Toy Story Effect

[Lirim Collard]

Foryears now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.

In the beginning, it was the Normandy that I fell for, not Mass Effect. If it hadn't been for the Normandy (gorgeous, sleek, the most advanced ship in the Alliance fleet and personal ride of Commander Shepard, star of the series), I might've just quit the newly remastered Legendary edition of the beloved trilogy after the first few hours.

See, I did not like Mass Effect at all when I started playing. Going in, I didn't have the nostalgia of a veteran player (it's a series I missed when it first blew up the games world in 2007), so I saw only this busy, silly, overcrowded galaxy full of disjointed whistle-stop worlds always in some sort of terrible peril. Everyone had a problem that needed to be fixed. Everyone had a story they needed to tell me. Here I am, most powerful Space Cop in the galaxy, and I'm wasting time scanning bug monsters and trying to stop a drunken general from spreading rumors about his girlfriend? All I got were fetch quests, dialog wheels and a clumsy, clunky, overly talky, decade-old cover shooter that no amount of updated textures, color shading or lens flare was going to fix.

ME1 is, as noted, a road trip story. It exists to familiarize you with the incredibly complex and deeply imagined universe Mass Effect operates in by having you bop around to all corners of it and talk to people.

ME2 was my favorite of the three games. It starts with Shepard dying and then just gets weirder. Functioning on a Getting The Band Back Together kind of frame, you spend most of the story recruiting old friends and new acquaintances for a big heist, all while working for a super shady gang of human supremacists called Cerberus run by a blue-eyed tech bro with Martin Sheen's voice. So yeah, Jed Bartlet as a sci-fi Elon Musk. It's freaky. But also moving, deeply layered, and full of complicated motivations for almost every character involved. Again, you're trying to stop the Reapers, only Dirty Dozen style this time.

ME3? That's all about trying to un-fail. ME3 is about consequences and the big picture. Rather than going after individuals, now you're using all your talky-talk time (and your Paragon/Renegade stats, which carry over, game to game) to convince entire races to join your side of the fight, band together, and defeat the space monsters together. It's less satisfying than the one-on-one feel of putting together a handful of broken, psychopathic space assassins and pulling off a commando raid on the bad guys, but feels appropriately huge.

It's the conjunction of all the little moments: of finding a friend in the place you least expect or being able to help someone who saved your life once 50 hours of gameplay ago. It's learning things about characters you've fought beside and lived with for years. Sometimes, it's about letting them die.

But to understand the story? Yeah. And all of it is just a conversation away. Take a minute to talk to Tali down in the engineering section of the Normandy and she'll tell you about it. The Quarian kid on Omega Station stuck trying to sell salvage for a ticket back to the migrant fleet will tell you about it. You'll see (or hear) pieces of the story scattered across a dozen worlds. Depending on dialog choices, mission order, who lives, who dies, who makes nice with who, you'll learn different pieces of the history, see different angles on the rights and wrongs of a thousand years of in-game lore. Same thing happens with Wrex and Grunt, the two massive Krogan warriors who join Shepard's crew. With Jack, the space-magic child prodigy abused by a system that only wanted to exploit her gifts. And Garrus, who became my Shepard's best, most reliable friend.

And none of it affects the story's main arc. Except that, really, all of it does. Because it is all part of the history of this place, these characters. If the story of the trilogy, writ large, is "Shepard Saves The Universe (A Couple Times, Kinda)" then everything else is the story of how he got to be the person he is when he does the saving. His choices matter. The things he sees and does all matter. Because they are the pieces of the story that you, the player, the person inside Shepard's N7 armor and inside Shepard's head, carry with you into those story beats that ring with finality. Shepard saves the world, sure. But it's the incredibly complex and interconnected narrative inside that makes the story matter.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.

Our minds naturally seek meaning and connections in the events we encounter. This is a powerful tool that can help us make complicated situations easier to remember and more engaging. However, the search for a coherent narrative can sometimes lead us into trouble.

Random events seem to be particularly difficult for us to understand and we find it tempting to assign narratives to (falsely) imply cause and effect or motivation. Take for example the idea of a hot hand in basketball. This is the belief that a player who scores many baskets in a row is playing above his normal level and will be more successful when taking subsequent shots. This narrative is so established that the 1990s video game NBA Jam even gave players flaming boots and superpowers if they scored 3 in a row.

The narrative effect means that we are much more likely to believe a set of assertions if they fit a compelling narrative. This can be a powerful tool in the actuarial world where it can sometimes be difficult to picture the abstract hypothetical situations that underpin future risk. Scenario analysis, where explicit narratives are built up to make future risks feel more tangible, is a cornerstone of risk management and can be particularly useful to help people take abstract risks more seriously. At Club Vita we recently developed a set of future longevity scenarios mapping out possible aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic for our subscribers to use within their risk management frameworks.

Given this power, we must be careful not to be biased by a strong story in our interpretation of underlying data, or worse still to try to adjust the facts to fit better with an established narrative.

I recently completed Metro 2033 with the alternative ending of saving the dark ones. I started playing Metro: Last Light today but the game is continuing as if I did blow them up. Is this because of the choices I made in 2033?

Developers will often give the player a choice, which in turn has an impact on what ending you will reach. However, this poses an issue, when making a sequel. Suddenly, their game has several different starting possibilities, often differing greatly in story, and who is alive or dead.

As has been stated before, Metro is based off novels written by Dmitry Glukhovsky. In the novel, the dark ones are blown up, at the end. So naturally, this is the canon ending. in order to allow the canon story to persist into the second game.

No, it doesn't. You can't import a save into Last Light, and the game assumes that the "bad" ending of the first game is canon. As Phillip noted, they're based on a novel series by an author (who returned to write Last Light).

I am reading this book, and a little girl is narrating the story. It was a new experience for me, since I am seeing the world through the eyes of a 12 year old girl. Other than the point of view of the narrator, how does the gender and age of a narrator affect the perception of the story?

In my opinion, it is heavily dependent on the story in question. Most of the times I've read books narrated by a female, young or otherwise, they seem to take on the role of a memoir - not so much a way of taking me to a whole new world, but rather allow me to relate to the person telling the story.

I'm recalling the book "The Girl Who Owned a City". Even though it was perceived through the eyes of a young girl, memory starts to push towards 11 or 12 year old. The book, even though full of action, mostly felt like a rebelling of her experiences. Maybe it's just the relatable manner of a male narrator setting the mood that something will happen to change his outlook, or way of thinking, or who he will become at the end makes me place myself in his shoes.

Typically, male protagonists undergo some type of change whereas most stories with females as narrators just become a stronger version of themselves, unless a traumatic experience, usually sexual from my encounters, happens. Male protagonist's are almost always expected to change.

I may have veered a bit off topic, but to summarize my first point, it generally feels different, and it may be based on my inability to take on the woman's point of view, or something Freudian to do with my childhood...

One wouldn't assume the same level of truthfulness or impartiality from 10 years old or 40 years old. This can be relevant when there is a question of credibility, or when some authors misguide the reader for a big finale.

I would like to add an effect (highest value) to a snapshot in my qliksense story, but when I start dragging the effect, a box appears on my snapshot as shown below. Can anyone tell me what is going wrong here?

The Story Collider is dedicated to true, personal stories about science. We host regular live shows across the US and UK, and produce a weekly podcast. We believe everybody has a story about science, because now, more than ever, science is a part of all of our lives.

3a8082e126