For those who have long wondered why the mainstream video-game industry, despite its untold riches, consistently refuses to offer its customers anything more artistically sophisticated than the average episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger,” a striking answer arrived last week in the form of a blog post by Ray Muzyka, co-founder of the game studio BioWare. Earlier this month, BioWare released Mass Effect 3, the capstone to a celebrated space-opera shooter trilogy that some have called the “Star Wars” of this generation. While the game sold a brisk nine hundred thousand copies on its first day in stores, the blazing ardor of the series’s fans soon turned Antarctic because of its controversial ending, which drove some players to an indignant rage so fierce that the casual observer might have thought that BioWare had cut off their supply of Mountain Dew Game Fuel.

Of course, disproportionate fan fury is hardly a new phenomenon; after George Lucas added Ewoks, midi-chlorians, and Jar Jar Binks to the “Star Wars” canon, for instance, he could have filled an airplane hangar with hate mail. What’s unique in this case, however, is both the depth of the partisans’ ire and BioWare’s reaction to it. In recent weeks, thousands of Mass Effect dissidents have clogged Internet message boards with angry missives, while thousands more have signed a petition demanding the ending be changed (a charity drive to build awareness for the cause raised eighty thousand dollars), and a fan went so far as to file a complaint against BioWare with the Federal Trade Commission. Which brings us back to Muzyka, who, in a Wednesday post on BioWare’s Web site, performed the artistic equivalent of falling to one knee and kissing the Godfather’s ring: he announced that the studio would cave to the demands of its “core fans” and revise Mass Effect 3’s ending. It’s a staggering victory for the series’s most zealous enthusiasts—and that, unfortunately, is the problem. As long as gaming’s “core fans” hold such sway over major game studios, art will never have a chance.

What makes this turn of events especially damaging to the cause of serious games is that ever since the first Mass Effect title débuted, in 2007, the series has been a progressive, boundary-pushing favorite among the gaming intelligentsia. (Yes, there is a gaming intelligentsia.) BioWare had long been the HBO of game studios, turning out well-made titles that were more cognitively challenging than the standard shoot-’em-up fare, and Mass Effect was its signature franchise: a thrilling action game that also featured competent writing, moral complexity, and a legitimate sense that the player’s choices shaped the narrative. Mass Effect games are still mostly about blowing up aliens, but these are nuanced aliens; your character, Commander Shepard, could even enter into gay romantic relationships with some of them, if you swung that way.

Because of Mass Effect’s impressive scope and sense of player agency, many fans put a worrisome amount of care and deliberation into every choice they made throughout the trilogy, which helps explain the outrage about the ending. (Alert: if you don’t want to have Mass Effect 3’s conclusion spoiled, skip this paragraph.) Our hero, Shepard, after spending roughly a hundred hours over the course of three games battling the Reapers, a sinister race who (naturally) want to destroy all organic life in the galaxy, finally blasts his way into the Reaper nerve center aboard a giant spaceship. Despite the hundreds of momentous choices the player has made on the way to this point, though, Shepard now has just a few options for ending things, all of which result in the same outcome. As countless irate gamers have pointed out, the decision the player makes only dictates the color of the explosion he sees while one of several confusing and functionally identical closing video clips plays.

Hence the gamer wrath: a litany of tough decisions made over a long period of time eventually led to a single inevitable, cosmically baffling outcome—one that is by no means a classic happy ending. (This predicament is otherwise known as “the human condition,” but I digress.) At worst, this is lazy storytelling from BioWare; the last fifteen minutes of Mass Effect 3 introduce a Swiss-cheese block of plot holes. At best, it’s a game developer’s ham-fisted effort to offer an open-ended conclusion that provides a sense of finality without having to show how each character lives happily ever after. Going by BioWare executive producer Casey Hudson’s comments about the controversy, it seems that the developers hoped the ending’s ambiguity would spur fans to debate what really happened for years to come. What he failed to realize is that these fans were gamers.

While Mass Effect 3’s ending has plenty of shortcomings, to change it after the fact is merely to allow a poisonous strain of thought to run rampant. Too often, mainstream game developers bow to the whims of their least sophisticated (though most dedicated) customers, the “core gamers” who demand bigger guns, bouncier boobs, and more facile storylines. Even a cursory glance at these gamers’ demands of BioWare reveals just how unsophisticated their requirements are; the petition complains that Mass Effect 3’s conclusion doesn’t “provide a sense of succeeding against impossible odds” and requests “a heroic ending which provides a better sense of accomplishment.” More than anything, the situation resembles the plot of Stephen King’s novel “Misery,” in which a psychotic female fan imprisons an author and demands that he rewrite his novels to suit her desires; perhaps significantly, she has to amputate one of his limbs to make him do it.

A mature audience for an art form would never do this, which shows us what a predicament gaming is in. To further the HBO analogy, compare this situation to another famously dissatisfying ending of a beloved series: the final episode of “The Sopranos.” Although many fans complained that the episode was confusing and inconclusive, no one seriously suggested that HBO reshoot the show. Sophisticated audiences understand that while they might hate any given plot decision, they ultimately have to respect the creative wishes of those who made the thing great in the first place; this is what gives the medium integrity. Of course, Mass Effect-style audience pandering is far from unique—movie studios routinely focus-test multiple endings, and even Arthur Conan Doyle undid his bumping-off of Sherlock Holmes because of fans’ pleadings—but we tend to view such creative flip-flopping with disdain. Real art sticks to its guns.

None of this is to say that Mass Effect 3’s ending is a masterpiece; in truth, it’s vague and self-contradicting, and I sympathize with those who feel it rendered their careful choices moot. Fans have every right to feel disgruntled, but demanding the game be changed simply contributes to the bowdlerization of a work, and a medium, that they hold dear. Perhaps those who are disappointed ought to consider that, as in real life, there are some things that no amount of heroism can overcome. It may not be as pleasant as a happy ending, but hey—that’s art.