Caution! Spoilers ahead! Or..... is there?

During E3, Bioware gave the basic in-booth demo of the next chapter in their proposed three-part space opera, Mass Effect. The demo had all the features you expect, but what was truly surprising wasn't anything in the demo itself, but what the boys at Bioware were telling people alongside it. As recounted by Garnett Lee on 1up's "Listen Up" podcast, during the demo, the people manning to booth dropped something of a bomb.
They outright explained that at the end of the game, the player's avatar, Commander Shepard, could die. Depends on the player's actions, Shepard may die, and would then not be in the eventual Mass Effect 3, and the player would presumably have to make an all new protagonist to finish the trilogy.

At first glance, this is a gigantic spoiler, isn't it? The developers of the game just laid out the end of the game for you, months before the game is ever released. Why in the hell would they do that? Are they nuts? Don't they know that will drive players insane?!
Well.... maybe they do. Maybe that's the idea. Allow me, if you would, to purpose a theory: Bioware did not spoil the end of Mass Effect. They did just the opposite. A... non-spoiler if you will.

I'll explain. If you asked me what was going to happen at the end of ME2 before E3, I wouldn't have any real information for you. I could guess a few things. I'd assume that it might end on some cliffhanger, as part two of three's tend to do. I'd imagine it might throw a curveball and introduce some new ultimate menace that would carry into three. I could bullshit it basically.
One other thing I also would have told you is that maybe one or two party members may die, much like the first game (or many Bioware titles). But I would never have guessed Shepard might die. The player's character? Of course not. That can't happen. At least not in an ongoing series.

How often in a game do you ever feel genuine fear for the safety of the lead character? Despite the occasional Chrono Trigger or Team Ico game, I feel pretty safe. My character will die. Often dozens of times. But he regenerates. I load a save. He has another life. But what happens if that safety net goes away?

It isn't gone of course. It's not Heavy Rain. 99% of the game still works that way. But at that crucial 1% at the very end? It's gone. Sheppard may perish, never to be seen again. And without knowing what to do to prevent it.... the ending is uncertain.

Do you see what happened there? I don't know how it's going to end. In fact, I am fundamentally unsure of how it's going to end. I might DIE. There a very few games where I am that unsure of what the conclusion may be. Telling me that it's possible for me to die didn't spoil anything about the game for me, it did just the opposite. It's opened the game up to a million possibilities. It has possibly changed how I'm going to play this game. All these RPG's tell us that out actions have repercussions, but how serious to do we take that? When one of those might be your eventual DEATH, everything I do suddenly has that much more gravitas to it.

So yeah, Shepard may die at the end of Mass Effect 2. That's not a spoiler. That's life. We all die sometime. Until more games start dealing with taxes, death stands as the ultimate anti-spoiler.

You might die, buy hey... you might not.

- Andrew Power is an animator and creator of the webcomic "Aptitude Test" He loves Mass Effect because it let him yell at a guy until he cried.