Personally I think that traditional values clash with free thinkers and so it’s not that intelligent people vote one way or another, it’s that an open mind is a pre requisite for higher level study.

The decide between left and right tends to be that the left feel the right are all closed minded stupid ignorant bigots and the right feel the left are stupid lazy scrounges who like spending money they do not have and letting foreigners in to do their jobs. Neither are good, the left produces the best research as it is not guided by money making so fits the fundamental needs of scientists and the desire of engineers to produce quality work, where the right is the best for making money so encourages value for money management types, economists and beuocrats.

Personally I feel it would be really useful to have this recorded in the national census then we could look and see if its a national trend, or one just personalised to my Facebook friends and work colleagues.

That will cover most of the ending “plot holes” which aren’t really plot holes, but “non-literal” storytelling as said by one of the developers. It will also “make sense” of the ending. They’ve even been throwing hints to support this theory, although I don’t think they would flat out confirm it. Part of the ending being open to interpretation is to not spell out how everything happened.

As for the whole endings thing, I think it would be reasonable to have 16 wildy different endings based on choices, but some people were asking for an ending based on every variation of choice, which would end up being over 1000 or more endings. Not really feasable.

Some were wanting a LOTR style ending where they showed how every character ended up. I brought up the argument of people stating the movie was too long because of this extra closure. Although, with Mass Effect, there’s closure for the major characters, but what about all those minor ones you met along the way? That would probably end up with a 2 hour epilogue which would reinforce the LOTR argument of people saying the game being unnecessarily long.

Although, funny thing, Mass Effect 1 & 2′s ending was the same, but no one said anything. The way I viewed it was from the time that Mass Effect 1 starts to the time that Mass Effect 3 ends, the game as a whole can play out very differently, but everyone seems to get wrapped around this “if the ending is similar, then everyone gets the same experience”. Not how I saw it.

For example if Tali does not survive Mass Effect 2, Raan will take her place during the Rannoch missions as well as Earth. I never got this during my playthrough, so that’s just one example of how the story could play out differently. Or you get a Geth Prime on Earth instead of Tali, if you refuse peace and side with the Geth.

I don’t think it’s fair to blame EA though. A lot of people seem to have some pure hatred for that company, although, since the fans don’t work for Bioware they wouldn’t know what actually went on during this whole thing.

We do make distinctions between people who have a ‘naive’ appreciation of kitsch, and an ‘ironic’ appreciation for example. Then, perhaps, both of these will differ from a ‘new sincere’ appreciation (if such a thing exists yet, I’m not sure about the notion’s critical value).

One thing I find interesting about the ironic appreciation of kitsch artworks is their sensitivity to the ‘authenticity’ of the producer, even though that authenticity is precisely what’s disclaimed by the ironic appreciator.

So people can have very different reactions to, say a t-shirt with a big picture of a kitten on it from the 80s, and an identical copy made by a company which has caught on to the trend for kitten t-shirts. It’s strange because you would expect that the ironic appreciator who never *really* thought the picture of the kitten was cool anyway wouldn’t care whether it was made ‘naively’ or not, but they often do. On the other hand, perhaps, someone who just really likes pictures of kittens on their clothes is less likely to be sensitive to the intentions of the production. Perhaps.

Again these are just some gestures, it would be better to try to flesh out a more specific example, so maybe I’ll come back to you if I come up with one. Does that answer your question at all or have I missed your point? I guess my main response is that it’s interesting how the different ‘modes’ of appreciation of kitsch would react differently to the ‘revulsion’ you describe. The ironic appreciator would perhaps take the revulsion-factor as a source of aesthetic merit (provided there revulsion was not the intention – the ‘authenticity’ requirement I described above) whereas the genuinely kitsch sensibility (if I can call it that) would presumably not feel the revulsion in the first place, and would not like it if they did.

So I think you’re right that enjoyment is crucial in this regard. But I think there’s a separate point to me made about what makes one a good judge or appreciator of art in general. As you mentioned in your original article, there’s a feeling that if one doesn’t like a given ‘great’ work, say that of Shakespeare, then that somehow reflects on one as a person. What I was trying to do above is to show why not liking a given work should not be taken to mean one is a bad judge of it.

If a person exhibits sensitivity to the relevant features of a work, can respond thoughtfully to it etc. then we have grounds for saying that they are a qualified judge of the work, whether they like it or not. Then, perhaps, it becomes more genuinely a matter of taste. Given that, as you rightly noted, there can be a tendency to call a person’s judgement into question if they don’t like the accepted things, I think this way of thinking about appreciation allows us to avoid this unhelpful tendency.

Does that distinction work, in your view?

It’s easy to image, however, someone saying they have a simple enjoyment of a work but don’t really think it is great art (the guilty pleasure).

Obviously both pleasure and appreciation are important for aesthetic taste, but it seems that pleasure is the necessary condition, whereas appreciation is not. It is something to strive for, and something important to many people, but it just can’t be as important as enjoyment/pleasure is for taste.