SEVEN
Godforsaken is often used to describe the world’s woebegone landscapes. But to say that God has forsaken something, there must be some corresponding indication that God had ever shown any interest in it, and, in the case of Edmonton, Alberta, this was not immediately apparent. On the evening of my arrival, at least, the temperature was close to the magic intersection at which Celsius and Fahrenheit achieve subzero parity. I was in Edmonton to see Drew Karpyshyn, the head writer of BioWare’s Mass Effect, a science-fiction role-playing game that some have held up as one of the best-written console video games of all time.
There is a nontrivial divide separating the relative achievements of console and PC games in any number of areas, but how “well written” console games are when compared with PC games, which have historically been more text-heavy, is especially contentious. Among the PC gamers of my acquaintance, Black Isle Studios’ RPG Planescape: Torment is often cited as being more thought provoking and literarily satisfying than any console game. In this respect, BioWare’s console games have an instantly recognizable style: that of seeming like PC games (a famously persnickety and piracy-plagued market that BioWare, unlike many developers, has not abandoned). What distinguishes the BioWare style is an unshakable reliance on dialogue and narratives with all manner of bureaucratic complication. What also distinguishes the BioWare style is gameplay longevity: I have had moderately meaningful relationships in which I invested less time than what I have spent on some BioWare games.
All of BioWare’s titles have been RPGs of one stripe or another, with an early concentration on the dungeon fantasia, an RPG subgenre that is extremely difficult to do well and virtually impossible to sell beyond its niche audience. The first BioWare title to move beyond the cleric-and-dwarf sodality was 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (known, in vaguely Neanderthal vernacular, as KotOR), which is set four thousand years before the events lamentably depicted in The Phantom Menace. With KotOR, BioWare was in danger of simply swapping one shut-in constituency for another, but it was a game of such narrative super-bity that even non–Star Wars fans took note. While the care the game lavished on the Star Wars universe was considerable, the way KotOR handled dialogue indicated a solidifying methodology. Here, as in the later Mass Effect, almost every conversation and encounter initiated by the gamer can lead to multiple and often drastically different outcomes, some of which bring you in line with the Force, some of which tempt you down the path of the dark side of the Force. The game changes—as does your character’s appearance—depending on where he or she falls along a spectrum of in-game morality. Although open-ended conversation may sound like a relatively simple game mechanic, when it is done well that is most assuredly not the case. The technology BioWare uses to manage in-game dialogue is closely minded, and parts of it are patented. No one, then, makes more conversationally driven console games than BioWare. When these games are played in proper solitude, the marathonic dialogue rarely becomes an issue. To watch someone else play a BioWare game, however, is to ponder the boredom-curing upshot of punching oneself in the face.
For gamers with dreamier turns of mind, the somewhat draggy narratives of games centered upon the unpredictability of conversation and encounter provides half of the enjoyment. The dynamism of combat or movement has never been the strength of the RPG and never will be. Indeed, the notion that involved narrative has any place in video games at all begins in the RPG—a fact I have heard more than a few game designers lament. While most game genres have ransacked the devices of film, the RPG has in many ways drawn from the well of the literary. This is the source of many game designers’ suspicions. Why construct an entire genre upon the very foundations (character, plot, theme) that have given games such trouble?
The man I had been seated next to on the plane into Edmonton, a KotOR fan from way back, underwent a spontaneous volubility transfusion when I explained the purpose of my visit. The woman manning the booth at immigration control gave my passport a hard, prideful stamp when I revealed the name of the local company I would soon be seeing. My Lebanese cabdriver, while making his way along an icy highway at speeds approaching fifteen miles an hour, nearly lost control of his sedan when I revealed my destination. “Big company,” he said. “Powerful company!” He then asked if BioWare’s physician founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, were still practicing medicine. (BioWare’s name derives from its origins, long jettisoned, as a medical technology company.) I didn’t think so, I said. “That’s very sad,” the driver said. “The world needs doctors.” Apparently, he was not a KotOR fan.
BioWare’s offices take up the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors of a tiered, charmlessly concrete office building on the south side of Edmonton. Once inside, I submitted to the required processes of game-studio entry: shaking the hand of the extremely pleasant PR person (who would be sitting in on my meeting with Karpyshyn to monitor “the messaging he’s putting out”), scrawling my name across the nondisclosure agreement, gladly agreeing to a quick tour.
At my request, the tour momentarily paused when we came to eight tall cabinets filled to capacity with books and old board games. That BioWare would have a large library was not surprising: Its games are noted for the vastidity of their worlds, all of which must be designed and populated and inhabited. Along with all the expected stuff (pop novels like Jurassic Park, old Dungeons & Dragons reference guides, an inordinate number of books whose titles included either realm or lance), BioWare’s library went beyond Advanced Nerd Studies: The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs; Architecture of North America; Giants of the Sea; Chinese Grammar; Guns, Germs, and Steel; The Celtic Book of the Dead; and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions. At this last I looked over at my handler. “We have to come up with a lot of lore,” she said with a shrug.
In the common area, five youthful BioWare employees were gathered around a massive flatscreen television and playing Street Fighter IV, which had just been released for the Xbox 360. That is, two were playing while the other three watched. From their total emotionlessness I gathered that this somehow qualified as working. Although none of these young men appeared old enough to rent a car, I was told that the average age of BioWare’s employees was, in fact, thirty. Compared with the rest of the industry, this practically qualified BioWare as an assisted-living provider.
The tour concluded with a meeting room that illustrated the degree of fan loyalty inspired by BioWare’s games. Hung on the walls of this room were nineteen painstakingly detailed woodcut plaques that bore the design-specific titles of every game BioWare has released. The artist responsible had sent the woodcuts to BioWare at no cost in order to show his “appreciation for years of great gaming.” I tried to imagine someone, anyone, doing such a thing for Paramount or Random House. This was quite impossible.
Drew Karpyshyn was a large, tree-trunk-solid man, his buzzed-down hair bringing to mind a soldier a few years clear of active duty. His face, however, bore few traces of its thirty-seven years, and I wondered if there was something about a lifelong commitment to sci-fi and fantasy (Karpyshyn is also a science-fiction novelist) that kept one boyish. As we sat down, I told Karpyshyn that, having now visited Edmonton, I believed I understood why BioWare made such long, involved, complicated games. He laughed and admitted that there was something to this. “There’s a huge amount of video-game talent in Edmonton,” he said. “Sixteen hours of darkness? What else are you going to do but play games?” Born and raised in Edmonton himself (though his ancestral heritage is Ukrainian), Karpyshyn had recently decided to relocate to BioWare’s Austin, Texas, office. “I’m done with Canadian winters.”
When I confessed to having spent around eighty hours playing Mass Effect, I could tell from Karpyshyn’s pop-eyed reaction that even he considered this excessive. Among video-game genres, only the RPG was capable of subjecting me to such a lengthy enslavement. What was it, I asked him, about the RPG? If play is freedom with structure, do not rule-bound genres like the RPG simply add another and possibly unnecessary layer of structure over the structure of video-game play? Why do so many people respond to that? I certainly respond to it, I told him, but I was not always certain I wanted to.
“Story has been more important in RPGs than it has been in other types of games,” he said. “That’s one thing that appeals to me, as a writer. Now that’s starting to change. You’re seeing story propagate across the different genres. A lot of games out there have a very interesting story, but it doesn’t really matter what you do. With RPGs, the fact that you can actually influence the story, and control it in some way, and have a different experience—a personal and individualized experience—is very important.”
Even more significant, he told me, was the RPG’s defining characteristic: the player’s ability to create his or her own character. In Mass Effect you are presented with a name: Shepard. Almost everything else is open to alteration. Mass Effect’s catalog of physical features is not as large or varied as some games with character-creation options (you have your pick of a dozen or so noses, two dozen hairstyles, an array of facial scars, and so on), but the game provides an additional interesting measure of psychological customization. Shepard can be the sole survivor of a long-ago massacre, a storied war hero, an erstwhile criminal, and so on. (The specific past and hang-ups with which your Shepard is saddled will be reflected within the game’s narrative and often determine the kind of people you will meet in the gameworld.) “I don’t really identify with a premade character,” Karpyshyn said. “When I make a character—even if I don’t make the character look like me—that is the character I’m inhabiting through the game. Even if it’s a female character or not even a human character—it doesn’t matter. I feel connected.”
I chose not to get into how long I took in designing my Shepard. The fruit of my labor was a striking green-eyed redhead with drill-resistant cheekbones and nicely plumped lips. Long after I finished Mass Effect, I consulted YouTube to rewatch a few of its key scenes and was confronted by a series of rank imposters: bald Shepards, Asian Shepards, blond Shepards, black Shepards, and (most appalling) male Shepards. This was a form of video-game interactivity that slid around the criticism of Jonathan Blow: It was an imaginative interactivity that in many ways resembled the reading experience, in which characters are cast and costumed in the mind’s definitive privacy. An RPG such as Mass Effect literalizes this process. The YouTube Shepards struck me as imposters because that is what they were.
The special resonance of the created character will amount to very little if the story she becomes part of is badly or lazily conceived. Because the typical RPG tells its story through serial conversation, dialogue is where the genre lives. More frequently, it is also where the genre dies. Many RPG characters have a peerless gift for antispeech, from the lobotomized Shakespeare of the average fantasy game to the exotically inane nomenclature of the average sci-fi game. No other genres tip so easily into silliness when trying to be deadly serious, and there is no purer indictment than that. In light of this, I had devised a simple scenario: If I am playing an RPG, and the characters are talking, and my response to a woman of any foreseeable nudity walking into the room is to instantly turn the game off, I know that what I am playing does not have much adult nourishment. Mass Effect almost always passed this test. When I asked Karpyshyn about the unusual facility his games had with dialogue, he said it was attributable to the fact that BioWare simply has more writers than most developers: thirteen in its Edmonton office and almost as many in Austin. One happy result of this was the quality control of competitive evaluation. “You know,” he said, “that your stuff is going to be seen by other writers.” As far as he was aware, no other developer had as many writers on staff.
BioWare’s writers, as full-time employees, are involved in the creative process from beginning to end. “A lot of companies,” Karpyshyn told me, “will bring writers in at the beginning and say, ‘Do an outline,’ or bring them in at the end and say, ‘Write a script.’” While the game industry was full of what Karpyshyn called “nightmare stories” of writers being abused, ignored, and discarded by developers, “BioWare respects the writing process.” BioWare also indulged the writing process: The script for Mass Effect contains three hundred thousand words.
Despite science fiction’s sui generis presumptions, most sci-fi worlds—imagined at the balance point of the evolutionary and the point-mutational, the cautionary and the aspirational—are imitative. Bad science fiction often seems to have not enough influences or too many obvious influences. Part of what made the world of Star Wars so attractive was its odd ingredients: Arthurian legend, the samurai film, the Western, World War II dogfight footage, Nazi propaganda films. George Lucas’s vision was as imitative as any other, but what it imitated was, at the time, crisply eccentric.
In 2005 a small group of BioWare writers, designers, and artists sat down at the conference room table Karpyshyn and I now shared. George Lucas was very much on their minds. The team had one goal: to create a “massive science-fiction game” that took place not a long time ago, in a licensing agreement far, far away, but in a universe of BioWare’s creation. (Self-generated fictional universes are referred to as “intellectual property,” or IP. The way most developers throw the phrase around leaves little doubt as to which half of it is more coveted.) They knew the game would be done in what Karpyshyn called “the BioWare way—very story-heavy,” but that was all they knew. Was it far future or near future? Would it be darker sci-fi, as in Blade Runner, or something more optimistic, as in Star Trek? For several weeks they talked about their favorite science-fiction films and novels. All had elements of special intensity, but what made these elements so affecting, and why? A list was made, and they realized that what these elements shared was not that they looked great or sounded cool, which is the point at which many works of sci-fi kick back and call it a day. Rather, these elements tapped into the emotions to which science fiction has privileged access: hope for and wonder at the potential of human ingenuity and, of course, fear of the very same. Rather than mimic the particular sci-fi elements that gave rise to these emotions, the emotions themselves became BioWare’s goal. “I think,” Karpyshyn told me, “that this is the step that a lot of games miss.” When I asked him if the list was still extant, he said that it was—and under no circumstances save for imminent Armageddon could he show it to me. Mass Effect, the first game of a projected trilogy, had scratched the list’s surface with no more than a pinkie fingernail.
I believed I could identify one item on the list without seeing it. A few characters in Mass Effect have an ability with something called “biotics,” defined by the Mass Effect Wikipedia page (which is a mere one hundred words shorter than that of President James Earl Carter) as “powers accessed by the characters using implants that enhance natural abilities to manipulate dark energy.” In gameplay terms, this amounts to the very enjoyable ability of throwing enemies around the room, sabotaging their shields, levitating them into positions of extreme vulnerability, and clobbering them with invisible freight trains of directed energy. One did not need any Dagobah training, I told Karpyshyn, to regard biotics as a step beyond homage. To his credit, Karpyshyn laughed. “I can see why people would say there are similarities, but let’s be honest: The idea that you can, with your mind, influence the world around you in miraculous ways is not a new idea.” Karpyshyn made sure to point out that, unlike the Force, which is one of the least-thought-through aspects of the Star Wars universe (why, if Darth Vader can choke at will, does he even bother with a lightsaber?), the use of biotics was governed by internally consistent rules that went beyond the expected gameplay mechanic of waiting for one’s biotic powers to “recharge” after overuse. He claimed these rules were a product of BioWare’s “sciencey” culture.
As well written as it is, Mass Effect neither fails nor succeeds on literary terms, for no game could. Literary sci-fi, in fact, has an overriding advantage: its invulnerability to visual disappointment. Those who are inclined to cherish the patently unconvincing have, thanks to a century of science-fiction films, one of the widest selections in history. Even beloved works of sci-fi have a disgraceful ratio of arresting aliens to hideously inadequate aliens, which made J. G. Ballard’s dismissal of the Star Wars cantina scene (“Muppets in space”) so devastating. It is well to remember that science fiction is not a license for speculative biology: If a real alien is ever discovered, it will probably not look like anything we can imagine. Admittedly, then, a “convincing” alien is subjective. Science fiction may err when it imagines the alien as nothing more than a ridged forehead and a surly mood, but arguing why a Klingon is inferior to, say, E.T. will reveal no clear path to victory. About all one can argue is that E.T. was more rigorously imagined than a Klingon.
Happily, the aliens of Mass Effect are E.T.’s, not Klingons. The face of a turian, for instance, somehow resembles a cross between a camel and an artichoke. The discomfortingly sexy asari look like what might have happened if Veronica Lake, the Blue Man Group, and a hood ornament had a child. Krogans comport themselves like large, reptilian, extremely pissed-off elderly retirees. The synthetic geth, which a large part of the game is spent killing on sight, look like nothing so much as incredibly evil desk lamps. However ridiculous the above comparisons make these aliens sound, they are all as mysteriously evolved but pleasingly convincing as the snaggled and antennaed denizens of the deepest parts of the sea.
No matter how wild the speciation of Mass Effect gets, its world has the imaginative solidity of wrought iron. As Jesse Schell writes in The Art of Game Design, the illusion of internal consistency in video games is as important as it is frail: “[U]nlike story-based entertainment, where the story world exists only in the guest’s imagination, interactive entertainment creates significant overlap between perception and imagination, allowing the guest to directly manipulate and change the story world. This is why videogames can present events with little inherent interest or poetry, but still be compelling.”
The other burden placed on Mass Effect is its need for quality voice acting. Fortunately, not a single performance in the game is less than competent, and several are startlingly good. While the film actors corralled by Mass Effect—Seth Green and Keith David among them—perform ably, the game’s most glorious performance is that of Jennifer Hale, now widely viewed as the Olivier of video games. Hale plays Shepard—if, that is, one opts for a female Shepard. When I asked about Hale, Karpyshyn said, “She’s brilliant. Her performance is so powerful, but it still allows you to feel like you are the character. It doesn’t distance you, and that’s very hard to do.” Hale’s performance is even more impressive given the constraints she was under. In all of BioWare’s previous games, as in most RPGs, the controlled character “speaks” when the gamer selects a desired statement or response from a proscribed menu, with the words themselves going unheard. Because Mass Effect is fully voice-acted, the game’s designers had to concoct a mechanic that would prevent the gamer from being twice exposed to what he or she wished to say. (Plus, Karpyshyn said, the actor would “never quite say it the way you said it in your head.”) The solution to this problem is what BioWare calls the Paraphrase System. When, at one point in the game, Shepard is sold out by the loathsome careerist Ambassador Udina, the Paraphrase System provides these responses: “This is a mistake,” “This is stupid,” and “You son of a bitch!” If one picks the first two choices, Shepard’s response is fairly tepid. If one picks the third choice (and I certainly did), Shepard snarls, “Nobody stabs me in the back, Udina. Nobody.” The acting challenge here is obvious. While performing the game’s many hundreds of exchanges, Hale had to express the spirit of the revealed paraphrases but remain tonally neutral enough to allow different conversational paths to lead to and depart from what Shepard is saying. At the same time, the nonlinear nature of the Paraphrase System prevented Hale from being able to perform any one thread of conversation all the way through, which would have been impossible in any event, as the game script bore no resemblance to that of a film. In effect, Hale was asked to provide the branches of a tree she could not even see. Karpyshyn noted that, for an actor, the only equivalent experience would be performing several different takes of a scene simultaneously.
The gratitude with which Karpyshyn spoke about Hale’s performance suggested that the collaborative nature of video games was the source of frustration as often as not. When I asked him about this, he admitted, “With a collaborative medium it’s much easier to get bad art. Games have gotten so complex that you need this huge group of very talented people. Mass Effect had a team of about one hundred and twenty. With games, you take a lot of pride in saying, ‘I was part of this great team.’” He wrote novels as a partial tonic to this: “When the novel comes out, I can say, ‘That’s mine. I made that.’”
Later I read Karpyshyn’s novel, which is set in the Mass Effect universe. Although a perfectly cromulent science-fiction novel, Mass Effect: Revelation pleased me perhaps one-hundredth as much as Mass Effect the game. Was this because the game was interactive and the novel was not? Most assuredly, no. Novels are vigorously interactive, and video-game interactivity (the limitations upon which are legion) is frequently overstated.
The meaning created through reader–writer interaction is categorically different from the meaning created through gamer–game interaction. The way a reader reads a novel may change; the way a writer understands her novel may change; but the novel itself remains invariant. I could debate the meaning of Karpyshyn’s Mass Effect novel, but a debate over the meaning of Mass Effect the game would be comparative, not interpretive. What did you do on Noveria? I decided to extirpate the rachni species. What about the wicked Dr. Saleon? I gunned down the defenseless cretin in cold blood. What about the poor enemy scientist cowering behind her desk on Virmire? When she begged for mercy, I uncharacteristically decided to grant it—the whole Dr. Saleon episode had left a bad moral aftertaste. Armor? By game’s end I was wearing Scorpion VI armor (updated with Medical Interface V). Weapon of choice? The Tsunami VII assault rifle (armed with Hammerhead rounds and tricked out with a barrel-lengthening rail extension). The world of Mass Effect was conceived with the gamer in mind, and the shadow of this final collaborator falls distractingly across every page of Mass Effect: Revelation. This was an issue even Karpyshyn had anticipated. The reason there is no Shepard in his Mass Effect novel, he explained, is because Shepard was not his character but mine.
There are two important things I have not yet addressed about Mass Effect. The first is its narrative. The game opens nineteen years after human beings made first contact with an alien federation overseen by the Council, which calls a spacefaring dreadnought known as the Citadel home. Humans are gaining influence within various Council organizations (though not the Council itself), and this is very much to the irritation of many other races. (The degree to which you can inflame or dampen alien racism among your own crew is one of Mass Effect’s most interesting quandaries. I almost always inflamed it—and felt enjoyably bad in doing so.) One of these Council organizations is a paramilitary police group known as the Spectres, of which Shepard, at the end of the game’s opening act, becomes the first and only human member. The title, meanwhile, refers to technology left behind by an ancient, vanished culture that allows the many races of the galaxy the luxury of intergalactic travel. When it becomes clear that Mass Effect technology has another, far more sinister application, you must stop a rogue fellow Spectre named Saren from enabling it. Along the way one notices the clever wainscoting that all good sci-fi specializes in: The human discovery of Mass Effect technology took place on, cleverly, Mars; the first outer-edge human space station is named in honor of Yuri Gagarin, and one nebular star cluster bears the designation Armstrong; an overheard newscast describes an alien species mounting a performance of Hamlet that will use pheromones in place of dialogue; and so on. All of this lines the corridors of Mass Effect with panels of preexistence, and with the illusion established that much has happened here, one believes that much else can.
The other thing I have not yet addressed is Mass Effect’s gameplay. In some ways, Mass Effect is not a very good game, at least not according to the criteria by which most games are judged. It is designed to operate as a third-person shooter, most examples of which, following the success of Gears of War, are obliged to provide a cover mechanic. In most games, cover is achieved by pressing the assigned button when one’s character nears a protective object. This allows one to pop over or lean around the cover-providing object and spray enemy positions between volleys of return fire. A cover system works when it does not feel too sticky. Cover should be easily attained and just as easily abandoned. The intuitive and responsive cover mechanic in Gears, though not perfect, is still the industry standard. The fighting in Mass Effect has an enjoyable briskness, with enemy bodies disintegrating upon the fatal shot, yet its cover system is sometimes unresponsive. While not hard to get into, cover is often difficult to break out of. When one’s shields are down to a final power cell and one’s enemies have sneaked into a flanking position, finding oneself stuck in cover and unable to respond defines gameplay frustration. Other mechanical issues are even more puzzling. For reasons known only to BioWare, grenade-throwing has been assigned to the Xbox 360 controller’s unassuming “back” button, to which few games cede any gameplay function at all. Indeed, throwing a grenade at a platoon of geth with the “back” button feels as fundamentally mistaken as using the volume knob on your car stereo to roll down the driver’s-side window.
Because Mass Effect is a role-playing game, at least 20 percent of one’s playing time is spent in various menu screens allocating talent points and upgrading weapons, armor, implants, and biotic abilities. Some RPGs have found ways to endow this convention with interest; Mass Effect does not, and its available upgrades have a relentless similarity. Early in the game, for instance, you find an Avenger assault rifle. Later you find an Avenger II. Then an Avenger III. A different assault rifle, the Banshee, can also be found. So can the Banshee II. And the Banshee III. Additionally, weapons, armor, weapons upgrades, and armor upgrades are the only functional items you find in the world of Mass Effect. On one mission, you find the ancestral armor of one of your squad mates, which, for some reason, cannot be worn. This is heresy from the usual treasure-hunting practice of the RPG, with books, notes, photos, and other items scattered throughout the gameworld. The whole reason you hunt for unusual items in RPGs, after all, is to use them. As one critic who otherwise admired Mass Effect pointed out, this “detracts from the realism of the world. Imagine driving through a desolate ice field on a distant planet, picking up some debris on your scan, making your way to it and finding an old crashed probe, and finally, opening it up to find…a sniper rifle.”
Furthermore, Mass Effect, like many RPGs, places a limit on the amount of gear you can carry, which is, again, convention. Figuring out what to drop and what to hold on to is one of the RPG’s especial challenges. (While playing the RPG Oblivion, I accidentally discarded my beloved Duskfang sword while standing on the edge of a waterfall, the Niagaracal rush of which claimed it. Since I had not saved my progress for a while, I dived into the lake at the bottom of the waterfall to search for the irreplaceable Duskfang. My search lasted close to half an hour. I then bit my lip and reloaded my last saved game.) Several games have creatively approached the matter of inventory management. Fallout 3 allows you to carry more than you are able to, but this also slows your pace to a crawl. Resident Evil 4 forces you to arrange your gear so that it fits into a briefcase, which winds up feeling exactly as stressful as packing. Mass Effect limits your inventory but the limit is so absurdly high that, when it is finally reached, and you have to figure out what now to do with your thirty-seven sniper rifles, your first impulse is to turn one of them on yourself.
The best part of many RPGs is wandering the gameworld and seeing what happens. Many gameworlds are arranged in a way that allows the gamer an almost subliminal sense of where to go: a hallway bathed in reddish light will rarely provide a way out; a hallway bathed in greenish light often will. RPGs frequently neglect to provide such markers in order to encourage exploration, and the gamer often comes to have a bizarrely eidetic familiarity with gameworld landmarks. Any gamer trying to describe to another where something can be found in an RPG will often have directions as longitudinally inviolate as those of a real map: “You know that room with the two guys standing out in front of the door, beneath the staircase by the elevator? Yeah, go straight through it, around that weird partition, and you can find the colony administrator in the back, sitting at his desk.” (I am frequently startled by how well I remember certain gameworlds: which crate to look in, which turn to take, which corner has an enemy around it, where to pause to reload. I often wonder where these mental maps reside in my mind. The same place where I have stored my extensive understanding of Lower Manhattan or my sketchier grasp of central Paris? I was once able to find my way from London’s Trafalgar Square to the British Museum based solely on my experience of playing Team SOHO’s open-world driving game The Getaway, so perhaps so.) Unfortunately, Mass Effect’s achievement in the exploration area is middling. Although the mission-critical planets the gamer must visit are all well designed, full of interest, and quite pretty, the mission-optional planets are pedestrian. There is the snow world, the sylvan world, the rock world, and the other rock world. The skies are different only in terms of their color and texture; cloud patterns are frequently identical. The mission-optional planets are also so underpopulated that they appear to have been neutron-bombed. The biggest problem, however, is that you get around these planets by driving a six-wheeled vehicle known as the Mako, which handles about as well as a luxury cruise liner. Its cannon is also about as combat-effective as a luxury cruise liner: Shooting something found on an incline even a few degrees lower than your position is frequently impossible. While driving around in the Mako, you often encounter a giant burrowing worm called the Thresher Maw. Why this huge carnivorous worm is found on so many planets, and why these planets do not seem to have any other life-forms, is not really explained, unless the Thresher Maw eats everything, in which case, mystery solved. When the Thresher Maw appears, the best but most tormentingly repetitive tactic is to drive around in a circle, shooting it with the dipsomaniacally inaccurate Mako cannon. It is very easy to dislike Mass Effect during such moments—but then some wonderfully odd and redeeming thing will occur, such as my chance discovery of a strange, solitary, bisonic creature on the planet Ontarom in the Newton System. The game refers to this beast as a “shifty-looking cow,” but it seems harmless enough—until you put your back to the thing, whereupon your credits begin to drain. It is difficult to hold anything against a game with an alien cow pickpocket.
With the above flaws acknowledged, and only partially excused, it may be hard to understand why I spent eighty hours playing Mass Effect. One of the best explanations I have concerns the RPG convention of incidental encounter, which Mass Effect integrates into its narrative more seamlessly than any other RPG I have played. In the parts of the gameworld that are densely populated, Mass Effect becomes an aquarium of possibility. All around you people are talking and having conversations, and one of Mass Effect’s nicest touches—if one is lucky enough to have a decent home stereo system—is the way the game tracks these overheard conversations, which float from one speaker to another in startlingly realistic transit. “Overheard” conversations in novels and films invariably sit at the center of inwardly pointing arrows neon with authorial portent, but Mass Effect’s overheard conversations—even though they are cued to begin with some interest-snagging topic or crux sentence—really are overheard. RPGs that lack Mass Effect’s ear for dialogue are often written too broadly for any sense of potential gamer agency to take hold, in which cases interactivity becomes a synonym for “cudgel.” In Fallout 3, for instance, characters you walk past will sometimes turn and look at you, as though in expectation of a greeting. You can fulfill that expectation or keep walking. In an open-world game such as Fallout 3 the narrative must be open enough to accommodate a number of contextual possibilities (have you just been caught attempting to pick that character’s pocket? have you recently injured someone he cares about?), but turning around to have a few words typically results in two kinds of encounters, one frustratingly overdetermined (“Go do this”), the other vague and desultory (“Nice day today”), neither possessing much dramatic fluidity. Free from the demands of imposed, authorial order, gameworld interactions frequently go adrift in a strange dramatic vacuum. A situation that must accommodate many possibilities may not be equipped to satisfactorily depict any of them. While playing Mass Effect, this criticism rarely feels applicable.
My favorite incidental encounter in Mass Effect involves an alien race called the hanar, also known as “jellies,” which resemble the flying toasters of early-screensaver fame. The hanar believe in something called “the Enkindlers” and are persistent evangelists on their behalf. At one point a stroll along a Citadel promenade leads to your overhearing an argument between a hot-gospeling hanar and a turian police officer, who maintains, quite reasonably, that the hanar needs an evangelical permit if he wants to shout news of the Enkindlers. If you choose to intervene, your available responses range from kind (you buy the permit for the hanar), to the Hitchensian (you tell the jelly to scram and have a few rough words with the turian at his expense), to the observant (you argue with the turian in favor of the hanar’s faith). This is one of several Mass Effect interludes that allow you to give voice to Shepard’s religious beliefs, which can run the gamut. I found it difficult to have my Shepard say anything even remotely pro-religion; I took the Hitchensian position every time, despite the fact that during my various Mass Effect play-throughs I have experimented with just about every possibility allowable. I did not blink in the moment I allowed Shepard to procure drugs for an addict or backstab a grieving husband, yet I could not bring myself to buy the hanar a permit or make for it an ecumenical plea. Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line’s edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice.
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A late Mass Effect mission involves an assault on an enemy stronghold. While you are discussing your strategy, an unexpected revelation of what is inside the stronghold causes one of your squad mates to object to the mission’s objective, which could place the survival of his race in peril. Your attempt to reason with him along “the good of the many” lines causes him to march off and sulk on the strand of a nearby lake. When you walk over to talk some sense into your squad mate, the conversation quickly escalates and, suddenly, you find yourself in a Mexican standoff. The first time I played Mass Effect, I had grown immensely fond of the aggrieved character, and each time a new conversation option appeared I felt a noose of real dramatic concern tighten. Even though all I was doing was selecting lines of dialogue, the experience of doing so became as gripping as a full regimental assault by geth.
Because I had not completed an earlier mission that would have allowed me a way out of this confrontation (a mission I was then unaware of), and because I had not invested my skill points in the areas of persuasion needed to convince the squad member to relent, the encounter ended with my squad mate dead at my feet and my mouth dropped open. I reloaded my last saved game and tried again. Once more, my friend and teammate took a bullet for his trouble. In my bewilderment I pressed on, and when the menu for squad selection came up, the slot for the dead character was now a darkened silhouette. It seemed as stark and inarguably final as a tombstone.
Later in the same mission, I was confronted with the loss of another squad member. This time there was no way out: Two of my teammates were trapped, and only one could be saved. I had been relying on the firepower and battle prowess of one of the trapped teammates throughout the game, and the other was someone who had taken up with me two of three points of a growingly isosceles love triangle. Complicating matters was the fact that the battle-hardened teammate had recently done something unforgivable and I wanted the romantic relationship with the other trapped character to be consummated. Thus the game took my own self-interest and effectively vivisected it. When decision time came, I literally put down my controller and stared at my television screen.
This is how games get inside of you. Murder mysteries in which you must hunt for clues. Revenge fantasies that force you to pull the trigger. Science-fiction sagas in which you orbit the planet, select your crew, and step off the landing vessel. And yes: love stories in which you have to choose. When games do this poorly, or even adequately, the sensation is that of a slightly caffeinated immediacy. You have agency, yes, but what of it? It is just a game. But when a game does this well, you lose track of your manipulation of it, and its manipulation of you, and instead feel inserted so deeply inside the game that your mind, and your feelings, become as seemingly crucial to its operation as its many millions of lines of code. It is the sensation that the game itself is as suddenly, unknowably alive as you are. As I sat there trying to figure out what to do, Mass Effect, despite its three-hundred-thousand-word script and beautiful graphics, was no longer a verbal or visual experience. It was a full-body experience. I felt a tremendous sense of preemptive loss and anxiety, and even called my girlfriend, described my dilemma, and asked her for her counsel. “You do know,” she said, “that you’re crazy, yes?” On the face of things, she was right. Here I was—a straight, thirty-four-year-old man—worrying over the consummation of my female avatar’s love affair. But she was also wrong. To say that any game that allows such surreally intense feelings of attachment and projection is divorced from questions of human identity, choice, perception, and empathy—what is, and always will be, the proper domain of art—is to miss the point not only of such a game but art itself.
I made my choice. The game, nodding inconclusively, went on.