Why Did the Ending of Mass Effect 3 Sink Our Opinion of the Whole Series?

[Jamie Madigan writes about psychology and video games at www.psychologyofgames.com. Consider supporting him on Patreon, and check out his book, Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on The People Who Play Them.]

Spanning three lengthy games, the Mass Effect series created an elaborate science fiction universe for players to explore and shape. It also had great characters with detailed and well written backstories that made them as memorable as any fictional character I've otherwise encountered. The alien doctor Mordin Solus, a pragmatic and likable soul who nevertheless carries the weight of a genocide on his shoulders, is probably my favorite video game character of all time.

The universe, the lore, the characters, the voice acting, the motion capture technology, the branching narrative, and the sheer amount of time that players spent with the games meant that many of us counted them as among the best that that generation of consoles had to offer. It was an amazingly satisfying experience.

Until the ending of the third game, anyway. That's when some people think things fell apart.

I think Paul Tassi explains it pretty well in his book,Fanboy Wars: The Fight For The Future Of Video Games

After that ending, many people claimed that the entire Mass Effect series had been ruined. Somehow their last few minutes with the game managed to sour the memory of an overall experience that lasted dozens of hours or longer. Said one member of a video game message board I frequent, "Of the 35 hours it took to finish the game, the first 34 hours 50 minutes were great. The last ten minutes dropped the ball into the street where my respect for the series chased after it into oncoming traffic."

That's weird, right? Similar things have happened with the endings of other games like Fallout 3. (I mean Fawkes was a mutant. Radiation HEALS HIM. Why couldn't he just go in there and flip the dang switch?) Tassi even goes on to point out that the disappointing endings to popular TV shows like Dexter or Seinfeld can result in the same thing: a bad ending exerts a disproportianate weight on our evaluation of an entire experience. Why is that? 

To answer that question, let's talk about sticking something up your butt.

Well, not just anything. Calm down. Specifically, let's talk about colonoscopies. This is a medical procedure during which a tiny camera on the end of a flexible tube is inserted into the patient's anus. This lets the doctor visually inspect the bowels for signs of cancer and even retrieve a tissue sample for a biopsy. Colonoscopy patients today benefit from anesthetics and even drugs that make them forget the whole thing, but during the 1990s it was a painful procedure that people endured and remembered.

During that time, a doctor by the name of Donald Redelmeir conducted many colonoscopies, and he partnered with psychologist Daniel Kahneman to conduct a study of how memory affects evaluation of experiences. During each colonoscopy, which might take anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour, patients were asked every 60 seconds to rate their pain on a 1 to 10 scale.

Take a look at these ratings of pain across time for two patients:

Which patient suffered more during their procedure? Patient B seems like the obvious answer. Because the procedure lasted longer, he experienced more minutes of pain and thus one could argue that his procedure was more painful.

Butt But here's the thing: shortly after the procedure was completed, the physician asked the patient to rate the "total amount of discomfort" experienced during the procedure, using a similar 10-point scale. In studying the data, Kahneman writes about two interesting and strong findings that, taken together, form what's known as "the peak end rule." First, the duration of the procedure had no effect on overal ratings of pain. It didn't matter if the doctor was rooting around in there for 4 minutes or 40 minutes. Second, the researchers found that the amount of pain experienced at the end of the procedure mattered a lot, and that a person's memory of how painful the colonoscopy was could be pretty accurately predicted by a combination of how painful it was in the last minute and how painful it was at its worst.

Put another way, a long, painful procedure could be ameliorated by a just a few, relatively pain free minutes at the end. But an examination could be remembered as much worse if there was a spike of discomfort and pain in the closing moments.

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman goes on to describe research that expands this point that we disproportionately weigh the last few moments of an experience when evaluating overall memories of how good or bad it was. This has implications for life, such as making it wise to save the most enjoyable parts of a vacation for the end. It also predicts that the disappointing endings of games like Mass Effect 3 are likely to drag down our memories of the entire game. The end of a protracted experience (good or bad) affects our evaluation of it more than anything else. 

One has to wonder if the game would have benefitted from some kind of more enjoyable coda or epilogue, such as the eventually released "Citadel" DLC where players got end their experience the game by attending a party with many of their beloved characters. Going into that fun experience for just a few minutes might have made a large difference in players' overall evaluation of the series.

[Jamie Madigan writes about psychology and video games at www.psychologyofgames.com. Consider supporting him on Patreon, and check out his book, Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on The People Who Play Them.]

REFERENCES

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Redelmeier, D., & Kahneman, D. (1996). Patients’ memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain, 66, 3–8.

Tassi, P. (2014). Fanboy Wars: The Fight For The Future Of Video Games. Forbes Media.