Stop canonising our RPGs

Where'd my choices go?

Not too long ago rumours of a potential TV adaptation for the Mass Effect franchise sparked up to frighten the gaming audience the world over. Not because Mass Effect is a franchise not deserving of such an opportunity, I think the narrative is certainly strong enough to hold up in a less interactive format, (in fact, at some points I think less hallways full of enemies would strengthen the narrative) nor that I think such an opportunity would be intrinsically bad in any real way. (I think we've reached a point where certain TV productions can be as impressive, if not more impressive, than movies) The problem runs deeper. It comes with the very idea of adapting a story predicated around player choice, in character creation, moral dilemmas and facing consequence. The foremost selling point of the original Mass Effect was not it's incredible diverse alien universe rich with tantalising lore and fascinating new cultures; it was the extent and manner to which the Bioware team presented choice and consequence.

The foremost spine of the modern RPG movement is held up on the ideal of making players feel like their choices throughout a narrative have a step in shaping the stories that are made. Some RPGs live and die in the eyes of their fans based on how extensive these games get in such manners, and certain blockbuster upcoming RPGs (Baldur's Gate 3) pride themselves on their ability to support swathes of player choice. As you can imagine, this isn't exactly the kind of 'feature' that can cross the 'platform divide' from games to movies, it is a unique facet of games, which is why we consumers hold it's sacred benefits to such a revered degree. Making our own characters who make their own choices throughout their own story only demands significance if we all agree that it everyone's choices are valid and all stories are canonical within the confines of our head. Which, in turn, makes them all non-canonical at the same time, bizarrely.

Unless you're Bethesda approaching the development of Obsidian, there's no real way to serve the individual choices of everyone when writing follow-up stories that perhaps don't play into the reactivity and consequence of your typical quality Western RPG. (Betheda's solution was to make all of Daggerfall's endings canonical and non-canonical at the same time thanks to meddling from the God of Time Akatosh.) Adaptation through a book or TV show, therefore, is bound to make solid the characters who exist in that ephemeral state and in doing so delegitimise the played experience of everyone who originally loved that property for the story they told within it. Sorry, Revan actually wasn't a woman, and The Exile actually has a canonical name! At least whenever Persona is adapted the creators go out of there way to ensure that protagonists are cycled through two or three names so that there's no hard-canon name for the MC's and that decision still lies mostly in the hands of the player.

Sometimes the issue exists between games, such as how in Splinter Cell: Double Agent you have the ability to juggle a good ending and save all the necessary core characters if you play just right, only for the next game to laugh in your face and tell you that a very specific ending with a very specific death was the canon. (Spiderman 2099 theme intensifies.) But usually it's ancillary material around the world of the game bringing to life stories and adventures that once belonged to players and snatching away their control of those events in order to incorporate them into something else. Something against the spirit of roleplaying, if you ask me. And with the upcoming Baldur's Gate 3 it has come to my attention that after years of claiming those games weren't even Canon, turns out Wizards of the Coast decided to reverse their decision on that matter in a backhanded slap of canonisation that makes the worst of all worlds.

In an adventure module from a while back, Wizards made the MC of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 a boring Neutral good human fighter who is as under-whelming in his choices as he is in his now canonical ending. Despite the very clear ending of Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal, with it's multiple paths, clearly stating that the essence of Bhaal is either destroyed or overwritten- the now canonical story is that the Bhaalspawn, now a magistrate within Baldur's Gate, is slain in a battle with a magical sudden other Bhaalspawn, despite the fact we very clearly hunted down all of them, or they survive that encounter only to become stuck in the Slayer-state at which point he has to be put down like a dog by the party of snot-nosed adventurers playing the module. Crap and crappier. Oh, and if all that wasn't enough- this death releases the last of Bhaal's essence allowing the lord of murder to resurrect, albiet as a mortal now. Huh, funny, I was sure one of the key most aspects of BG2 was the destruction of the Bhaalspawn essence inside of you unless you capitalised on that essence to become a god... but I guess in canonising these events Wizards took it upon themselves to spit on Bioware's carefully constructed narrative too. Thanks guys. 

As I mentioned before, Knights of the Old Republic's Revan has undergone their own series of canonisation efforts that hijacked a very fan-driven love for the character and afflicted it with constant, seemingly malicious, injustice time and time again. The novel characterised Revan as surprisingly confrontational, whilst simultaneously canonising the light-side ending of the game- and then The Old Republic MMO came around and brought back Revan in a manner that... well it just felt disrespectful. He was an addled psychopath looking to overthrow the galaxy in order to unite it against a greater threat- it's all just 'been there done that' storytelling recycled from the old Revan as an attempt to not rock the boat too much but in doing so removing all the player-led development the character had enjoyed beforehand.

We even see this sort of phenom effect games in smaller fashions, like how Borderlands 3 explicitly claims that Lillith was the one to kill Handsome Jack at the end of Borderlands 2, despite the fact that impressive moment was left up to the player to decide. Again this is a small detail, largely insignificant in the grand scheme of the narrative being told, but it robs that power that the player is given in Role playing games and that power is meant to be everything. Interactive media is a contract with the audience telling them that the action is driven by their inputs, and if the creator needs to seize back control of the action because they didn't account for what the player would do- then it's kind of failed in that core-most dedication, hasn't it?

Not to mention there is rarely a time that we ever see a reconfigured and rewritten player choice moment that isn't staggeringly worse than all the options on hand. It's as though there's a curse on erasing player choice that denotes all replacements must be soul-suckingly terrible, and kill all the fun of the story in the same breath. Baldur's Gate's canon continuation literally invalidates the entire game franchise by resurrecting the big bad. If we had never left Candleheart Keep, the exact same thing would have happened! The franchise is now irrelevant! The moral of the story? People keep giving us the reigns and then retroactively telling us how the story should go, like the most annoying gaming partner, but I say we reject that- let's get back to telling our own stories.