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

"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.