3 ms·

Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation

35 points by personjerry 12y ago

jimmcslim 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
austinz 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  +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.
- gte910h 12y ago
  Perhaps AFUTD isn't considered this generation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) Also did this decades before that I think "the author's reference pools are not as deep as they should be" is the point: People of THIS generation are getting THESE ideas from THIS place.
cromwellian 12y ago
"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.
spain 12y ago
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).
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
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.
beloch 12y ago
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.
mercer 12y ago
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.

35 points by personjerry 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

austinz 12y ago

> 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 12y ago
+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.
gte910h 12y ago
Perhaps AFUTD isn't considered this generation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen) Also did this decades before that I think "the author's reference pools are not as deep as they should be" is the point: People of THIS generation are getting THESE ideas from THIS place.

cromwellian 12y ago

"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.

spain 12y ago

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).

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

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.

beloch 12y ago

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.

mercer 12y ago

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.