Extra Lives (14 page)

G
odforsaken
is often used to describe the world’s woebegone landscapes. But to say that God has forsaken something, there must be some corresponding indication that God had ever shown any interest in it, and, in the case of Edmonton, Alberta, this was not immediately apparent. On the evening of my arrival, at least, the temperature was close to the magic intersection at which Celsius and Fahrenheit achieve subzero parity. I was in Edmonton to see Drew Karpyshyn, the head writer of BioWare’s
Mass Effect
, a science-fiction role-playing game that some have held up as one of the best-written console video games of all time.

There is a nontrivial divide separating the relative achievements of console and PC games in any number of areas, but how “well written” console games are when compared with PC games, which have historically been more text-heavy, is especially contentious. Among the PC gamers of my acquaintance, Black Isle Studios’ RPG
Planescape: Torment
is often cited as being more thought provoking and literarily satisfying than any console game. In this respect, BioWare’s console games have an instantly recognizable style: that of seeming like PC games (a famously persnickety and
piracy-plagued market that BioWare, unlike many developers, has not abandoned). What distinguishes the BioWare style is an unshakable reliance on dialogue and narratives with all manner of bureaucratic complication. What also distinguishes the BioWare style is gameplay longevity: I have had moderately meaningful relationships in which I invested less time than what I have spent on some BioWare games.

All of BioWare’s titles have been RPGs of one stripe or another, with an early concentration on the dungeon fantasia, an RPG subgenre that is extremely difficult to do well and virtually impossible to sell beyond its niche audience. The first BioWare title to move beyond the cleric-and-dwarf sodality was 2003’s
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
(known, in vaguely Neanderthal vernacular, as
KotOR)
, which is set four thousand years before the events lamentably depicted in
The Phantom Menace
. With
KotOR
, BioWare was in danger of simply swapping one shut-in constituency for another, but it was a game of such narrative super-bity that even non–
Star Wars
fans took note. While the care the game lavished on the
Star Wars
universe was considerable, the way
KotOR
handled dialogue indicated a solidifying methodology. Here, as in the later
Mass Effect
, almost every conversation and encounter initiated by the gamer can lead to multiple and often drastically different outcomes, some of which bring you in line with the Force, some of which tempt you down the path of the dark side of the Force. The game changes—as does your character’s appearance—depending on where he or she falls along a spectrum of in-game morality. Although open-ended conversation may sound like a relatively simple game mechanic, when it is done well that is most assuredly not the case. The technology BioWare uses to manage in-game dialogue is closely minded, and parts of it are patented. No one, then, makes more conversationally
driven console games than BioWare. When these games are played in proper solitude, the marathonic dialogue rarely becomes an issue. To watch someone
else
play a BioWare game, however, is to ponder the boredom-curing upshot of punching oneself in the face.

For gamers with dreamier turns of mind, the somewhat draggy narratives of games centered upon the unpredictability of conversation and encounter provides half of the enjoyment. The dynamism of combat or movement has never been the strength of the RPG and never will be. Indeed, the notion that involved narrative has any place in video games at all begins in the RPG—a fact I have heard more than a few game designers lament. While most game genres have ransacked the devices of film, the RPG has in many ways drawn from the well of the literary. This is the source of many game designers’ suspicions. Why construct an entire genre upon the very foundations (character, plot, theme) that have given games such trouble?

The man I had been seated next to on the plane into Edmonton, a
KotOR
fan from way back, underwent a spontaneous volubility transfusion when I explained the purpose of my visit. The woman manning the booth at immigration control gave my passport a hard, prideful stamp when I revealed the name of the local company I would soon be seeing. My Lebanese cabdriver, while making his way along an icy highway at speeds approaching fifteen miles an hour, nearly lost control of his sedan when I revealed my destination. “Big company,” he said. “Powerful company!” He then asked if BioWare’s physician founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, were still practicing medicine. (BioWare’s name derives from its origins, long jettisoned, as a medical technology company.) I didn’t think so, I said. “That’s very sad,”
the driver said. “The world needs doctors.” Apparently, he was not a
KotOR
fan.

BioWare’s offices take up the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors of a tiered, charmlessly concrete office building on the south side of Edmonton. Once inside, I submitted to the required processes of game-studio entry: shaking the hand of the extremely pleasant PR person (who would be sitting in on my meeting with Karpyshyn to monitor “the messaging he’s putting out”), scrawling my name across the nondisclosure agreement, gladly agreeing to a quick tour.

At my request, the tour momentarily paused when we came to eight tall cabinets filled to capacity with books and old board games. That BioWare would have a large library was not surprising: Its games are noted for the vastidity of their worlds, all of which must be designed and populated and inhabited. Along with all the expected stuff (pop novels like
Jurassic Park
, old Dungeons & Dragons reference guides, an inordinate number of books whose titles included either
realm
or
lance)
, BioWare’s library went beyond Advanced Nerd Studies:
The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs; Architecture of North America; Giants of the Sea; Chinese Grammar; Guns, Germs, and Steel; The Celtic Book of the Dead;
and
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions
. At this last I looked over at my handler. “We have to come up with a lot of lore,” she said with a shrug.

In the common area, five youthful BioWare employees were gathered around a massive flatscreen television and playing
Street Fighter IV
, which had just been released for the Xbox 360. That is, two were playing while the other three watched. From their total emotionlessness I gathered that this somehow qualified as working. Although none of these young men appeared old enough to rent a car, I was told that the average age of BioWare’s employees
was, in fact, thirty. Compared with the rest of the industry, this practically qualified BioWare as an assisted-living provider.

The tour concluded with a meeting room that illustrated the degree of fan loyalty inspired by BioWare’s games. Hung on the walls of this room were nineteen painstakingly detailed woodcut plaques that bore the design-specific titles of every game BioWare has released. The artist responsible had sent the woodcuts to BioWare at no cost in order to show his “appreciation for years of great gaming.” I tried to imagine someone, anyone, doing such a thing for Paramount or Random House. This was quite impossible.

Drew Karpyshyn was a large, tree-trunk-solid man, his buzzed-down hair bringing to mind a soldier a few years clear of active duty. His face, however, bore few traces of its thirty-seven years, and I wondered if there was something about a lifelong commitment to sci-fi and fantasy (Karpyshyn is also a science-fiction novelist) that kept one boyish. As we sat down, I told Karpyshyn that, having now visited Edmonton, I believed I understood why BioWare made such long, involved, complicated games. He laughed and admitted that there was something to this. “There’s a huge amount of video-game talent in Edmonton,” he said. “Sixteen hours of darkness? What else are you going to do but play games?” Born and raised in Edmonton himself (though his ancestral heritage is Ukrainian), Karpyshyn had recently decided to relocate to BioWare’s Austin, Texas, office. “I’m done with Canadian winters.”

When I confessed to having spent around eighty hours playing
Mass Effect
, I could tell from Karpyshyn’s pop-eyed reaction that even he considered this excessive. Among video-game genres, only the RPG was capable of subjecting me to such a lengthy enslavement. What was it, I asked him, about the RPG? If play is freedom with structure, do not rule-bound genres like the RPG
simply add another and possibly unnecessary layer of structure over the structure of video-game play? Why do so many people respond to that? I certainly respond to it, I told him, but I was not always certain I wanted to.

“Story has been more important in RPGs than it has been in other types of games,” he said. “That’s one thing that appeals to me, as a writer. Now that’s starting to change. You’re seeing story propagate across the different genres. A lot of games out there have a very interesting story, but it doesn’t really matter what you do. With RPGs, the fact that you can actually influence the story, and control it in some way, and have a different experience—a personal and individualized experience—is very important.”

Even more significant, he told me, was the RPG’s defining characteristic: the player’s ability to create his or her own character. In
Mass Effect
you are presented with a name: Shepard. Almost everything else is open to alteration.
Mass Effect
’s catalog of physical features is not as large or varied as some games with character-creation options (you have your pick of a dozen or so noses, two dozen hairstyles, an array of facial scars, and so on), but the game provides an additional interesting measure of psychological customization. Shepard can be the sole survivor of a long-ago massacre, a storied war hero, an erstwhile criminal, and so on. (The specific past and hang-ups with which your Shepard is saddled will be reflected within the game’s narrative and often determine the kind of people you will meet in the gameworld.) “I don’t really identify with a premade character,” Karpyshyn said. “When I make a character—even if I don’t make the character look like me—that is the character I’m inhabiting through the game. Even if it’s a female character or not even a human character—it doesn’t matter. I feel connected.”

I chose not to get into how long I took in designing my Shepard.
The fruit of my labor was a striking green-eyed redhead with drill-resistant cheekbones and nicely plumped lips. Long after I finished
Mass Effect
, I consulted YouTube to rewatch a few of its key scenes and was confronted by a series of rank imposters: bald Shepards, Asian Shepards, blond Shepards, black Shepards, and (most appalling)
male
Shepards. This was a form of video-game interactivity that slid around the criticism of Jonathan Blow: It was an
imaginative
interactivity that in many ways resembled the reading experience, in which characters are cast and costumed in the mind’s definitive privacy. An RPG such as
Mass Effect
literalizes this process. The YouTube Shepards struck me as imposters because that is what they were.

The special resonance of the created character will amount to very little if the story she becomes part of is badly or lazily conceived. Because the typical RPG tells its story through serial conversation, dialogue is where the genre lives. More frequently, it is also where the genre dies. Many RPG characters have a peerless gift for antispeech, from the lobotomized Shakespeare of the average fantasy game to the exotically inane nomenclature of the average sci-fi game. No other genres tip so easily into silliness when trying to be deadly serious, and there is no purer indictment than that. In light of this, I had devised a simple scenario: If I am playing an RPG, and the characters are talking, and my response to a woman of any foreseeable nudity walking into the room is to instantly turn the game off, I know that what I am playing does not have much adult nourishment.
Mass Effect
almost always passed this test. When I asked Karpyshyn about the unusual facility his games had with dialogue, he said it was attributable to the fact that BioWare simply has more writers than most developers: thirteen in its Edmonton office and almost as many in Austin. One happy result of this was the quality control of competitive evaluation.
“You
know,”
he said, “that your stuff is going to be seen by other writers.” As far as he was aware, no other developer had as many writers on staff.

BioWare’s writers, as full-time employees, are involved in the creative process from beginning to end. “A lot of companies,” Karpyshyn told me, “will bring writers in at the beginning and say, ‘Do an outline,’ or bring them in at the end and say, ‘Write a script.’” While the game industry was full of what Karpyshyn called “nightmare stories” of writers being abused, ignored, and discarded by developers, “BioWare respects the writing process.” BioWare also indulged the writing process: The script for
Mass Effect
contains three hundred thousand words.