I thought I liked the ending of Mass Effect 3. While it wasn’t as great as it could have been, it’s not as bad as the controversy surrounding it made it seem. However, as more time passes, I find myself getting more and more upset with the game. In the time since I’ve beaten it, two pieces of DLC (the Extended Cut endings and Leviathan) have come out that significantly change the experience. There’s more plot, more mythology, more explanation about the things left hanging, and more importantly, story beats that I wasn’t made privy to initially. And that angers me. But when I really sit down and think about it, I don’t know why I’m angry. Yes, I’m missing out on content, but I was satisfied with the version of the game that I played. So, why do I still feel like I’m missing something? These pieces of DLC, regardless of how important they are to the plot and mythology of the series, are the equivalent of deleted scenes and alternate endings of a movie. I love deleted scenes and alternate endings but only as a curiosity, they don’t change my opinion of the movie itself. Yet the “deleted scenes” from Mass Effect 3 now have me questioning my original experience. So why do I care so much about deleted scenes and alternate endings in a game?

Julian Barnes’ novel, The Sense of an Ending, explores the nature of memory and how the documented past often conflicts with our personal recollection of events.  The book is split between two main sections: one in which Tony is a young man who responds to romantic disappointment with a detached dry wit and one in Tony’s retirement years.  With most of his life behind him, he unexpectedly receives a letter that prompts him to reevaluate his memory of those formative college years.  Faced with old writings from both himself and his friends, he struggles to reconcile the immaturity, irresponsibility, and bitterness apparent in the historical record with his personal heroic recollections.

It’s an understated, narrowly-focused story about one person’s life, but the underlying concepts are universal. Our mental notion of the past is a continually shifting concept that can be upset by even the smallest piece of contrary documentation.  It’s probably a good lesson to apply to all facets of life, but in the interest of starting small, let’s focus on video games.  The proliferation of the Internet has provided an unprecedented opportunity to record and then access past events.  Going forward, our memories of the kinds of games we play, how we play them, and the culture surrounding them will routinely bump up against the recorded past.

Despite having been taught English by his Native American mother and living with an English speaking mentor while training for years to be an assassin, the new protagonist of Assassin’s Creed III, Connor, never learns the gentle art of using contractions when speaking English. Now, maybe not all people who learn English as a second language always pick up on the usage of contractions as they pick up their new tongue, but that isn’t the only peculiar tendency in Connor’s speech, a character who is of a mixed heritage, half-British, half-Mohawk.

This guy usually speaks in a slow, stoic, monotone about nearly everything.  You know, like Tonto in The Lone Ranger or just about any Native American character might speak in any 1950s cowboy picture.  It just sounds weird, right?  Distant, detached, alien, which is what those older representations of Native Americans always tend to sound like to my ear when they speak in their slow and weirdly halting manner.

However, the worst thing about Connor as a character seems to me to have less to do with him possibly serving as an ethnic stereotype (though, his speech patterns at least seem to suggest some of those classic trappings) and more to do with the fact that he just doesn’t seem human at all.

At a certain point, video game developers and critics seem to have agreed that all video game storytelling must include the player. There’s a familiar chorus to this discussion: “games must unite the player and the protagonist,” “the player’s decisions must dictate the flow of the narrative,” and “the world must be built around the player’s experiences.” Thus, a certain line of logic follows. Games that don’t do any of the previously listed things aren’t interactive. If a game is not interactive, it’s passive. Games are not a passive medium. Games that passively tell their stories aren’t really games. The critical consensus seems to then be that the main character in a game has to either be an extension of or a substitute for the player. The whole world must be at the player’s disposal and the world has to be built around the player’s actions (or inaction). The more the player can play with, the better the game respects its medium. This “me-first” approach to video game storytelling is tragically limited.

This week Moving Pixels Podcast gets together to discuss our best gaming experiences of 2012.

We decided that we would not allow anyone to repeat any picks from anyone else’s lists, so there may be a few inclusions that surprise you.