Ten Years Later, Why is Mass Effect still my Favorite Video Game?
In Mass Effect, the player matters.
This past week, Mass Effect’s 10th birthday prompted a realization: it is the oldest “favorite” I have.
To wit: my favorite book has changed in the last 10 years. My favorite TV show and my favorite film have changed in the last 10 years (probably in the last 10 minutes, to be fair). My favorite song, my favorite poem, my favorite band, my favorite meme; everything, all my favorite media and mediums, are not the same as those I canonized when I was twelve years old. With my Blink-182 birthday fast-approaching, I’ve been thinking more and more about ‘formative years,’ and how it could be that despite a total rehaul of my value system, I could still love something as much now as I did a decade ago. For good or ill, when asked what my favorite video game is, I’ll still give you the same answer I would have when I was a plump-waisted eighth grader: Mass Effect.
CAVEAT: For the purposes of this essay, I’m only discussing the original Mass Effect. I acknowledge Mass Effect 2 is a better game across most strata, but I’ve always jived better with the first.
Concept and Allegory
I still haven’t completed the Mass Effect trilogy, though I finally started Mass Effect 3 and I’ve managed to avoid spoilers thus far. Essentially, Mass Effect is a slightly high-concept space opera set in the near future of 2181. In the lore, humans discover ancient alien technology on Mars sometime in the 2100s, allowing them to unlock the secrets of FTL travel and some other super sci-fi-y things, like the mass-altering energy fields for which the series is so poetically named. They quickly discover other contemporary alien races and attempt to integrate into galactic civilization. Long story short, you play as a tabula rasa space-marine-war-hero (male or female, oh boy!!) thrust into a power-fantasy scenario, in which evil sentient machines from beyond time and space are poised to destroy the universe. Naturally it’s up to you, Commander Shepard, to stop them. Good shit.
Just as BioWare previously tackled heady notions of dual-identity, morality, and corruption in their Knights of the Old Republic series — ideas far more complex than the dichotomic Star Wars universe normally allows — so too do they approach Mass Effect. By setting the game firmly in our future, BioWare establishes a subtle intimacy with social issues, civic politics, race relations, and gender and sexuality (though only in the sequels, after they faced extensive criticism).
Science-fiction has long been a genre tailored for allegory, but rarely is the Rod Serling approach utilized in video games concerned with blowing up aliens and zipping around in starfighters. Even though Mass Effect has plenty of that sort of thing, it couches grand sci-fi fantasy in the ugly prejudices of our world, as the developers imagine it would be if propelled out amongst the stars. Players encounter an anti-alien political party called ‘Terra Firma’ with some strong Tea Party vibes. Anti-human prejudice from the older species on the ‘Citadel Council’ damages humanity’s chances at integration. There’s good old-fashioned bias against the physically disabled via your chair-bound pilot Joker. A race of displaced aliens called Quarians faces class discrimination. Diaspora abounds in the first game (and both sequels) as refugees flee the devastating effects of the galactic war. Players can choose to support police brutality against religious expression. The list goes on.
The vicariousness of playing as an adventurous space-farer held great allure for a misanthropic middle-schooler.
Allegory does play a role in Mass Effect, but it’s rather thin; aliens are clumsy, misguided stand-ins for people of color and LGBTQIA groups. Otherwise, the discrimination is fairly literal and diegetic, and the player often has the choice to either participate in that discrimination or fight against it.
This brings us to the cornerstone of the Mass Effect franchise; choice.
BioWare made it clear upon the game’s release that many decisions you make in ME would affect events in the forthcoming sequels, potentially altering entire plot-lines. At the time, no other game had attempted such a mechanic. Despite the eye-rolling “Mass Effect” double-entendre, this element of choice held some allure for me as a misanthropic middle schooler. There’s the obvious vicariousness of space-faring (more on this later) and the ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ replay appeal. First and foremost, however, Mass Effect excels in emphasizing the potency of choice, and this potency provides a level of catharsis that I have yet to experience in another video game.
The Choice Puzzle
Events directly influenced by player-action in Mass Effect never feel cheap or contrived because choices are birthed naturally from the environment. Decisions provide narrative and emotional resolution. Nothing feels superfluous. Oftentimes, actions will result in consequences hours down the line: for example, choosing to recruit Liara early on in Mass Effect will open up the option to travel with her to Noveria, where the boss just-so-happens to be Liara’s mother, changing the circumstances of the final battle. This feeling of potency extends even to the theatrical ‘morality’ choices that form the crux of Shepard’s character.
Mass Effect demands the player feel a sense of ownership over the protagonist — their Shepard — in order to have a meaningful gameplay experience.
The issue of translating morality into a multiple-choice question has plagued many a modern-RPG. How do developers offer players a spectrum between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and still maintain the integrity of the scripted narrative? Troublingly, a key choice in Mass Effect is whether or not to kill the Queen of an alien hive-mind species — essentially whether or not to commit genocide. Oftentimes the difference between a ‘Paragon’ (good) and ‘Renegade’ (bad) choice is the difference between being a halfway-decent person and a full-blown specist. Is it wrong to portray this as some kind of balanced choice? Is it a problem if all the ‘evil’ options are one-dimensional edgelord bullshit, and the ‘good’ options are obsequious nice-guy gush? After all, ‘Dark Side’ endings have undoubtedly become a fundamental component of big-studio RPGs.
While it certainly suffers from opportunities to be cruel-for-cruelty’s sake, Mass Effect tackles the morality-spectrum dilemma in a relatively unique way. Games like Red Dead Redemption discourage players from making ‘Dark Side’ choices using mechanics — i.e. if you rob and kill like an outlaw, lawmen will literally make the game impossible for you by sending a well-armed posse to kill you every ten minutes — and other games like Fallout 3 offer the morality component as an optional cosmetic supplement to your gameplay experience. Morality in Mass Effect does indeed impact gameplay — certain conversation options are only available to renegade players and others only to paragons — but it also does something special. At best, most other RPGs use morality choices to affect the plot of the game. Morality choices in Mass Effect affect the story.
Morality, Story & Plot
INTERLUDE: Plot = the narrative players see unfold on-screen. Story = the ‘lore,’ or the entire world-of-the-story unraveling on- or off-screen. If we see it, it’s plot. If we don’t, it’s story. The morality choices in Mass Effect affect both.
This is amazing.
The stakes are much higher when player-action might impact invisible actors in the diegesis. Imagination is a powerful tool, far more powerful than facial animation graphics from 2007.
In most power-fantasy games, the player motivates the whole world around them, but rarely does the world motivate the player. This is begrudgingly accepted as an unfortunate side-effect of attempting to tell a scripted story while still providing the player with the fallacy of ‘choice.’ In this respect, Mass Effect is sort-of able to have its cake and eat it too.
Much of Shepard’s impact on the galaxy at-large is outlined in the ‘Codex’ — a text-based compendium of non-essential lore information accessible via the pause-menu. Still other consequences are explored in optional side-quests, such as one notable example of Shepard bouncing around a star-system destroying murderous specimens from an illegal research lab. The choice to destroy these specimens is the difference between life and death for scores of unseen innocents, and it’s optional. Story-centric consequences may not impact gameplay in any kind of tangible way, but as indicated in the lore, somewhere someone will suffer because of the player’s inaction. In Mass Effect, ‘no choice at all’ is still a choice.
This may seem silly or mawkish, I grant you, and certainly not a good enough reason to consider Mass Effect my favorite video game. After all, who but the most disassociated could possibly value escapism so much that they would lionize a video game that prioritized story over mechanics?
To compound the issue, Mass Effect is not that fun to play! Sure, BioWare corrects the clumsy shooting mechanics and clusterfuck inventory system in Mass Effect 2, but the first game is absolutely abysmal in terms of basic gameplay design. There are about 4,000 guns, all of which look exactly the same and differ only by 2–3 DPS points, and about 5,000 suits of armor that work the same way. Combat is uncoordinated and frequently subject to AI stupidity and broken cover-mechanics. The biotic-power system, though clever in concept, ends up more a hindrance than a help because of over-extended cooldown times. The revolutionary conversation-wheel dialogue system is pretty much the only saving-grace for gameplay. Unless you’re the type of gamer who wants a frustrating experience playing a fucking video game, Mass Effect is an eldritch horror.
In Mass Effect, ‘no choice at all’ is still a choice.
So, given Mass Effect’s mortifying gameplay, how was it able to draw in a dry-eyed thirteen-year-old dweeb who up-until-then had mostly contented himself with stomaching homophobic slurs during Halo 2 Team Deathmatch?!
For the answer, we must return to the coup de grace of Mass Effect: vicarious power fantasy.
Sympathy for the Avatar
“The Closer Look” published a video essay on player-choice, in which they postulate that “a character is defined by the choices we make, so when we make their choices for them they cease to be a character.” The essayist claims player investment in a protagonist is inversely proportional to the amount of choice offered to the player. Essentially, they argue choice-based games limit themselves to providing emotional connections with supporting characters only, because the playable character is such a malleable blank-slate.
This is a viewpoint worth considering, except hell yeah I care about Commander Shepard! I’ve played Mass Effect fifteen fucking times and I still care about Commander Shepard! Perhaps in certain instances I care more about supporting characters — *cough* Garrus *cough* — but where is it writ that protagonists must be arbiters of empathy in any given form of entertainment? I care more about Katara and Toph in Avatar than I do about Aang. I care more about the Ewoks being blown to bits by AT-STs in Return of the Jedi than I do about Han Solo. This does not diminish the impact of these narratives. Good stories need not deify their protagonists as imagos of emotional investment.
Everyone who has ever connected with video games as a medium can name one in-game narrative which consumed them so wholly that they felt no trace of voyeurism.
Besides, Commander Shepard is not some robotic plot-catalyst a la Oblivion or Dragon Age or Assassin’s Creed. They’re a living character with robust physicality. The roleplaying-player is encouraged to connect with Shepard not just as an avatar but as a character in the world of the story. Building a ‘choice-based’ game does not automatically create an unsympathetic protagonist, assuming developers do it right. If players go ‘Dark Side,’ Shepard will sucker-punch adoring fans and leave entire colonies to die. If players act charitably, newsreels will sing Shepard’s praises. Mass Effect demands the player feel a sense of ownership over the protagonist — their Shepard — in order to have a meaningful gameplay experience.
There is less temptation to go ‘Full Light’ or ‘Full Dark’ in Mass Effect because morality has little effect on gameplay outcome, freeing players to tackle every scenario as they imagine their Shepard would — without pressure to accumulate points toward some morality-driven goal. The player must create their own incentives in matters-of-choice, thereby strengthening their connection with the protagonist. Decisions in everything from romance options to side-quests create ripples that can be glimpsed through even a cursory glance at the lore. In Mass Effect, the player matters.
“The Closer Look” asserts that plots driven by player choice are inferior to sharply-defined narratives such as The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption. Mass Effect directly refutes this criticism. Deep-RPGs are not precluded from emotional resonance. Hell, look at Kingdom Hearts. I would argue that TCL’s interpretation misses an essential — perhaps the essential — point of gaming: interactivity.
Expectations and Obligations
I had a professor back in college who maintained that video games are the next natural step in the evolution of narrative. Oral tradition, early stage-plays, thespian performance, poetry, symphony, silent film, board games, radio serials, sound film, television serials, LARPing… the progression here trends toward deeper immersion. More senses are activated as new storytelling mediums emerge — sight and sound — but most importantly, more is required of the audience.
With video games, for the first time in history, the circumstances of the story require immediate input from the audience. While comic books have long offered readers the opportunity to vote on narrative decisions, never before has the audience been a true player. Even in non-RPGs, the flow of the story is directed by players pressing buttons to deliberately control the action.
Mass Effect takes advantage of interactivity in such a way, and did so at such a vulnerable time in my own adolescence, that I will forever associate it with my initial exposure to the video game medium.
Interactivity replaces voyeurism with vicariousness — passivity with tactile decision-making. While every plot-based video game, whether it offers ‘player-choice’ or not, technically consists of a scripted narrative, the player is required to become an active motivator of that narrative in order to reach the resolution. Putting the impetus for catharsis on the audience, i.e. the player, is perhaps the boldest stride storytelling has made since the written word. While the medium is decades old, story-driven games are still in their infancy.
Mass Effect might not represent the same sort of sea-change as Donkey Kong or even Dear Esther, but this isn’t about objective qualification. This is about subjective affection. Everyone who has ever connected with video games as a medium can name one in-game narrative which consumed them so wholly that they felt no trace of voyeurism. This point of total association creates a link between player and game that transcends even the most ‘active’ movie-watching experience. Mass Effect takes advantage of interactivity in such a way, and did so at such a vulnerable time in my own adolescence, that I will forever associate it with my initial exposure to the video game medium.
Up-Close & Personal
Ten years ago, I subsisted off a diet of science-fiction and fantasy. In want of friends or healthy relationships, I sought refuge in narratives thick with lore, plots dense with story. Star Wars was the first big one, obviously. I have shelves-worth of EU novels in my apartment today. Next came The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings, various YA-fantasy novels too cookie-cutter to distinguish from one another, and — cir. 2008 — Mass Effect. It was the first video game to feature lore on-par with the films and books I adored. Unlike those, however, Mass Effect offered me the opportunity to interact.
It was easy for a lonely escapist like me to find solace ‘a long time ago in a galaxy, far, far away.’ Contrastingly, Mass Effect won my affections for the same reason it is so apt for soft political rhetoric — it takes place in our galaxy, not so long from now. Unlike my other favorite fantasy worlds, Mass Effect had the potential to convince me that if I had just been born a couple of hundred years later, I could have lived in that neon-synth future shimmering cyan off the screen. This kind of dissociative obsession was undeniable — and implacable — for a lonely child just cusping their formative years.
I can look back now and recognize there is sadness in this. All of the other ‘favorites’ I had at twelve have changed because the aspects of my personality that watered those vines are gone. I’ve grown up. This is how it should be. Yet the one relic from those years that depended upon my capacity to dissociate remains. Mass Effect is my favorite video game for a whole slew of good reasons: it’s revolutionary, it’s (relatively) progressive, it’s well-written, it’s fleshed-out. None of those reasons can excuse the truth of it. Mass Effect is my favorite game because it offered me a world close-enough to my own that I could latch on, but far enough removed that I could find some enjoyment there. It was pure, unfiltered vicarious thrill.
Why is this still the case? I’ve played other games since then. More importantly, I’ve made myself into a healthier person. I’ve made friendships. I’ve confronted the sinister trauma in my past and so has my family. I’ve reevaluated my priorities. Yet I can still go back to my Xbox 360 and start a new playthrough of Mass Effect and be filled with a whisky-warmth from chest to heel, swaddled by a story and a world that sated me when the real one became unbearable.
Maybe there’s something to be said about the responsibility video games have, as a medium, to discourage players from dissociating. Maybe there’s some ineffable theory here concerning the fragility of a mind tossed in youth’s squalls, and how a port-in-the-storm as innocent as a video game could turn compulsive. It’s hard to say in these gray realms of feelings and anecdotes.
Stories were my safety net when I was scared and vulnerable, even if I didn’t know it. Yet only one of those stories was able to impel delusions of grandeur bold enough, vivid enough, to remain these past ten years.
