A Couple Brief Thoughts About the ME3 Ending Controversy(No Spoilers)

I know, I know this (http://youtu.be/MjoMQJf5vKI) is what I'm doing. But I had a couple thoughts about the controversy that I just need to express. So, if you don't want to hear about this ever again, that's totally cool, just don't read it. I won't be mad.

First of all, I'm not here to comment on the quality of the ending. I'm not interested in getting into whether it was good or bad or not. Plenty of better writers than I have fallen on both sides, I not really interested in that kind of review. That being said, I am going to address some of the arguments people had against the ending. However, it's going to be in a way that doesn't address the quality of the ending itself. You'll see what I mean. ONWARD.

Alright, one of the thoughts people had about the ending was that Bioware must be trolling. This pisses me off so much I'm practically red in the face. The fact is, no matter how many hours you've put into the series, the employees at Bioware are more invested in it than you, in every possible way. Casey Hudson, the primary director behind all three games, has spent most of his waking hours for the past 10 years on this series. For the creators, these games are their babies. No reasonable human being would troll an audience with something that feels so much like a passion project. If you didn't like the ending than you have to address that dislike with the fact that this ending had pure intentions. There were people who thought you would like it.

This may be a point about syntax more than the validity of the point itself, but whatever. Many have said that ultimately their choices didn't matter. Now, this may or may not be true depending on your point of view. However, that phrase "my choices didn't matter" sticks in my throat. Whether or not they mattered in terms of the ending, they still mattered. If you paused and thought a minute when confronted a choice, it mattered. If it made you think differently about a issue, or made you reexamine your own beliefs, it mattered. The ending may or may not have expressed those choices very well, but those choices still mattered if they affected you. I know they affected me.

That's it. That wasn't so bad, right? To be honest, I don't really care what you thought about the ending, as long as you could back it up. I just think the debacle was a opportunity to have a conversation. About video game narrative, about choices, about the illusion of choice. What we ended up with was a bunch of people yelling at each other and creating white noise. That makes me sad. So please, those of you about to comment, don't make me sad.