Select Page

Greg Rucka—he of the comic books Queen & Country and Whiteout—has a new post up on his blog about the gameplay and story of Mass Effect 2. In it, Rucka looks not only at Mass Effect 2 and the storytelling techniques of video-game RPGs but at how they differ from pen-and-paper RPGs. He writes:

This would be fine if the game was a true, anything goes, RPG. But it’s not; the nature of these games is that they are directed, despite the best efforts of all those involved to make the guiding hand an invisible one. It’s all well and good to say that you can be who you want to be, but – at least at this point – it’s impossible to execute. Or, to put it more precisely, without the true freedom to do anything, be anyone, say anything, the onus is on the storyteller and not the player to fulfill the demands of the character’s journey.

I thought you might get a kick out of this text, leading up to Rucka’s first self-described digression in the post:

I have a pencil & paper GM who adamantly refuses to ever tell his players how their characters feel about anything. He argues, persuasively, that to do so would be to overstep his mandate; would be, essentially, telling his players how they should play their characters.

And I can live with that, even if I don’t agree with it.

It’s a thoughtful post that I found compelling (though I’ve only played the demo for ME2). What do you think?