I pause before answering. Not because I’m torn for choice, but because I don’t know quite what to say. I do know what I’d like to say:

“I’m sorry, ‘cheated?’ You understand why I ‘cheated?’ I don’t think so, Major.

“So I spent some time flirting with you while we served on the Normandy. That is, if listening to you recount how you white-knighted some girl in biotic school by killing your teacher is considered flirting. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like the bastard pretty much deserved it, but whoa. I mean, I watched the slaughtering of my entire family on Mindoir, then watched my entire Alliance unit get devoured by a thresher maw on Akuze, but I never accidentally broke a dude’s neck over a boy I liked. That’s some hardcore darkness you’ve got swirling around inside you, buddy!

“Yes, there was also the night before Ilos, and I’m not going to take anything away from that. Our ragged band of brothers was heading into an uncertain future, and you and I managed a sweet, if brief, moment of connection before it all went down. As if enough hadn’t already gone down. Between almost having to shoot Wrex and losing Ash on Virmire, I was barely holding on. You were there for me, and I was there for you. We’ll always have Ilos.

It was good, but it wasn’t THAT good.

“Then I defeated Saren and saved the Citadel. Do you remember what happened after that? A Collector ship attacked the Normandy, ripped a hole in its side, and I got spaced. And DIED. I died, Kaidan. Dead. Suffocated in space, where no one could hear me scream. Not that I could, due to that whole suffocating thing. But thanks to Cerberus (I know, I know, you’re not a huge fan), I was rebuilt as a regular Bionic Woman and woke back up — two years later.

“And I’ll never forget our reunion on Horizon. Your dramatic entrance from behind those crates, touting me as the savior of the Citadel and a living legend. The awkward hug. Your accusations that I was showing up after two years and acting like nothing happened. Your petulant whining that you thought we had something, something real.

“‘Thinking you were dead tore me apart,’ you said. ‘How could you put me through that?’

“Uh, I was dead, then unconscious for two years? Then I woke up to some serious shit going down, what with those Collectors abducting people from colonies all over the galaxy? Like they did right before you got all up in my face, on the very ground we were standing upon? Believe it or not, things aren’t always about you?

“So all this talk of cheating and the ‘I still love you,’ stuff? We spent one night together, sweetie. Then you (rightfully) assumed I was dead. Then, and I can’t stress this enough, two years went by. I hate to be all Ross about this, but I think we were on a break, at the very least. A reasonable person would assume all bets were off. But like I said, I never accidentally broke a dude’s neck over a boy I liked.

“What do I want? I want you to shoot what I tell you to shoot, or lift the baddies up into the air so I can shoot them. I want you to quit being such a dummy. I want you to stop acting like a sixth grader facing rejection for the first time. I want you to get it together, Alenko.”

I don’t say this. I don’t say any of it. I opt for the kinder, simpler, “I’m sorry Kaidan, but we should just keep it professional.”

Then you make me pay for the lunch you invited me to.

You know what? Garrus is way better in the sack anyway.

He’s a better dancer, too.

—

Sara Clemens is an ad copywriter for a book publisher, so every single day she pretends she’s in an episode of Mad Men. You can follow her on twitter at @TheSaraClemens, and find all the things she’s ever written for the internet at saraclemens.com.

I’d perform soliloquies for Stitch, my teddy bear. My G.I. Joes took part in an ever-evolving saga of espionage. My Barbie dolls were the members of a huge and convoluted family tree, and participated in all the drama that comes with it. My mom’s Barbie was the mom. She still wore her makeup and hair exactly the way she did when she was a teenager herself.

Can’t you see it just dates you, Babs? You don’t look any younger!

I was also a voracious reader and movie watcher. I especially dug sci-fi. I saw Alien for the first time when I was eight, and apart from gifting me with the image that still pops up in my nightmares (the baby xenomorph birthing itself from John Hurt’s chest, obviously), it also introduced me to Our Ripley of Nostromo, the first female film character I found entirely relatable. I mean, Leia was close, but at the end of the day? I wanted to be Han Solo. Soon enough, I was calling my cat “Jonesy” and pretending she and I were going into cryostasis when we’d go to bed.

She always wanted to sleep directly on my head though, the little facehugger.

But wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to up the ante? To actually feel like I was on a spaceship? To wear the right clothes, say the right words, and be surrounded by a bunch of people doing the same? To feel really immersed in these worlds? Heck yes, it would. So I decided to become an actor.

And I did, and it was great. I made people laugh and cry (mostly laugh). I met the people who make up my core group of friends. I met my husband. I made contacts that got me my first paying gigs in New York. I told a lot of stories.

However, as with most things that are awesome, there was a catch. While little Sara assumed it was the actors who were at the center of the make-believe, actor Sara discovered it was really the audience (as of course it should be).

It may look like she’s on the deck of spaceship, but she’s actually standing in front of several panels of green spandex. Her costume is held together in the back by safety pins. Half the time, she’s not even talking with the person who appears in the scene with her. Theatre offers her more immersion, but then it’s a constant exchange of energy with the audience, because they’re actually there in the room. That energy exchange is important and wonderful and absolutely thrilling, and I miss it dearly, but there came a time when I realized I was the one who wanted to be fooled.

Enter Commander Shepard, stage right.

I was already well acquainted with the immersive qualities of video games, but Mass Effect took dead aim at my childhood fantasies and struck true. An epic space fantasy spanning three games, where decisions from the first affect outcomes in the second and third, it offered me the chance to be the badass space explorer I always wanted to be.

I stalked the decks of the Normandy. I donned space armors and wielded high tech weapons. I befriended my crew. Flirted with them, too. Some of them died, and I mourned them. I helped some people, and hurt some others. I saved the galaxy. For the most part, I was the good gal, but I followed my own code — sometimes you just have to use the Renegade interrupt option and blow up that gas tank your opponent is too busy monologuing to notice.

“Boring conversation anyway,” you’ll say out loud from your couch.

A video game tells a story for an audience of one. A great video game lets that audience help tell it. I may never get a chance to play Ripley in the Alien reboot (though I am totally available, Hollywood), but my Shepard ain’t a half bad substitute. Especially because she’s mine.

There are lots of ways to tell stories, and I’ve got no plans to stop.

—

Sara Clemens is an ad copywriter for a book publisher, so every single day she pretends she’s in an episode of Mad Men. You can follow her on twitter at @TheSaraClemens, and find all the things she’s ever written for the internet at saraclemens.com.

First and foremost, I feel like I just blew up a lot of shit. At the end, you have to fight Misery, The Doctor, The Doctor after the red crystal takes over his body, and then the Core after the Doctor, um Red Crystal Doctor, um, a bunch of red bubbles possess the Core AND Misery AND Sue.

Basically, you just shoot a lot.

And, weirdly, it didn’t feel like the toughest fight of the game. I had a much harder time with the Dragon Sisters on my second trip through the Egg Corridor (after the big collapse). Of course, that’s not a complaint. I am, in all honesty, ready to be done. I’m happy with the game, and the experience as a whole, but I’m ready to move on to something else, too.

I don’t have a lot new to say about the narrative — I think it’s a compliment to Cave Story that most of the narrative value is embedded throughout the game rather than coming in one big burst at the end. Destroying and escaping from the floating island felt like a culmination rather than a revelation, although there are a few good additional bits if you watch the credits. Sue, for example, gets turned back to a human, but it doesn’t stick.

The most powerful moment for me was actually the quick flash to Curly Brace, still inactive and locked in the core.

In fact, saving Curly Brace is the one thing that could drag me through the game a second time, although I think there’s a good argument to be made for not going back to save her. While it’s almost assumed that a good game is one that’s designed for replay value — BioWare is famous for this, and actually puts messages on loading screens encouraging the player to start a second playthrough and make different choices — Heavy Rain director David Cage has stated in interviews that he hopes that players make a single trip through his game.

These competing desires are expressions of different theories of game narrative experience, both, interestingly, hinging on design architectures which attempt to make player choices matter. BioWare is, in effect, saying “we put a lot in this game, and you owe it to yourself to see the various outcomes your choices can lead to. See how characters react differently, find all the easter eggs, do everything.” The evidence, in this case, that choices matter comes from experiencing different outcomes, and the implied argument is that if a player is only going to play a game once, then they may as well go buy a game with a more linear, game-directed storyline. (Like maybe Final Fantasy XIII. To which I say, “Touché, BioWare. Touché.”)

Heavy Rain, while seeming to be similarly focused on crating meaningful player choices, actually takes an entirely different approach as to what it means for a choice to matter. Instead of encouraging the player to go back and find out what could have happened differently, the game instead focuses on creating a more seamless experience.¹ In fact, without a second playthrough (or some digging online), it’s not entirely clear at the end of the game what exactly could or should have gone differently, and one of the things I admire about the game is the way that players who reach wildly different endings can leave the game with the impression that they achieved the “best” ending.

All of which is to say, while part of me wants to save Curly Brace, her loss was the most affecting narrative moment in Cave Story for me, and I’m not totally sure I want to defeat that.

So what do you say, Daniel and Kevin? Will you be playing again? Or was the first trip enough (or more than enough)?

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1. I use the phrase “more seamless” rather than “seamless” intentionally. There’s a whole column (at least) in Heavy Rain‘s seams and joins, but I’m supposed to be talking about Cave Story, so I’ll leave it there for now.

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

In fact, the unintended implication of Mass Effect‘s episodic but non-sequential narrative architecture may be that the truly moral choice would be for Shepard to fly from system to system but never actually land. Each of the distress calls would continue to beckon, preserved in a stasis where some existential danger has been comprehended, but eternally delayed. I like to imagine entire generations living their whole lives on that ship, passing the story of the hero who will come to save them to their children and their children’s children. It’s an appealing counternarrative to the adolescent fantasy of an individual hero whose labors succeed where armies, scientists, and politicians have failed. It would also save the player from having to wait for all of those loading screens.

Even so, while it may not be quite right to speak of my time playing the game as pleasant, I have to acknowledge that Mass Effect 2 was a rich experience. Peter Brooks¹ argues that a great deal of the pleasure of narrative comes not just from knowing the ending, but in the postponement of the ending, and in that light, Mass Effect 2 is a masterpiece. The plot of Mass Effect 2 is actually pretty thin — Shepard dies (why not?), is brought back to figure out who is kidnapping entire human colonies, a crew is recruited, some navigational information is recovered, and everyone flies to the center of the galaxy to save the world and learn a little something about themselves.

But while the main story itself doesn’t give the player that much to do, there are a million ways to put off doing that handful of things. Every character Shepard recruits wants something, and expects Shepard to get, save, and/or destroy it for them. While I think BioWare would argue that these errands constitute a major part of the main storyline — and they did indeed compose a significant fraction of my play time — they’re also entirely optional. More importantly, in terms of the narrative architecture, making the character loyalty missions optional means that they have to be entirely independent of each other. Nothing that you do on any one loyalty mission can directly affect any other because the game can’t assume that you’ve completed (or will ever complete) any specific mission before completing another. Without that necessary sequential relation, there is no room for causes and effects. Each mission is its own context, meaning, and self-contained consequence, and Shepard remains a blank state onto which entire civilizations can project their hopes and fears, a knight-errant.

While BioWare is famous for their choice-centered good or evil/light side vs. dark side/paragon vs. renegade gameplay, and for creating game franchises where the choices made in earlier games carry over into sequels, these choices can necessarily have only marginal impacts. If the player makes a choice that results in a character’s death in an earlier game, then this character will not show up in the sequel, but since each game must be created to encompass both the possibility that character X is alive and dead, then characters from earlier games must be limited to secondary (or cameo) roles in later games. Commercial constraints mean that BioWare cannot create a Mass Effect 3 which cannot be beaten (or is ultimately any less rich of an experience) if any single character is killed in Mass Effect 2. (Imagine, for example, a Lord of the Rings where it doesn’t really matter whether Boromir or Aragorn dies. Tolkien would not have been able to make Aragorn so central to the plot of the second book, and so absolutely critical to the resolution of the war. Boromir’s death would be robbed of its classically tragic nobility.)

The result is that each game demands that you assemble a new cast of characters, and largely abandon your previous crew. Relationships still exist, sort of, but of necessity cannot be central to the action or narrative development of the new game. There are major choices in Mass Effect 2 that promise to impact Mass Effect 3 — you can strengthen or decimate the Geth, you can deliver the Collector base to Cerberus or destroy it — but these decisions cannot do much more than change a handful of cutscenes. (The outcome of the war does not really depend on whether you win the loyalty of Rohan or tell them off.)

None of which is to say that you shouldn’t play Mass Effect 2. It’s an extraordinary game in terms of visuals, setting, and characterization, but it’s a triumph of storytelling and not of story, of world building and not of narrative. Raph Koster has argued that “Narrative is not a game mechanic” — that is that narrative in video games is not a central operation of the game itself but a way for the game to provide feedback to a player who is navigating the game’s essentially non-narrative problem set (mash button, kill monster, steer car, etc.). I’m not totally convinced by Koster’s argument, but Mass Effect 2 is a pretty strong example of what he’s talking about.

All of which is to say that Mass Effect 2 is a picaresque (and a good one) and not a novel. It’s a convincing illusion of a world in which the player has agency and choices have persistent effects, even though the overarching story does its best to undo those effects. None of these observations are meant to be criticisms of the quality of the game. In fact, most of them could be addressed if BioWare were designing individual, standalone games rather than franchises. It’s not the mechanic/narrative interface that defeats the possibility of player choices from having a significant and lasting impact on the narrative world, it’s the lack of a clear and specific endpoint.

The world doesn’t end, and because the world continues, the game has to account for all the choices the player didn’t make.

So do enjoy Mass Effect 2 — I did — but don’t feel bad if you take your time about it. The world will wait for you.

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1. In Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. It feels like kind of a pretentious reference, but this can sometimes be a pretentious column.

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.