You know the kind I’m talking about: Our hero wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of who he is or how he got there. There’s a pounding on the door, the landlord’s hollering that this week’s rent is due, the nameless protag opens the door, and the cops burst in, pinning him to the bed and reciting Miranda for the murder of so and so and OH MY GOD WHAT’S GOING ON?!? Dark City‘s a good recent example, but it’s something I’ve loved since Corwin woke up in a hospital bed in Nine Princes in Amber.

There are any number of acceptable and equally fun variations on this basic idea, a lot of them circling around the idea that the protagonist is investigating some blank spot in their recent history, trying to learn what happened and how they were involved — bonus points if it starts look like they themselves are the killer/criminal/victim they’re trying to find. I ran into a fun twist on this not too long ago in Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, a sci-fi detective story where the main character’s memory is fine, but his new body (not-so-gently used, one previous owner) has a number of dark secrets; it’s was a really good way for me to scratch that itch.

Chuck Wendig‘s come up with another one.

Let me introduce you to Miriam Black. She’s got a hell of a party trick: give her a little skin-to-skin contact (fingertips, lips, elbows on the subway, whatever), and she gets an instant, full-color, down-to-the-second replay (preplay? foreplay?) of your death. Pretty cool. Pretty dark. Pretty bad ass. That’s Miriam Black.

At least that’s what she wants to world to think.

Truth is, if you watch Miriam for a little while… if you listen to her talk (she loves to talk) and notice how she goes out of her way to alienate anyone and everyone with whom she comes in contact (emitting a stream of viscous, vicious, venomous dialog that fills a defensive moat only the brave or stupid would try to cross), you realize that that Miriam hurts. She blames herself for every death she’s ‘witnessed’; dies a little bit every every time a soul she’s touched shuffles off this mortal coil (no matter how much of a human stain they happen to be). She’s damaged goods, brother, and she’s getting worse, not better.

Miriam Black knows when you're going to die... and she will do anything to convince herself she doesn't care.

“Sounds interesting,” you might say, “but where in all that is your little amnesia fetish getting sated?”

Well see that’s the interesting bit.

Miriam, road-weary and cynical, has a chance encounter with someone… nice. Someone she likes almost immediately. Someone she might even become friends with; a granite block of a human being who’s maybe tough enough to withstand the wear and tear of the shit storm that is Miriam’s life.

Inevitably, she reaches out for a bit of human contact, and sees her new friend’s death.

Murder. Violent and nasty. In a month.

And, somehow, Miriam is involved. Somehow, she’s there when it happens, and does nothing.

That’s when Blackbirds got me.

I don’t know how to tell you what this book is — a paranormal sci-fi conspiracy horror murder-mystery roadtrip? Maybe. It isn’t even an amnesia story, not really, because you can’t really have missing memory of something that hasn’t happened yet.

Except… Miriam can.

How can I sum this up? How can I give you the one-line morsel that will send you off to find the rest of the meal?

If Phillip K. Dick had lived Charles Bukowski’s life, he might have written Blackbirds.

Might have, I say, because I doubt he (or certainly Bukowski) could have given half as much depth to Miriam as Wendig shares, and it’s Miriam that makes Blackbirds work. The gritty asphalt fantasy that makes up the plot? Don’t get me wrong: that’s great stuff, but it’s poor, damaged, desperate Miriam that brings the whole thing back to where we live.

You may not like her (she’ll be happier if you don’t), but you’ll care.

Just see if you don’t.

The reason it’s interesting to me is because it has to do with the weird line between the traditional cultural definitions of “story” and “game” that a product like Mass Effect walks.

So, yesterday, Kaelri wrote (in part):

Frankly, I do believe that art is inviolate – that is to say, I don’t believe an artist has some sort of moral obligation to address the grievances of audience members who don’t happen to like what they came up with. If I’m a fan of a thing, it’s because I found the product and liked it; and if I choose to support it, as an advocate or a consumer or both, they still don’t owe me nothin’. Maybe they “should” pay attention to me for the sake of their business model, but that’s different from saying they “should” listen to me as though my fandom makes me a shareholder in the creative process.

First off, I get exactly where you’re coming from. I would even agree with you — when it comes to traditional media, a writer or really any creative person of any kind is not obliged to make fan-demanded changes to their work, unless they’re trying to make a more saleable product, or they just want to because their work would be better that way.

They can refuse, as I said in my original post — it might mean they never get published or that they never reach a wider audience, but that’s entirely their choice… when it comes to traditional media.

But, as I said yesterday, Mass Effect is something other than traditional media, which is why I’m going to disagree with you when it comes to this particular artistic work, and others like it:

I believe that we — the participants in the Mass Effect games — are co-creators.

Now, that’s a big statement, so let me dig into it a bit. This certainly isn’t true of every game out there — no one is complaining that they didn’t get enough creative input into the ending of Braid, because that isn’t what Braid is about — it’s not that kind of game.

Mass Effect, however, is that kind of game. It’s a conscious and (as I said in my made-up LotR example) difficult thing to do, but it is undeniably a can of worms Bioware chose to open, and once it’s open, they’re pretty much stuck with the consequences. The players have control of a lot of stuff that happens in the game series, if only with a binary yes/no level of input, and having extended them that authorship power you have, to a greater or lesser degree, given them access to the canvas and the right to call foul if they disagree with what you’re painting.

Again, this is not the case in every game out there (and it is not true of any traditional media of which I’m aware), but it is the case with Mass Effect. I can (with studious and somewhat questionable effort) entirely remove even someone like Garrus from all but a few scenes in the entire game series (the equivalent of having Samwise in one scene in Fellowship, no scenes at all in Two Towers, and writing him in as a bit-part escort for the last couple chapters of Return of the King). I decide whether many if not all of the character’s live and die and, with ME3, my influence is extended to the point where I can effectively wipe out two whole species.

It’s fair to say that Bioware is steering the A-plot, but when it comes to dictating the very tapestry against which that plot plays out, I am being dealt a lot of cards, and the hand that I play is a strong one. Certainly, my control over the personal stories in all three games is ironclad, and would be argued by many to be the most important and interesting bits.

So am I, at some level, a co-creator?

In indie tabletop RPG design, there’s an idea that some call “The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.” It refers to the classic, old-school RPG notion that “The GM is the author of the story and the players direct the actions of the protagonists.”

The term was coined to illustrate the fact that story is made of the actions and choices of the protagonists, so claiming to control one but not the other is senseless. If you have influence on the story at all, you exert influence on the protagonists, and if you truly control the actions of the protagonists, you have real and concrete influence on the story.

Or you should.

And, to be fair, Bioware did a fantastic job throughout ME1 and ME2 with giving players that kind of control and influence. (They’re not as good about it in ME3, but they’ve (sadly) compensated by becoming very skilled at disguising a lack of choice with something that feels like you’re making a decision.)

I would say that one of the biggest problems with the end of ME3 — or at least the part that causes the loudest initial outcry — is that it very baldly revokes that player-authorship at the point in the story where the players want it most.

To say that the players — while certainly not equal partners in the process, but creative contributors nonetheless — should have no say in the conclusion of the story they helped create is unfair, and to defend it by hiding behind “artistic expression”, as Bioware has done, is an insult to the players’ input throughout the series and a rather crude misrepresentation of what Mass Effect has been to both the creators and the players for the last five years.