Mass Effect, anxiety, and letting go

Whenever I play a game like Grand Theft Auto 4 or FarCry 2, I find myself plagued by a condition I call "open-world paralysis." Basically, whenever a game throws a lot of collectibles, side missions, and challenges at me in addition to the main plotline, I get so overwhelmed that I don't know where to start. More often than not, I decide to not start, and in fact, I still haven't finished either of those games.

Mass Effect, while not exactly an open-world game, offered a variation of the same problem; since I knew that the choices I made and missions I completed would carry through two more games, I found that I was hesitant to do anything for fear of irrevocably messing up my game. I was actually worried that I would make a decision in the first game that would lead to undesirable consequences in the third, and there was a very real possibility that I would make myself start over from the beginning.

What I mean to say is that I have anxiety.

However, even before that became a factor, I faced a bigger obstacle: the character creation system.

Character creators occupy a discrete sphere of my personal hell, and it only gets worse if there are sliders involved. Add in the fact that my Shepard was going to be with me for three games, and I almost quit playing right there. Obviously, I was aware of the "Default" option, and any sane person would have just taken the guy on the box and been done with it. But that seemed like cheating, somehow.

After maybe two hours of fiddling, I ended up with what I thought was a decent character model and I played a full hour of the game before I changed my mind and decided that I couldn't play three games as that guy. Then, instead of making a new character and trying again, I put the game down for over two and a half years.

In February, with Mass Effect 3 squarely on the horizon, I managed to muster up the will to go back and make a new character. This time, I decided, I would keep the character and finish the game, no matter how much I failed at the character creator.

I had spoken too soon.

I'm not really sure what I was going for with this guy, but he looks a human and a rat had a baby that grew up, became a boxer, and then lost every fight he participated in. When my Shepard talks to someone, he looks like he's going to engulf them in his frightful maw. I'm not saying he's ugly, but I wouldn't have been surprised if Liara had faked a headache at the end of the game.

I had similar issues picking Shepard's class and background, which is ridiculous because those decisions wouldn't have much (if any) bearing on the story or my choices in it. I got through it by reminding myself that I'd never know the difference, and when I couldn't decide between focusing on weapons or biotic powers I made Shepard a Vanguard — the most wishy-washy of character classes.

At this point I had spent longer working on the character than I had playing the game, and I kept this in mind as I replayed the beginning. I willed myself to look past Shephard's giant forehead and tiny chin, the way his ears stuck out like open car doors, and how uncannily wide his teeth looked when he spoke. Honestly, I devoted more concentration to this than I did aiming.

With all of this rattling around in my crazy head, it was time to start making moral decisions, and in fact, this was pretty easy because all I really had to decide was if I wanted to be a super nice person or a sociopath. My biggest obstacle turned out to be side missions that allowed the game to continue even if I failed.

Normally I'm a compulsive saver; I usually save immediately before I do anything I think I might need or want to do over. However, my decision to accept my Shepard regardless of how hideously I'd designed him turned into momentum that pushed me through the rest of the game. I found that even when I failed a non-game-ending mission, it was easy to let it go because seriously, look at that guy. If I can put up with that, it doesn't matter if I succeed at corporate espionage. I finally decided that whatever happened on this, the canonical playthrough, could stand. While I might go back and play the game again to explore other possibilities, the first time through I would just accept whatever happened.

And in that freeing moment, I exhaled.

And then I burned that mutha down.

What had kept me from finishing Mass Effect on my first try was what ultimately carried me through it. While the multitude of different outcomes, tiny decisions, successes, and failures had initially paralyzed me with anxiety over playing the game incorrectly, once I forced myself to accept one thing — that I would never be happy with what came out on the other side of the character creator — I was prepared to accept whatever else might happen. It was not my job as a player to cultivate or force a "perfect play." It was my job to make decisions, and accept that sometimes my decisions would create undesired results.

Will the lessons I learned from Mass Effect translate to similar games in the future? It's way too early to tell, but as long as it took me to get through this one, I'm not going to know for quite a while.

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