Author Topic: Of motivations and Shivans  (Read 28528 times)

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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Narratively, I think the Shivans need a reveal. There needs to be some central secret that has a profound impact on the player. Mass Effect failed at this, because the explanation for the Reapers was ultimately pretty much just "they're some things made by some people to do some stuff". There was nothing perspective-altering about that; the explanation was very mundane.

I was gonna say something but Battuta chimed in first - yes, there is no need for a reveal, but I do believe you have to give something. That something might just be a trick, a hint at an answer, at a process that will give you answers, a signal that gives you hope that indeed you are about to understand the gist of it, and then when you are truly happy to finally being about to have the answers on your lap, a curveball goes on your way and you are left with a mystery again. This is a description of FS2 mostly, where hints of a process or an answer were being constantly given (The ETAK promising a communication with Shivans, the Sathanas defeat, promising a visit towards their hintersystems and thus to their secrets). In FS1 this also happened (The shivan ship boarding, prominently).

But what I think that drove people nuts and still drives people to think about them and what they really are and so on and so forth is how mysterious they were left as. Any answers someone could come up with will *always* be less than the unimaginable that exists before you know what they are about. Once you know, the mystery is gone, the interest is gone. "Ah, the Shivans are X. Ok then".

It seems like a cheat but it is NOT. For the precise idea here is exactly the Gap. The unsurmountable Gap between the Real and your ideas about it. This is a core feature of Cthuluh, they were beyond reason, they had irrational (impossible) geometries. They were unintelligible. And it is this gap that is the source of the Terror. Close this Gap with some Mass Effect shenanigan, and suddenly the Reapers become laughable.


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Anyway I've gotten off topic. Point is, the heuristics stuff is fascinating, but it's not enough on its own. There needs to be some sort of perspective-altering impact.

Sure, you need *something*. But you also need the idea that you *cannot* grasp more, that there is some kind of limit, from which only madness ensues. That tension is the fascinating originality of these kinds of stories.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
I think part of why this community is still going strong and has made some incredible stories and theories is precisely because :v: only ever hinted at the Shivans' nature. @Luis, I thoroughly enjoyed your reading of FreeSpace as a retelling of Exodus and thanks to :v: never coming out and saying that any fan theory was wrong, like Bioware did with the Indoctrination Theory when the ending was still being discussed to death.

In my experience (with much of it coming from our community) the audience will usually come up with far more intricate and creative explanations given enough time (Luis's Exodus theory, Blue Planet, etc.) than what the developers could explain (again see Mass Effect). The key though is hinting at more going on than is initially presented. FromSoftware (Souls series) is excellent at this and they give slightly less directly to players than :v: did with FreeSpace.

The retail campaigns do drop quite a few hints by themselves that people have run with, or even running with the Shivan name alone. What :v: has left us with is the ability to let our imaginations and discussions prosper through their tiny hints. Once again dropping hints and only nudging players towards a certain direction without forcing them there can lead to much stronger and more dedicated communities, just look at the Souls fanbase and its presence of lore speculation on Youtube.

Also, shameless self plug, since I have more free time over the summer, I will be working more on my game design videos, some of which will focus on what we have been discussing here, along with more comparisons between Mass Effect and FreeSpace.

As a side note, I remember playing ME1 for the first time and being pumped to have another mysterious force to face with the Reapers and being extremely disappointed that they attempted to explain their motives to the extent they did.
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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Well, ME1 was just straight-up a better game than the other two. The atmosphere was unmatched. And there was a greater focus on detective work, and side-stories that were mysterious and eldritch in their own right without being connected to the Reapers, rather than the focus being on whether you're a bad enough dude to stop the Reapers.

@Luis: Again, it only worked with the Shivans because the story never ended. And it's still unsatisfying that all we can do is speculate. Again returning to the ME comparison, I see people argue all the time that Bioware should have left the Reapers unexplained. THAT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. Unless they were planning to explain it in a future game.

Basically, a mystery can only be sustained so long as there's hope of solving it. If it becomes clear to the audience that the writers don't have an answer in mind, the mystery loses its magic. We still wonder about the Shivans because there's enough ambiguity that we can fool ourselves into thinking the writers had a plan for what the Shivans were, even though they were probably just making it up as they went along.

Conversely, a mystery that has a pretty obvious explanation that's almost certainly the intended one can be sustained if the writer simply refuses to confirm it. See: Procedure 110-Montauk. It's quite clear what the procedure entails, but the author refuses to tell, which generates curiosity.

The point is, this sort of story only works if you have a plan. You CANNOT make this stuff up as you go along. Steven Moffat learned that the hard way with the whole Silence arc that turned out to be something stupid because he didn't plan ahead. (Although oddly enough, the pertinent episodes in Series Six still retain their mystique, even knowing that it adds up to jack squat in the end.)

And yeah, you can't explain everything about a Lovecraftian entity. Again with my ME concept, the big reveal doesn't actually explain what the Reapers are, or where they came from. It actually just explains what we are. But it explains what they're doing here, and what the point of their actions is, and that's enough. You don't have to explain everything, but you do have to explain something important.

Also, though, it depends on what kind of story you're trying to tell: mystery or horror. For horror, you don't need to explain anything, really, and explanations are generally a bad idea for a Cosmic Horror Story. However, the stuff I write is generally more along the lines of Cosmic Mystery, which leans heavily on horror, but is ultimately more about creating awe. The Eldritch Abominations in a Cosmic Horror Story are pretty much invariably evil or at least antagonistic. In a Cosmic Mystery, they're frequently neutral or even friendly, albeit still far from comprehensible.

(Also, the Exodus thing isn't a theory. It was very clearly intentional. The game was going to be subtitled "Exodus", and Bosch explicitly references the story a couple times.)

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Montauk is bad, and dumb.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
One of my favorite aspects of FreeSpace was the complete mystery behind the Shivans. I always figured that was the point, to make them as alien and strange as possible by making their motives and behavior completely opaque. I forget where exactly :v:'s tiny hint at what FS3 might have been is, but I recall it talked about following Bosch to Shivan space. Given the opaque nature of the Shivans, I doubt there would be as much of an explanation as some might want.

The thing with explanations for entities like the Shivans is that every individual has begun creating their own idea of why the Shivans behave the way they do. If we got an official explanation, regardless of how well done it might be, it will still stifle discussion (look at Mass Effect). I'll keep referencing FromSoftware primarily for this reason. Whether or not they have a complete story hidden somewhere in their offices doesn't matter. They've inspired many theories and interpretations of their world, which was part of their goal all along, give people something to latch onto and see what happens.

Whether or not that too was :v:'s intent with FreeSpace doesn't matter anymore, since the probability of them ever working on a third game is practically nonexistent. What they left us was hints to draw our own conclusions from. If that third game had come out or even simply an expansion pack, I don't think they would have answered all with the Shivans.
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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Montauk is bad, and dumb.

?

I mean, I'm not totally sold on it myself, but what's your reasoning?

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
@Luis: Again, it only worked with the Shivans because the story never ended. And it's still unsatisfying that all we can do is speculate. Again returning to the ME comparison, I see people argue all the time that Bioware should have left the Reapers unexplained. THAT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. Unless they were planning to explain it in a future game.

It worked, didn't it? It was mostly by accident because I agree with you, Bioware would have ****ed up and explained it away with some terrible idea. I'm saying that this would have been the case, because the stakes were just too high, the material they should have come up with would have most probably fall short of what they had built in FS2. Such a case was even hinted by Petrarch by postulating how the Shivans were just trying to "get home", a "ET goes home" idiotic tearful idea that I'm glad it was just a wild speculation that can be dismissed as such.

But the point remains, it worked. And sometimes, these accidents do bring about jewels.

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Basically, a mystery can only be sustained so long as there's hope of solving it. If it becomes clear to the audience that the writers don't have an answer in mind, the mystery loses its magic. We still wonder about the Shivans because there's enough ambiguity that we can fool ourselves into thinking the writers had a plan for what the Shivans were, even though they were probably just making it up as they went along.

I agree. I think that the writers should always outthink their own works, that is, the things that are "explained" in their material should always be one or two steps behind what they really know about these beings. The point is that all the behavior of these beings should imply by itself a lot more than what is told or even admitted. But to imply, it must be present and explained in the writer's mind. The point is to give a sense of coherence and solidity to these beings that enact from more than the lore and canon, but is merely felt, never exposed. This gap between what is canonically "known" (even by "show don't tell" standards) and what the writer actually knows, gives profundity to the material, and thus life.

If all you see is all that there is, there's never a there there, there's never a feeling that there's more to it than we know, because we already know it all. And to fall short of providing that "all", and let your imagination fill the blanks by yourself, is the hallmark of true art.

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And yeah, you can't explain everything about a Lovecraftian entity. Again with my ME concept, the big reveal doesn't actually explain what the Reapers are, or where they came from. It actually just explains what we are. But it explains what they're doing here, and what the point of their actions is, and that's enough. You don't have to explain everything, but you do have to explain something important.

They almost reach that explanation with the Leviathan DLC. The end product still sucks balls. I don't even like Battuta's solution, but it's a case of hopelessness to solve all these loose threads.

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(Also, the Exodus thing isn't a theory. It was very clearly intentional. The game was going to be subtitled "Exodus", and Bosch explicitly references the story a couple times.)

By the time I wrote it, I didn't know that subtitle! The game references a *lot* of things, from the Second Crusades (Aquitaine), the Iceni revolution from the roman empire (by queen Boadicea), the tower of Babel, the story of the Collossus, and even the psychological arc of Francis Petrarch. When I found this working subtitle, I was indeed quite happy that I had nailed it.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
My solution is good, and smart. It's all in the execution, you're not going to get real effect in forum posts.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Execution is indeed king in many ways, but afaict it's mainly a doomsday device with an inherent fragile Nash equilibrium there. A temporary stalemate. The Reapers will not kill themselves just because you ask them to, so you have to hold the hand over the button forever. Eventually, they find a way to kill you and the device. Even if you demand their suicide and are able to convince them your bluff is for real, there's no method to quickly evaluate their compliance. A hiper-intelligent actor will always prefer to hide several agents from your sight, falsely comply and then try to destroy the device and restart the harvest. Ply evals obviously determine full compliance with Shepard as being as bad a decision to make as letting Shepard press the button (for it equally ensures the failure of its mission).

IOW, it's a stalling solution. Not a real solution for the problem that the Reapers were "made" to solve, and as we learned from Leviathan, is a real issue in the universe, the technological singularity followed by the eventual destruction of all organic beings in the galaxy.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
As so often happens in these conversations, you're responding to a detail you yourself introduced! I don't think I would ever want 'Reapers self destruct' to be part of the ending.

The most basic mechanical and narrative theme in Mass Effect, almost from the first line, is the tension between playing by the rules — 'we have to think about the consequences in the long run, we have to consider our place in the community' — and saying '**** the rules, I have violence!' This is paragon/renegade.

The final choice should embody that. The choice itself isn't that important, after all. It's watching the consequences unfold for the characters we care about (even when those characters are entire species). The tension and ambiguity you take issue with is a strength in my mind.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
I totally see the tension, which I agree is excellent, it's just difficult for me to see the resolution sharply and satisfactory. Without the Reapers commiting suicide, it's just Shepard (or any other substitute), forever, holding the hand over the button while the Reapers watch closely until you flinch / crack. Even if you are able to come up with a kind of a treaty with the Reapers, any good evaluation of the problem would reach the conclusion that it is an inherent fragile state of affairs. And by "fragile", I mean absolutely prone to failure (Battlestar Galactica to the power of 10). Either someone ends up pressing the button or the Reapers manage to infiltrate and sabotage the weapon. From that moment, it's harvest time again!

Of course, if they calculate it and find no solution to sabotage it, they would have still to remain in the shadows to prevent the machines taking over.

I can see why you like these solutions, they are open to a sequel! But are they good for a satisfying ending to a trilogy? Should the ending tone be one of remaining tension, remaining stress, a guillotine that was paused but still hovering your head?

My main question would be, what would then the paragon / renegade choices be like? Isn't that solution completely straightfoward? You *have* to hold the gun to your head. If you shoot, everything's over. That ain' no fun ending for a Renegade. You can only do *one* thing. The worst execution would have you decide in which tone you'd issue the threat (talk about colored endings, this would be the "virtuous or badass smile endings").

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Mass Effect was never going to have an intellectually watertight ending. The intellectually watertight ending, given the setup, is 'Reapers do whatever the **** they want'.

The ending had to be cathartic, emotionally satisfying, tonally interesting, and open to intellectual speculation. You had to be able to imagine Shep and friends/enemies cruising around the new galactic status quo partying and getting into trouble. Or, at least, a new galactic status quo mourning Shep and taking on a shape (a shepe, har har) defined by Shep's decisions. The great sin of the original ending was that it flipped the table and refused to let you imagine your choices propagating out into the lives of the people and civilizations you cared about.

The proverbial Good Mass Effect 3 Ending gives the player a range between

'we won locally, hell yeah, we're cool reaper punch heroes, but if you think about the cosmic picture it's got some ominous drums'

and

'it's all over, look at this beautiful disaster, what a good tragedy!'

With some degrees between.

The Reapers were two things: a plot device to drive every other plot thread to crisis, and a tone device to create awe and fear. The ending can't defeat the Reapers, but it doesn't need to. We spent three games learning to love and invest in the status quo. All Shep has to do to 'win' is to put the demons back out in the dark for a while, with some hope of a final resolution and some mad sideways insight into their purpose. Then the story can be what it really needs to be to end well, which is Mass Effect 3: The Citadel DLC.

 
Re: Of motivations and Shivans
My solution is good, and smart. It's all in the execution, you're not going to get real effect in forum posts.
Would you mind saying what your solution is? I have to say I find the Kestrellius's alternative version brilliant, although maybe I haven't thought it through enough.

btw. I'm very unsure about the ME1 was gold, and then it went downhill mindset. My impression was that "rough around the edges" is a kinder assesment, and applies to more then one aspect of the game (story included).
Compared to Shivans, Sovereign's speeches are pathetic in both senses of the word, and would fit poorly in any interpretation besides the dumbest these machines are just plain evil one.

As for the mystery vs. resolution thing, I think both can work, but the chances of the first one being done right seem to be minuscule. It's a potential easy way out and is often used that way, and the longer it's drawn out, the more tenuous it becomes.
The fact that there are great theories about Shivans and readings of FS in general is not an inherent property of fan theories, but rather of FS, and I find it very exceptional in this regard.
Also saying that you shouldn't go for a resolution because there will always be better fan theories doesn't strike me as a convincing argument. Anything you do someone can do better, fan theories are often overhyped. It's true that you can leave room for more interpretations, and that's certainly a valid goal, but not _the_ goal, right?
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
I don't think ME1 was anywhere near the peak of the series, no. I think that's a narrative created by misunderstanding of what made Mass Effect successful.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
As for the mystery vs. resolution thing, I think both can work, but the chances of the first one being done right seem to be minuscule. It's a potential easy way out and is often used that way, and the longer it's drawn out, the more tenuous it becomes.
The fact that there are great theories about Shivans and readings of FS in general is not an inherent property of fan theories, but rather of FS, and I find it very exceptional in this regard.
Also saying that you shouldn't go for a resolution because there will always be better fan theories doesn't strike me as a convincing argument. Anything you do someone can do better, fan theories are often overhyped. It's true that you can leave room for more interpretations, and that's certainly a valid goal, but not _the_ goal, right?

Yes, there are plenty of garbage fan theories out there, and much of it could be attributed to source material that either doesn't support it through the narrative structure or simply because the creators shot them down so early on. Both FS games have an amount of closure regardless of how much they answer, which is why we've been able to come up with interesting theories about the Shivans. Just look at Dark Souls and Demon's Souls for another great example of having a fleshed out world with a ton of mystery and interpretation still to be had. It is important that the creators have more knowledge about the world than they give the audience, but the point is they don't need to force their interpretation down people's throats like has happened in the past.

Depending on the type of story, the end goal can be to open it up to interpretation. That is what the Souls series has done and it has some extremely well regarded storytelling. The point is, you don't need to outright say what a story is about, you only need to provide direction. Your audience/players are intelligent enough to make connections for themselves without you having to spoon feed them everything.

In terms of Shivans vs. Reapers, their biggest difference, and why the Shivans worked better than the Reapers was the Shivans were pure action. We interacted with them numerous times and never got much closer to understanding them. Being brought to the brink of annihilation twice by something so unknowable is scary and effective. The Reapers on the other hand were almost pure talk and we barely interacted with them, even when we were supposed to be fighting them in a war. If they had been more puppet-master-esque, the all talk could have worked, but they got stuck in the uncomfortable middle ground of being physical antagonists and puppet masters with their mystery gone and only speeches to have any impact.

In short, if we compare the Shivan actions we see with the Reaper actions we see, the Shivans have far more impact, directly and indirectly, on the narrative than the Reapers do.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 03:59:41 pm by Firesteel »
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
I think Bioware made a huge mistake when they settled on superantagonists who couldn't be represented in gameplay.

 
Re: Of motivations and Shivans
That's true. Making the main antagonists of a ground-based RPG living spaceships was a weird decision.

And, of course, ME1 wasn't perfect. In some respects it was inferior to the other two. ME2 had in a lot of ways the best character interaction, and ME3 the best combat gameplay. But ME1's story and atmosphere was unsurpassed, and to me at least, that's the most important element. The trouble was that ME2's central plot was both stupid and completely irrelevant. ME2 needed to do a ton of things, and it did almost none of them. It needed to be about gathering allies and information about the Reapers, and instead we got "lol look Collectors". And the Collectors were built up as a major threat in and of themselves, rather than being the pawns of the Reapers that they were.

Also, the whole "gathering a team" thing would have worked a lot better if the focus had been gathering a team to fight the Reapers. With the Collector base (or whatever final mission) being sort of a first test run. And then, you have the same teammates into ME3, rather than having to do the whole tedious regathering the team thing again.

To elaborate a bit on my alternative conclusion: essentially, the Reapers are sort of an afterlife. If we take, for example, Turians: in order to make a Turian-Reaper, you have to liquefy a couple million Turians. However, once you do that, the resulting consciousness includes every Turian who ever lived. There's a sort of genetic memory technobabble handwave thing. It doesn't include the ones that are still alive, but once they die they get assimilated too, provided the Reaper isn't destroyed.

The end of the series, then, gives you three basic choices, each with a paragon and renegade variant. You can either just go along with it, which is a happy ending because everybody gets to be a giant space cuttlefish and reunite with their dead loved ones. Or, you can tell the Reapers to piss off and come back later, and they're just like "okay, fine. But next time you're going to college, kid!" which is sort of a happy ending because that's pretty much what your goal was to begin with. Or, you can convince the Reapers to stick around and be responsible parents, teaching the races of the galaxy about stuff rather than running off to dark space and getting drunk with their friends. And that's a happy ending because the cycle still continues, as it should, but the galaxy now knows what to expect and won't have to experience all the terror and confusion.

So, yes, the Reapers pretty much do whatever they want. You can convince them to alter their behavior slightly, but you can't break the cycle, because the cycle was never a bad thing. It just looked like one from a limited perspective.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
The other problem ME had was how separate each game became in the narrative in spite of being a planned trilogy and being so closely connected temporally. There were plenty of plot elements from ME2 that went completely by the wayside for any number of reasons, probably because one of the lead writers left the studio.

One of the narrative elements in ME2 that I always found odd was how far everyone back tracks on the existence of the Reapers, in spite of one showing up and taking control of the Citadel only 2 years previously. Compare this to the repercussions of a war 32 years ago still being felt in FS2.

I'm sure money and marketability were partially to blame for major, required events from earlier games being glossed over in later games, but it breeds lazy storytelling when something has been built and then immediately torn down.

@Kestrellius:
I agree that ME2 was not a strong second act for a trilogy. We needed an Empire Strikes Back and got something with far less overarching narrative relevance. And yes, the choice to make space cuttlefish robots the main antagonist in a ground based game is strange, and probably part of why Cerberus played a ridiculously large role in the third game.
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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Don't even get me started on Cerberus in ME3.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Of motivations and Shivans
Were the reapers so impossible to include gameplay-wise though? In the trilogy, you fight Sovereign through the dead body of Saren (that was weird), and throughout ME2 you do fight Harbinger through ... assuming direct control... over collectors. Anyway, you do end up fighting a proto-reaper at the end. There's also an attempt to create gameplay within a Reaper (when you collect Legion). By ME3, you end up killing two smaller reapers.

So all of that tells me that they at least tried in multiple ways to do just that. This to me wasn't the main problem, they could have borrowed from Shadow of the Collossus some ideas about how it's possible to create a battle between two absolutely different scales of "fighters". Each Reaper could be more than an enemy, he could just be an entire "boss level" to overcome. Many cool ideas could be made here. They simply chose otherwise.

e: You could learn methods to infiltrate the Hull of a reaper and be able to sabotage its shields, making them vulnerable to the fleet. Some high tech device that would allow you to go through the reaper defenses if you are small enough, hell, you could even make it some kind of Protean finding or something.

Let's not forget that in FS2, the only relationship you end up having with a Sathanas is, one, scanning its hull, and two, sniping its front beam weapons. It doesn't prevent it from being awesome.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2015, 02:06:00 pm by Luis Dias »