play. That's already going to put it back on my radar, but then Matt seemed to enjoy it and we talked about it afterwards, and it made me want to give it another go. I think the fact that we are also friends who talk about games has something to do with it too. Though I don't think he's played the game since, him playing it in the session made me feel more like a shared experience, and when I refer to the series he knows what I'm talking about. Could that alone have increased my involvement with the game? I think it might have. And I'm glad it did.

I'm not saying it's a perfect series. Like most point and click adventures, the puzzles are less about creative problem solving and more about trying to figure out how the designer wants you to solve it. The dialogue is funny, but there is a lot of it and the story doesn't always really make a whole lot of sense... It was ok playing it with the Wii controls but the later games weren only out on Steam so I had to switch. I think the second game, Beyond Time and Space was the weakest of the three I played - it felt rushed, shorter than the others, with puzzles that made even less sense than normal. But the more I played, the better I got at it (and yes I did sometimes resort to walkthroughs or increased the in-game hint level, but I noticed as time went on this happened less too). Maybe I learnt how to think like the designers, but the puzzles didn't feel as frustrating. So even if the narrative was a little out there, I kept progressing, and I still wanted to know what was going to happen next. But I needed a reason to get past the initital hurdle I came across and that seemed to come from sharing the experience with someone else. Without them even being in the same room! And now it's got me wondering what other games I would have enjoyed? Also, I'm wondering what I would have given up on if I hadn't had others to share the experience with?!

All of this ties in with my reseach because I'm not just interested in what happens when we play but why we choose to play anything in the first place. Like I said, the analysis is at a pretty early stage but if I can uncover at least part of that, and explain how it all might relate to learning, then I might just have something decent to put in my thesis ;-) Plus, it's something I need to consider when I am doing my analysis - if my participants had an impact on my game-playing, then how did I impact theirs?