I’m vacillating between liking and hating the ending to Mass Effect 3. Surprised? Of course not. Spoilers follow for the uninitiated.

Mass Effect 3 ends the space opera trilogy in the most vague, unsettling or brilliant way. I can’t decide. I have no real intention of going into the details of the plot, characters, choices or dialogue. (The soundtrack, however, is brilliant.) My interest is in the defense BioWare is presenting. Art.

They see themselves as artists and, as such, should be immune to the populist consumer demands of their audience. Here to, I vacillate between supporting and disagreeing with their premise. I absolutely believe games can be, and in many cases, are art. I have a problem supporting that opinion when the developers sell additional parts of the story in downloadable content packs (or are owned by EA).

My friend Aaron, who I’ve debated the ending with these past few days, told me I should tweet @masseffect and say, “I’ve never bought a painting that later had additional canvases sold for it.”

This is exactly the problem I feel developers face when telling me their work is art. A popular belief among players finishing Mass Effect 3 is that the story concludes so poorly it must be a cliffhanger to be completed in a paid downloadable content pack. That’s not art. That’s the product of a meeting where people use phrases like “value-added.” I wasn’t given a complete artistic work. I was given a book with only the first three words of the last chapter, then told by the author I was attacking their artistic choices.

As it stands now, if the additional pack even exists and they had planned all along to release it (expecting all their fans to get the cliffhanger and patiently wait), I believe they’ll have to release it for free to appease the near unanimous condemnation from every person who plays the game. That’s not a bold artistic statement, it’s a poor business decision. All they’ve done is torment fans and lose money.

If they had no intention of releasing clarifying material for their artistry, then I’ll quote Roger Ebert, who, incidentally, does not believe video games are art.

“If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn’t.”

BioWare, don’t lecture us on artistic expression in an attempt to hide poor business decisions. Just own up to the mistake. And if you didn’t plan to release anything to explain your ending, admit you choked at the end, developed collective amnesia and forgot you weren’t writing the ending to the Matrix trilogy.

On an unrelated note, who’d win in a fight, an adventurer with an arrow in the knee or Marauder Shields?