A large group of devoted Mass Effect fans absolutely detested the ending to the game’s third, final installment. The outrage became so frenzied that developer BioWare announced that they were going to change it. This news has led to further frenzied outrage from game developers fearing that their artistic integrity will no longer be respected, critics decrying it as the death of games-as-art, and other general quasi-enlightened indignation.

The simple answer to all this is that video games are inherently a collaboration between author and audience. The more holistic answer is twofold:

1. An author’s intent is meaningless if they fail to communicate it to the audience
2. Art and meaning does not have to be intentional, and is often unintentional

The first point is a uniquely metamodern observation: it neither rejects nor accepts the validity of authorial intent, but makes it contingent upon its relationship to the audience’s interpretation. The second point is something that has been well-established since the dadaist and surrealist movements (but obviously not widely-understood). The result is that Mass Effect is not a mere series of video games. It is performance art, being unwittingly performed both by BioWare and their fans.

VAGUE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3 FOLLOW

Mass Effect 3 tasks the player, as Commander Shepard, with defeating the Reapers: an ancient race of synthetic lifeforms which live in intergalactic space, and return every 50,000 years to consume all intelligent life in the Milky Way. The technology which makes space travel possible in the Mass Effect universe was placed there by the Reapers as a trap for intelligent civilizations, urging them to develop along a predetermined path. It’s cosmic horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft: humans — and all intelligent life — are insignificant in the face of something much bigger than ourselves, which we can never hope to understand.

The Mass Effect trilogy is all about defying cosmicism: yes, we can understand it, the player says. Yes, we can defeat it.

This is especially prominent in the third game. In order to raise an army to fight the Reapers, the player must unite all of the alien species in the galaxy. This is nigh impossible; hundreds- and thousands-year-old conflicts divide these races, preventing them from ever wishing to work with one another. Some of the most alien and strange races are believed to be inherently violent and dangerous — the insectoid Rachni with their hive mind; the artificially intelligent Geth who exist as algorithms on a server, and construct and destroy robotic bodies for themselves on a whim. Throughout the game, the player as Shepard defies this impossibility. Yes, we can unite all of these races. Yes, we can solve all of these conflicts.

This is exactly what happens. In the game’s final act, all of the intelligent species of the galaxy have indeed put aside their differences as a direct result of Shepard’s — the player’s — actions. Galactic peace seems inevitable once the war against the Reaper threat is won. The player has done the unthinkable. They have solved the unsolvable. Intelligent life is significant in the face of the cosmos.

But then, in the game’s final moments, all that is thrown away. The player is presented with a series of events so illogical that many fans believe it must have been Shepard’s hallucination as a result of Reaper mind-control. While logical, this “indoctrination theory” still constitutes a sudden about-face of Mass Effect’s underlying theme: yes, we can defeat the undefeatable.

Critic MovieBob has compared this sudden about-face to the bleak ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, likely in an attempt to evoke the challenge that Gilliam faced in releasing the film with such an ending. What he fails to realize is that Brazil‘s ending was not a sudden about-face. The bleak, fatalistic tone is present throughout the entire film. Every moment of hope in Brazil is clearly false in hindsight, whereas Mass Effect 3 makes every effort to make its uplifting moments perfectly genuine. If Mass Effect 3 was trying to imitate Brazil, it only succeeded at imitating Repo Men‘s failure to imitate Brazil.

This is what the fans realized, as evidenced by the popularity of this alternate ending. Throughout the entire game, the player is able to make Shepard point out logical flaws in an effort to bring peace, but this option is suddenly gone at the 11th hour. When I played the ending sequence myself, I remember — halfway towards the green-explosion-ending-o-tron — turning Shepard around and having him fire his gun at the ghostly child. I don’t know why I thought it would do something. But I remember thinking, why should I have to make this false choice? I’ve never been forced to do this until now.

The game ended. But for many outraged fans, it did not. Before, it was Krogans, Turians, Quarians, Salarians presenting false choices to players, and they handily dismissed them all. Now, it was BioWare themselves. BioWare became the antagonist. And all of a sudden, Mass Effect wasn’t over anymore. The players had become Commander Shepard, and they refused to accept defeat; they were going to defeat the Reapers. But they could no longer do that inside the game.

Video games are a powerful medium because they are not stories about someone else. They are a story about you. For one hundred hours, BioWare had engulfed players in the emotion of defiance. For one hundred hours, players asked the question, why does it have to be this way? And for one hundred hours, their struggle against injustice paid off. The players had fully assimilated the notion that with enough effort, enough struggle, they could correct any perceived injustice against them, and make anything make sense.

What else did you expect they were going to do?

Mass Effect is about defiance, and its persistence in the face of a supposedly unsolvable problem. When I say that, I’m not talking about the games. I’m talking about the fans and BioWare. They are performers, playing the protagonist and antagonist of Mass Effect, on the stage of the world.

And the fans won. That’s not the death of art. That’s art on a level that we never could have imagined.

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

The film continues with these similarly lengthy shots, some of which have literally nothing moving for minutes at a time, for seven hours. The film could have been a series of still photographs, and not much would be lost.

Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a 20 minute cutscene, during which the player has no chance to do anything meaningful with the controller. Here’s a snippet of it, presented Mystery Science Theater 3000-style to make it more palatable:

The game continues with these similarly lengthy cutscenes, interrupted occasionally by short interactive sequences which are heavily scripted and offer the player no chance for creativity, for 40 hours or something. The game could have been a Japanese animated film with giant robots and guns and explosions, and not much would be lost.

The key difference between Hideo Kojima and Béla Tarr is that Tarr has gone on the record saying that he doesn’t want to adhere to the conventions of “good” filmmaking and storytelling. Kojima, on the other hand, is trying so hard to prove that you can tell wonderful stories through interactivity, when in fact the interactive elements of his magnum opus add nothing to the storytelling.