Usually, when superfans are unhappy with the ending to a long and engrossing story, they'll react in a number of predictable ways. They'll complain about the ending to anyone that will listen. They'll vow never to enjoy a story from that creator ever again. They'll create elaborate fan fiction sub-universes where the story concludes in a more pleasing way.

Many fans of the Mass Effect series are already doing all of these things to express anger over what they see as an unsatisfying ending to Mass Effect 3. But they're also going a step further, actively demanding that BioWare change the ending as it's currently constructed to be more palatable to the masses.

(Warning: While I've worked hard to avoid discussing specifics about the conclusion of Mass Effect 3 in this article, the remainder does contain broad hints regarding the events that happen at the end of the game. If you want to go in with absolutely no idea of what happens in the last moments of Mass Effect 3, stop reading now.)

The "Demand a Better Ending to Mass Effect 3" group currently has over 13,500 likes on Facebook and an associated Twitter account has garnered over 1,500 followers in just a few days. The group is asking members to prepare polite letters to Bioware expressing their displeasure with Mass Effect 3's ending, and to donate money to help support the cause with a more professional Web presence.

"Bioware is a business if we can make them understand that by using the current endings they alienate (no pun) their customers, and destroy the replay ability [sic] of the trilogy they are hurting their profits we CAN bring about a change for the better," the protest's creator writes on the Facebook page.

The fan demonstration efforts don't stop at online letter writing, though. A separate, nebulous "PAX East Platoon" is being organized to "stand together and voice our concerns at the Mass Effect panel" taking place at next month's PAX East show in Boston. "We will show a united fandom front, to look them in the eye and say that their contrived, mystical, nonsensical ending will not do," the group's organizer writes. "We will show what this series means to us, and how we have been wrong. We WILL hold the line!"

Why are they so mad?

So what is it about Mass Effect 3's ending that has so many up in arms? For many, the lack of direct player control over some rather massive story threads seems to be the main sticking point. After investing dozens of hours into a story where every decision seems to matter, Mass Effect 3 players "reach the ending of ME3 and realize that everything you have done means nothing," as the Facebook protest group puts it.

This isn't 100 percent true; there are 16 or so distinct variations on the Mass Effect 3 ending, depending on how you're counting, and some of them show how previous player choices can have profound consequences for the fate of major characters and even entire planets. But the protesters do have a point: the larger outlines for the final fate of the galaxy seem preordained no matter what decisions you've made or how hard you've worked to get that "galactic readiness" rating up before the final battle.

I mentioned in my review that I found the ending I ran into on my first ME3 playthrough "somewhat unsatisfying from a narrative point of view," but at the time I figured there were other "better" endings that could have been achieved through careful decision-making and effort on a subsequent playthrough. Now that I've researched just which portions of the ending can be changed through player action, though, I'm genuinely surprised at how little all of Commander Shepard's actions seem to impact what happens to the galaxy as a whole.

Cosmicism and choice

You could argue that Bioware is making something of a philosophical nod towards predestination in structuring the ending this way, saying, in essence, that no matter how hard we work, and how much impact we think we have, our decisions are ultimately incredibly insignificant amidst the ridiculously large and complex flow of time and space. Just before Mass Effect 3's release, Kyle Munkittrick at Pop Bioethics made a convincing argument that the Mass Effect series has always embraced an overarching theme of Cosmicism, which he defines as "not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe [but] the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence."

Even if this was the intent, though, the execution puts this idea across in a way that seems designed to be as jarring as possible to longtime players. After the series has spent dozens of hours training the player to expect their every decision to have a meaningful impact on what happens down the line, it's more than a bit off-putting to be confronted with an ending where your decisions have absolutely no impact on major, galaxy-changing events. It's as if the creators at Bioware have let players build an elaborate, twisting ant colony over a span of years, then came along and blasted that colony away with a leaf blower at the last second just to prove that they could (and to make a point about how the universe works).

Of course, that's their right as authors. Despite the illusion of player control throughout the Mass Effect series, we players have always been passengers on a train ride whose branching tracks had been laid by someone else. Just because all those tracks seem to end in a similar place doesn't mean you can demand that the track-layers change the ride now that it's over.

It seems unlikely these protests will come to anything, in any case. When video game protest efforts like this do work, which happens very rarely, they're usually focused purely on business decisions and not artistic ones (see Project Rainfall's recent successful efforts to get Japanese Wii RPGs released in the West). Bioware obviously put a lot of time and thought into the artistic direction for the ending to this series, and they're unlikely to betray that vision just because a group of vocal fans are upset with it.

Still, the strength of the backlash among a vocal minority of fans shows that, when you give players a degree of control over the way a story develops, some are likely to see that as a right to demand fuller control of everything related to that story.