Speaking of gaming on the small screen
The first I heard of this show was not the announcement of it's legitimacy by the sucker of a studio who just bought it's rights. My first shout was a pure reaction from a former writer for the Mass Effect games who felt it his moral duty to art and the world to claim how the very concept of this show made him 'cringe'. Now that's a lot more of a provocative title then what his actual comments read as, because that's what the journalism world lives off, slightly and intentionally misconstructions for the sake of sensationalism, because his views are actually voicing the same things that people like me always mention whenever talk of these grand garish game series adaptations come alive. But beyond the things that he and we know to be true, lies the pernicious hunger of the corporate world that cares not for where things belong and will take and take without recourse or punishment. Everyone else suffers for their greed, and at the end of the day there's nothing left to do but sit around in the refuse and say 'what the hell even happened'?
So 'Massively Effecting' the video game franchise is getting it's own TV show, that's a nice bit of security at the very least given that the game series itself is currently behind a video game studio so beleaguered that it recently lost it's second creative director for the same game in two years. (Dragon Age 4 is going to suck more than usual, isn't it?) To be clear, Amazon doesn't have their hands on the show yet, but they're in the "nearing a deal phase", which typically means leaking the deal negotiations to the public to gauge interest. Of course, at this early stage that also means we have next to no idea what this series would even contain were the forces that be lapse in their watch over the soul of humanity enough to let this through, so we don't even know if it will be an adaptation and why this is a story that needs to be told. However, we can make some educated guesses given the other properties that Amazon has gobbled up in it's desperate attempt to make it's streaming service worth a singular damn. (Wasn't The Boys enough? Why can't you be happy this that?)
Mr 'former writer' had the same impression that most had going into this news, that this would be a straight adaptation of the Mass Effect games. Now this does have a precedent with Amazon given that their Wheel of Time adaptation and Lord of the Rings remake is treading the same waters, although you could point out how both of those were keenly weaved narrative books whereas Mass Effect is a more loosey goosy video game storyline. I mean sure, we all pretend that it's some super intricate web of delicate interweaved narrative prowess, but anyone with passing familiarity with the games themselves know that the product is a lot less proud then that. (They let entire plotlines drop like flies in order to justify the finale) What I'm saying is that there's a decent chance this series idea is going to just take place within the Mass Effect world and tell connected stories, which I think would actually be super cool. of course, if it is the adaptation that everyone thinks it might be, well we can go ahead and call that the worst ending...
But why would that be so bad, why is everyone from your humble degenerate twitter commenter to your whiny atypical games journalist all throwing a fit to the same pitch? Well, it's because some (if not most) games just don't belong on the small screen. (or the big screen for that matter) Yesterday I touched on this with my analysis on the core fundamental reasons why an interactive medium creates stories that appeal on a completely different level to what a passive visual medium hopes for, and crossing the two over with an adaptation will often mean a complete rewrite of everything that made the original recognisable in the first place. (Or you end up with confused and unfocused mess like the Assassin's Creed movie.) Although to try and make see both sides of the argument here, I suppose that an RPG like Mass Effect might have some place being adapted into a TV show...
Remember that Mass Effect and other Bioware RPGs are story-heavy affairs, wherein the passive entertainment of watching narrative events unfold are sometimes just as entertaining as playing the game itself. (If not more so.) Whilst ideally for a video game you'd want a greater balance of the value proposition to consist in the gameplay, I suppose for sheer adaptation prospects these proportions bodes a bit better. I can see a politically charged drama with the fresh face of humanity trying to scour it's mark onto the well established alien councils of the discovered galaxy, as a solid concept for a TV show. And having a super solider proving the worth of humanity in a tense chase against a rogue secret alien agent that has plots to unravel the universe; this premise works without the game backing it up, is what I'm saying. And yet fundamentally something still feels off about all of this. What could that be? Well our former Bioware writer seems to have honed in on it.
With Bioware games, and most RPGs in general, you have that all-important moment where you make your character, and that is the key here. The protagonist of Mass Effect, the secret agent searching those stars and pushing this narrative, is your character. He or she is your Commander Shepard. That isn't just how this character was shaped, it was what they were designed for. Commander Shepard has little personality beyond 'military training' in their basic writing. (I guess he/she tends to be a bit patriotic no matter which way you lean, too) This is a character designed to be, as our writer puts it, "a blank slate", perfect for the player to impose their own personality upon. That is why Mass Effect is a video game, because it's very soul rests on the interactive act of the player putting themselves into the product. They decide Commander Shepard's gender, look, combat training, past, drives, personality, love life, everything about he/she. Therefore if this Mass Effect TV show is indeed a straight adaptation, they'll have lost one of the core appeals of Mass Effect the second they do casting.
Who wants to be told definitively what their title character should look like? Heck, that was one of the key problems with the Mass Effect marketing material, showing too much of the default male's face so that it influenced player's perceptions on what the idiot should look like. It was so annoying that they had to offer different box art for Mass Effect 3 showcasing the female lead, and for Andromeda they opted for a totally masked box art character altogether. Imagine that 'identity crisis' problem on steroids, and you have the potential disaster that Amazon would be in for whilst trying to choose a starring cast for some sort of adaptation. But then again, they've opened themselves up to the whole 'challenging established iron-clad imagery' thing with the very idea of remaking Lord of the Rings, so perhaps they enjoy hitting up against seemingly impassable walls and then... proving themselves? (I wait with bated breath to see how LOTR works out for them.)
So we come around to the same message I have for any and all potential adaptations of video game properties that are bumping around Hollywood; don't. The video game industry already takes too many of it's cues from the traditional passive entertainment industry for movies and TV shows to bring anything different to the table. Take the confused Tomb Raider movie from a few years back that smashed together different game plotlines and felt undeservedly rushed from start to end. The upcoming Uncharted movie that looks woefully miscast and steals imagery from key scenes in the game series only to do them worse because a computer generated figure can do more daring stunts than a real actor on a CGI background can. History screams at these people that 'video games' and 'small/big screen adaptations' do not go well together. It's like Anime and live-action Netflix adaptation, it's just a bad idea from start to finish. So if you really are gauging interest before taking this deal, Amazon, then allow me to say very clearly that I, for one, am very not interested. Unless it's not an adaptation; in that case it's cool.
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