Mass Effective?

Yeah, alright, dumb title, yadda yadda yadda.

Anyway, today I am going to talk about a videogame, a science fiction one of course. Why a game? Well, part of it is admittedly that I’m running out of semi-obscure genre novels that I read recently (and I can’t just do something on, say Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter; got to keep my nerd-hipster cred high after all), but also there’s the fact that, apart from my movie review, all I’ve done is blab about books.

So, Mass Effect. What is it? It’s a science fiction Action-RPG made by the Canadian developer Bioware, famous for their in-depth narratives and memorable characters, for a video game. Ah, there’s the rub. While their stories may be something special in the gaming world, the question is whether they hold up on a literary level. The answer is, unfortunately, no.

Mass Effect is very much a space opera and its visuals fall into the Star Trek school of design; all sleek spaceships and handsome people. Most of the aliens are also just people with silly things stuck onto their faces and the few that aren’t act only as NPCs (non player characters) and can never join your team. The player is cast into the role of Commander Shepard (whose gender, appearance and first name is whatever you want it to be), basically a space James Bond with none of the class. Anyway, at the start of the game you are made a Spectre, ie special agent by the intergalactic ruling board, the Council, and tasked with investigating a suspected traitor, shooting evildoers and romancing up blue chicks or boring guys.

There are some twists and turns along the way, but nothing very unpredictable and the only earth shattering revelation is that one group of evil robots is actually being controlled by another, older group of evil robots. Strangely, the story seems to draw a lot from common fantasy tropes; there are ancient artifacts and grand evils, and although your team is ostensibly made up of professionals, the game treats it as an adventurer’s party. Although much of the dialogue is fairly well written, it is hampered by a black the white morality system that Bioware tends to use. The conflict between narrative choice and gameplay restrictions ultimately seems meaningless when, at the end of the game, you are still given.

What’s more, some of the deeper themes the game explores come off as heavy handed when the science fiction aspect is removed. For example, a subplot throughout the story concerns humanity trying to become properly accepted by the rest of the galactic community, which is all well and good. But when you look at the pro human argument it all sounds hilariously racist if you exchange the word “alien” with some sort of ethnicity. Even worse is a sidequest where you, as a complete stranger, get to decide the fate of a mother’s unborn child through sparse dialogue choices; clearly an analogue for the abortion debate.

There’s an argument going on in the gaming community nowadays; can video games be art. Perhaps the better question is whether they can be considered a good story.