Over the last few months I have had the interesting experience of participating for the first time in a game specific forum, the Mass Effect forums to be exact. This time has taught me a lot, introduced me to many interesting people, and made me decide never to participate in a game specific forum again. But I’ll get to that later.
Around August last year, I decided it was time to finally play the original Mass Effect, seeing as the sequel was just around the corner. I loved it a great deal and played through it multiple times, which obviously culminated into me wanting to talk about it with other people. Seeing as it was a two-year old game, I had to go to the one place where I could discuss it, the actual Mass Effect forums on Bioware’s site. It didn’t take long before the inundation of ME2(Mass Effect 2, get use to the acronyms) coverage and news started to pull me in and never let me go.
Before I knew it, ME2 was becoming a part of my daily life, months before I would actually be able to play it. I would check every day for news, screens, videos, anything that would, as Robert Ashley put it, “stroke my game-boner.” And for every day there wasn’t some new piece of info, I would delve into the endless speculation and discussion of the forums: “What do you think of the new squaddie[party member] revealed today?” “Which class looks coolest?” “What are the ME1[The original Mass Effect] squaddies’ roles in ME2?” This was part of my daily grind, speculating, analyzing, and of course, arguing.
It became abundantly clear soon after the first ME2 coverage started flooding in that many on the forums would be sorely disappointed with the game no matter what. The most frequent point of contention in the early days was the role and inclusion of ME1 LIs(Stands for Love Interests, characters romanced in the game). The effective beginning of this debacle can be traced back to Casey Hudson’s comment that ME1 LIs could not be recruited as party members in ME2. This comment instigated what can only be called an internet s***storm of protests and hate directed at Bioware. It is impossible to calculate the amount of forum talk was devoted to this topic, for me it was a blur of dozens of topics and what must have been thousands of posts on either side of the debate. And thus came my fall to the dark side…
I am ashamed to say I became one of those who were unofficially known as “the Bioware defense force”, those who would blindly defend any decision Bioware made for no particular reason other than that we liked their games. Yes, I was a fan boy once. One thing that in retrospect that brings me gladness is that there were well-reasoned and sensible arguments on both sides, however there were always a fair share of idiots to mix it up.
This time taught me something about how people enjoy games. After arguing about the merits of a new cast I quickly realized that many people gravitated around relationships with these LIs as a much more central aspect of the game than the typical gamer might. Romances in general were a huge part of what people talked about concerning the game, which led to a similar outcry when it was revealed that there would be no gay or lesbian romances in ME2.
And not just romances, every character had an ardent following, even the ones who were generally not popular in the mainstream (i.e., Kaiden and Tali). Criticism or dissatisfaction expressed about any character would be met by violent reactions and over-expository posts explaining how incredibly wrong they felt the critic was. In fact, one such thread entitled “I’m actually kind of glad ME1 LIs aren’t in ME2” was met with well over a thousand posts and is reportedly the longest thread in the history of the forums before the move to Bioware Social.
However, this is pretty typical forum fare. Where it started to get weird was when I pried into some of the reasoning behind the anger over ME1 LIs absence. Several posters questioned the point of having these LIs in the game when they were going to be sidelined in the sequel. One poster went so far as to say that the very notion that choices would have impacts on future games was a crucial part of their enjoyment for the original game. This puzzled me for a while until a convenient event gave me an interesting insight on the nature of a certain type of gamer.
Around December, the forum Moderator Chris Priestly announced that due to technical limitations players could only import their first 11 playthroughs of ME1 into ME2. I had no real reaction to this, but reading the thread I quickly saw the fury from this revelation. It turned out most posters had played ME1 far more than 11 times, several professing to have over 30. This got me thinking and looking at other threads I soon realized that for many, ME1 was one of the only games they had played in the past few years, the most extreme cases being those who only played Bioware games and pretty much nothing else.
The final piece of insight into these gamers’ playing habits came during an interview with Casey Hudson where he stated that Bioware would track how many players would “cheat” on their ME1 LI in ME2. One poster in particular felt it was unfair because they would “cheat” in “throw-away” playthroughs that shouldn’t count because that wasn’t their “real” playthrough. This dynamic is telling for two reasons: First, because the person is so tied to their in-game LIs that it matters to them what results Bioware finds in the achievement tracking. And second, because the person is willing to “cheat” in other playthroughs because they have a driving need to see all content, despite any disdain for the content in question.
In the end, I feel I’ve had an uncommon look into what makes a large, often unacknowledged part of the gaming community tick. It’s easy to dumb it all down to a TV Tropes link or a dismissal as simple, dumb fan boys, but there’s more than that. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand them, nor do I ever want to be in a forum with them again, but my experience has made me reconsider a lot of what I thought about games and gamers in general
