Weekender: The Small Stuff

I can't hit him, or argue the point. I actually need to initiate the one-sided preaching session with a button press before this all happens.

I do it anyway. Do it every time I'm passing. Partly because I want to see if my options will change any time soon. Partly because I know it'll piss him off. An NPC. Who's got no bearing on my mission. Preaching big words in a small corner of a wretched space station that I don't have any real call to be returning to.

I'm likely thirty hours, four discs and two games behind you. You're all lamenting Mass Effect 3's ending. Me? I'm still trying to decide whether to crack open a life-support system with a genetically perfect Krogan inside who might kill me for the trouble.

My whereabouts, or "when-abouts" should that be, in relation to yours isn't the point. I'm merely using a frame of reference you may remember from your time on Omega. If you can't remember, or haven't played Mass Effect then no problem. The point I'm discussing is prevalent in all manner of RPG.

Its the fleshing out of a world. The smaller changes effected by the developer in response the seismic alterations created during the story, usually due to you.

It's smoke and mirrors, but in an RPG it's all important to keep - what. Us? Believing in our magnificence wrought onto the world. Believing in the world itself and the people within. Maybe to keep us caring. Because we do find ourselves to be a caring bunch.

I've trotted across the floors of the Normandy as much to overhear the chatter of the crew as to work on upgrades or engage with key team members. I swing by the crew quarters to hear the continued saga of one man's family going from frying pan to fire.

I've done it for every RPG that I can remember. Zelda, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy. I don't know where I gained the knowledge that the action was shared between them all, but come the end of every boss fight or new discovery I'd trek back to towns, houses and wanderers and hammer the talk button to hear their opinion - an archaic and long-haul version of Twitter.

Most never said anything useful, but it was good to reconnect to people that for a little while had become my entire world. Sometimes it was a small change you made by being there, and you wanted to check up on how they were doing. One writer ready to quit the profession soldiered on and made a name for himself just because I'd headed back into town unexpectedly in Final Fantasy VIII.

I mentioned in my Witcher 2 preview recently how mid-prison escape Geralt came across a cell with a band of adventurers, as if a group of heroes from an entirely different game had stumbled into mine by accident. You get these small canvases of life detailed just enough to become fascinated with.

I'm not sure if it's just filthy voyeurism or compelling soap opera. But it's the small stuff as much as the big that really sells the RPG to me, and to the studios that labour to make every action, tiny or massive, have marked repercussions throughout the world.