Yo.
It has always been my intention to try my hand at a story Enneagram for a videogame, specifically a nonlinear game.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have plans for inspecting The Witcher 2, but I figure that before I go and dabble with a game I’m barely familiar with, I should start with a game I’ve played through a dozen times.
. . . Two dozen times, if I count all the Let’s Plays I’ve seen.
I’m talking about Mass Effect.
I love and hate this series. But mostly love — and I’ll probably be focusing on that love for the duration of this brief post and the posts to come.
Mass Effect is a trilogy of games, each one with its flaws and virtues, and no doubt the trilogy as a whole is framed with an Enneagram, but for now I’ll just be examining the story of the first game.
And what a story it is! When I contemplated the game’s plot structure a few things were burned into my mind:
- This is an RPG (Role-Playing Game, if you’re still not in-the-know), which means it’s long. The story doesn’t flow like a film, since it’s really the length of a series of films — or more accurately, one full season of a television show.
- Because this is a game, even a game with a heavy emphasis on story, the pacing is largely player-dependent. Some of the Enneagram numbers can play out shorter or longer between different playthroughs.
- Also, since this is a western RPG — an RPG made by Bioware at that — some parts of the story are changeable. Why, the entire middle section of the game is composed of four missions that can be played in almost any order.
As a matter of fact, I feel the game’s story is roughly split into seven parts, or episodes, each with their own Enneagram: Eden Prime and the Citadel Trial, followed by what I call the four Divergent Missions (Therum, Feros, Noveria, and Virmire), then the Finale. If you’ve never played Mass Effect, well, none of those names are going to mean anything to you, but I’ll go into more detail as we come to them.
Each of those episodes will get their own post, but before I even get that far I’m going to write out the Main Enneagram, which chronicles the overarching plot of the game and ties the seven episodes together.
I’ll get to that next time — frankly, I wrote this introductory post to keep my name from falling off the front page.
Thanks for reading. I’ll try to work fast.