
Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation - personjerry
http://www.popbioethics.com/2012/02/why-mass-effect-is-the-most-important-science-fiction-universe-of-our-generation/
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austinz
> Despite writing at the turn of the last century, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmicism
> is something with which no major narrative of humanity’s journey through the
> stars has dealt.

Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_ tackled this very subject decades ago,
and with far greater poise than Mass Effect did. (And I say this as a fan of
the series.)

I suspect the author's reference pools are not as deep as they should be, and
I say this because a lot of the topics that the author claims ME to be the
first to address have in fact been bandied about in science fiction for a long
time. Mass Effect is great in lots of ways; it brings together a lot of plot
points and concepts from other series and synthesizes them together into a
decently coherent whole. But the series is far from original thematically.
(minor spoilers) In particular, the third game tries to address the idea of
transhumanism in a way reminiscent of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, another game
which came out a year before, but does it in a particularly cack-handed way.
Even the ending choice in ME3 is thematically similar to the one from the
earlier game.

~~~
cromwellian
+100. A Fire Upon The Deep totally predates this. Many of the main characters
in the story aren't even humans, they're hive mind wolves and plants, and
hyper intelligent AIs. And the Blight doesn't even have any goal, it's more or
less a virus that wants to survive, other than that, we don't know it's
motives, and the hyper-intelligences don't really care much about humans. The
humans in the story are portrayed as fools who don't have the wisdom of the
older races and end up digging up stuff they shouldn't be messing with.

------
spain
I agree with the others saying that the themes in Mass Effect have already
been done many times in the past and that it brings nothing new to the table.
Furthermore, in my opinion they are very mediocre as videogames (well, with
the exception of the first one).

------
cromwellian
"The reason is this: Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the
postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe
indifferent to humanity."

Really? That seems like a bold claim. The story of insignificant humans who
ultimately are controlled by eternal, hyper-advanced species, seems a repeated
theme. I actually found that aspect of Mass Effect rather boring (this again?)
Both 2001 and Babylon-5 featured completely alien cultures and insignificant
humans, who were unwittingly guided to evolve the way the god-like races
wanted.

A few years ago (2007-ish) I wrote up a space-game design that was like a
combination of Minecraft and Elite in space. The main (hidden, exposed in
glimpses) plotine was that the universe was actually being run by a vast, very
old species called The Alphas, who actually had no interest in other species
at all, but were committing mass genocides, based on a Frank Tipler's _Omega
Point_ concept (which was the title of the game, OmegaPoint). The Alphas were
doing Kardashev scale Type-V galactic engineering, moving stars, blackholes,
and interstellar dust clouds around to permute the geometry of space so as to
control the collapse of the Universe in order to extract infinite energy and
computation from it.

In game, they would have ships the size of planets, which would disassemble
and surround stars, creating photon rockets to move them over eons. Think of
how in 2010, the monoliths overtook Jupiter. The younger races would try to
stop them, but would be ineffectual in the face of self-replicating Von
Neunmann probes.

Only by races banding together, and allying with the second oldest race in the
Universe (the Gammas), could they hope to take down Alpha Ships.

But the gist of it is, the older race doesn't give a shit and has no goal with
respect to other species. They see you as nothing more than bacteria or ants,
and are only interested in manipulating stars, whether or not your have a
civilization dependent on that star.

But God-like races who want to control evolution, or play "Order vs Chaos"
games seem quite common in SF.

------
mercer
As an aside, as far as (RPG) gameplay experiences go, few have topped
Planescape: Torment in quality of storytelling.

If you include non-rpg's, The Thief series (1 and 2) are good contenders too.

------
PhasmaFelis
He claims to be speaking for all of sci-fi, but only mentions four written
properties--Ender's Game, Dune, Starship Troopers, and the Cthulhu Mythos--
three of which have been big-budget motion pictures, and the last so deeply
embedded in general pop culture that you can know all about it without ever
cracking a book. He can't even _spell_ "Ender's Game" right after three tries.
He's routinely flabbergasted by concepts that have been routine in written
sci-fi for decades.

tl;dr: Yet another commentator who thinks that Gene Roddenberry invented
science fiction. Ugh.

------
jimmcslim
TL;DR.

I kid, I kid!

On a serious note, has the Mass Effect trilogy led to any conversion of
opinions by 'serious' 'art' critics that computer games aren't an art-form...
as it seems plain to me that Mass Effect does indeed qualify but is oh so much
more besides, as outlined by this excellent thesis. Is 'can computer games be
art?' still a debate anymore? Was it ever a valid question or just
intellectual snobbery?

~~~
mercer
I still hear many people say that games can't be art, but the debate seems to
have subsided. Perhaps this is because games have become so ubiquitous there
it's just not as interesting to discuss it anymore.

------
beloch
Choice in most computer games, the Mass Effect series included, is largely
illusory. It is too costly and difficult to provide radically divergent
branching experiences based on player choice. Choices that truly alter the
plot result in exponentially increasing demands on development resources. Just
one truly game-altering choice would halve the length of a game that a given
budget could produce. No matter what choices you make in the Mass Effect
games, Shepard always winds up in the same places doing the same things. It
truly does not matter if your Shepard is the sort of person who holds all life
sacred or a hardened killer who ruthlessly throws people off of highrises when
mildly annoyed. You can overthrow the rulers of the galaxy and replace them
with humans in the first game of the trilogy and, to Bioware's credit, that
choice is reflected in the subsequent games, but in a way that has almost no
impact. In the Mass Effect universe, what you do truly does not matter.
However, the genius of Bioware is that the player feels their choices _do_
matter to a degree that is sometimes agonizing! Despite the lack of impact on
the plot, there are enough minor details to make you deeply care about how you
interact with the game's NPC's.

Bioware has been at the forefront of RPG's/adventure games for quite some
time. While their combat mechanics are occasionally rather broken (e.g. Jade
Empire), their plots are the gold-standard in the industry. The illusion of
choice is a part of their craft that has been finely honed over the years. The
Mass Effect universe is not the first impressively deep game-world Bioware has
created. They breathed new life into both the D&D and Star Wars universes, and
created the Dragon Age universe, which is a notable example of world-building.
Consider Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. This is a long series of games
extending back into the nineties. The amount of reading material, in the form
of in-game books, in this series of games is staggering, but the quality of
that material ranges from mediocre to absolutely awful. In the first Dragon
Age game, Bioware produced a similar amount of reading material, but every
last word of it finely crafted and carefully designed to immerse you in a
game-world far richer and larger than actually portrayed in the game. Even the
title of the game, "Origins", suggested that this 80+ hour RPG was a mere
introduction to a new world. Mass Effect used this approach as well, fleshing
out the universe with a Codex that is truly impressive in terms of depth. This
supplemental material is insanely cheap to produce relative to the time it
takes for gamers to consumer. Hardcore fans will gobble every last word up,
but even casual players will feel the depth of the universe that is present
even if they just sample a few paragraphs here and there. The choices may be
illusory, but the conceptual depth of the Mass Effect universe is not.

The biggest leap forward made by Mass Effect was the dialogue wheel system.
Prior to Mass Effect, RPG's allowed players to choose exactly what their
characters said. Players would be presented with several options and would
read precisely what their characters would say in the process of selection. As
a result, it was largely redundant to voice the protagonist. Players who had
read what their character was about to say would probably be too impatient for
their character to read that text aloud. As a result, games would often fully
voice every role _but_ the protagonist, ostensibly so that the player could
imagine him or herself speaking the protagonist's lines. The process of
reading several (sometimes) lengthy responses also injected unnatural pauses
into conversations. The Mass Effect dialogue wheel provides players with a
rapid, shorthand way to select responses. Your choices are described by a few
words at most, and often in terms of what your character is thinking instead
of what he'll actually say. e.g. When faced with a prevaricating NPC, an older
RPG might have offered one dialogue choice in which your character spots the
lie and tries to draw the NPC into a self-incriminating trap. In Mass Effect,
to do the same thing you might choose a response that simply says "He's
lying!". The wheel usually provides you with your next choice while other
characters are still speaking, so you can carry out a natural, flowing
conversation just by making choices that reflect how you feel. The most
crucial dialogue, that of the protagonist, is now fully voiced by an actor.
The result is that players feel like they're in a movie. Not merely watching,
but _starring_ in. They are frequently awed by the eloquence of Shepard's
finely voiced responses and feel a tremendous boost due to simultaneously
identifying themselves as Shepard. The Mass Effect dialogue wheel let's you
feel like you're delivering dialogue like Pacino! It's an utterly ingenious
system. To get an idea of how important the dialogue wheel is to Mass Effect,
consider Dragon Age: Origins. Origins was released after Mass Effect but was
in development for much longer, so it uses the old system with a voiceless
protagonist. It feels astonishingly primitive when compared to Mass Effect as
a Result.

Video Games are going to take fiction (sci-fi or otherwise) to new heights.
The reasons are legion. I can't do them all justice, but consider just this
one alone: Minds and time. Movies, like video games, are a collaborative art
form that takes many minds to create, but the time they have to convey meaning
is limited to just a couple of hours. Novels, on the other hand, can take tens
of hours to consume, but are the product of a very small or, most typically,
just one mind. Video games are the first art form to emerge in which many
minds can engage their audience for an extended period of time. Mass Effect is
notable for bringing an immense richness and variety of tropes together and
synthesizing a truly meaningful universe that invites open interpretation. It
is simultaneously big-budget, pop-culture space opera and a dozen different
things, ranging from nihilism to humanism and everything in between. The Mass
Effect universe is, perhaps, too complex for any single human mind to have
created.

Now that I've spent enough time gushing, let me add one sour note of
pessimism: Electronic Arts. EA is notorious for tainting the gaming universe
with their sweat-shop productions. Bioware was bought by EA and, as far as
anyone is willing to say, remains largely autonomous. The gargantuan size of
EA's bank account should have offered Bioware the freedom to do truly brave
things, but that is not how EA operates. They expect profits. Hints of cost-
cutting and compromise have set into Bioware's latest games. Consider Dragon
Age 2 and Mass Effect 3. Where the previous games in these two Bioware
properties included multiple cities/worlds to explore, the latest, EA
influenced games did not. Practically all non-combat interaction in ME3 is
confined to the Normandy and Citadel, while all of DA2 takes place in the same
city. Both games could have opened up new areas as the game progressed, but
instead relied on stocking the same old areas with a mixture of new NPC's and
old, unaltered NPC's. DA2 is especially awful, recycling the same dungeons
repeatedly even within the same chapter of the game. ME3 was epic enough for
this to go largely unnoticed, and the end of the game was so ballsy that it
overshadows EA's cost-cutting. However, DA2 was met with luke-warm reception,
largely because so much of the game material was so excruciatingly recycled.
One can only hope that EA doesn't continue driving Bioware into the ground.

~~~
JohnTHaller
It's also worth noting that EA basically cut a year off of ME3's original
development time, which is why we got a series of endings to the whole series
that made your choices matter a whole lot less. It's still one of the only
series that sees you choosing whether or not to kill off one of the major
characters (Wrex) and has many dialog and character choices open or close to
you based on previous actions.

