One of the things you might not know about Mass Effect is how the BioWare developers are able to let players have an impact on an epic story.

This isn’t a matter of creating a shuffle text. Because decisions the players make affect the actual story that they are told, it’s more like creating a shuffle text in which some of the pieces may or may not show up at all, let alone in a different sequence.

In an article for the Globe & Mail I look at the Narrative Dialogue System and the Plot Manager, two technical tools used by BioWare to wrangle the massive story that is Mass Effect.

You can read it in full over here.