I was reading through an interview with the Lead Designer of Mass Effect 2, trying to decide if I was excited about the game or not, when I came across the following question and answer:
VideoGamer.com: What’s BioWare’s approach to breathing life into science fiction through the Mass Effect series?
CH: The goal is you don’t want to be derivative. Everything is like something, we know that for sure. No matter how original we make something, if it has three eyes then it’s like this alien from that property. If it has four eyes then it’s another alien from another property. In general we try to not base anything on any property out there, and just come back to first principles. It starts with absorbing our favourite influences. Obviously there are things we love about the best books we’ve read, or the great science fiction. A lot of Mass Effect is inspired by the feeling of the movies from the late Seventies and early Eighties, like Blade Runner, The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that early, ambient eerie idyllic future. What we do is we take those magic moments or feeling and influences and boil them down to their principles. What are we going for? What do we like? It comes down to ideas about art style and what makes a great character. Then using those principles then we build back up into something that’s original and come up with our own story, our own ideas for aliens and things like that. That way we avoid being derivative of something else.
At the same time, once we start developing things then we start to look for thematic symmetries, where we go, what is the high level concept really about? What are we trying to say with the story and the universe that we’re developing here? We try and make it a lot more cohesive. That’s how we end up with something that’s a nice combination of being familiar enough, because it’s based on these principles that we all appreciate about great science fiction, and yet it has fresh and original ideas in it. And then at the same time it holds together as one thing, because we’ve looked for those symmetries and themes that all tie it together.
This is absolutely fascinating as it’s essentially a formula for the creation of generic stories. Start by choosing an atmosphere from a common set of existing stories, producing a setting which is recognisable and filled with pre-determined elements. Bladerunner is unique for presenting a unique atmosphere: for many of us, it was a very first glimpse of a true dystopian, cyberpunk future. Star Trek was unique for presenting a strong, grounded future, in total keeping with the Isaac Asimov’s form of science fiction. But they were original in this. In developing Mass Effect 2, Bioware most decidedly is not being original: they are stating they did precisely the opposite, at least in the determination of the setting of their story.
Once they had arrived at a setting tweaked from pre-existing visions of the future, they derive a story, founded within the nature of the setting, with their own ideas added into it. However, the setting itself tends to place severe restrictions on what you can do with a story, particularly when you bring with it the atmosphere. This is an important point, I think: the atmosphere in which we frame a story places broad restrictions on what you can do with the story. Telling a space opera, set in a grim mature universe with a humanity struggling towards the high-minded principles espoused by Star Trek tends to say a lot about what you’re going to ultimately be talking about, without a word of actual plot being said.
After putting together the story pieces (and Bioware does assemble story piecemeal, it’s an artifact of the development process that is enhanced by the above described story-development procedure), they then re-examine them and draw them into place within the atmosphere they’d decided on, producing the “cohesion”.
In effect, they’ve created a process for developing generic stories.
I guess they’re committed to being boring. I’ve thought for a long time that games’ stories are committed to being boring because they tend to be watered-down movie plots with watered-down characters doing ludicrously nonsensical things in a static world that only reacts to certain behavior in predetermined ways.
This is why I play games that let me make my own story. Games like sports sims, Europa Universalis 3, Civ 4. I also play games where I can largely ignore the story and focus on gameplay.
Perhaps their stories are generic and a little watered-down from others’ ideas, but I think they have great execution over their ideas. I think you can only do so much with an electronic medium and especially since they’re not targeting a hardcore audience, they’re doing a great job with the universe they’ve created. While the general outline of the story might be generic, the characters are lively and quite different.
I think it really is all about execution, actually. I mean, there really are no more original ideas and some of the most lauded pieces of media aren’t necessarily unique, they’re executed extremely well. For instance, Nolan’s The Dark Knight didn’t really bring any story elements to the table. Betrayal, psychosis, unflinching will…but his style and execution made it original and creative.