Mass Effect - Good Game or Great Game?

Burnt out from writing for class, I’m trying to get back into the swing of things before class starts again.

Many moons ago, I watched a friend play through KOTOR twice in one weekend. We sat there in silence as he played, it was nice to just zone out and watch a Star Wars story unfold in a much better way than had been done in a while. I loved that damn game. Even after watching him play through it, I played through it later. It was nice to see the d20 system that I had advocated for all those years ago make its way into a video game. It was meant more for that then pen and paper gaming. That is a different post though. This post is about Mass Effect.

I should state some things here. I loved Star Wars as a younger person. I read all the books, owned all the movies, owned bootlegs of the Christmas special, scripts, I was a closet Star Wars nerd. And here’s another thing, I liked the episode I, II, and III. I liked the concepts, I liked the hidden powers of the Dark Side, I liked how it developed. I hated how it was told. I am a Sociology student and I’ve been at this for almost 7 years now. Sociology looks for the stuff under what we see in our reality. We look at consequences that weren’t intended, meaning things that weren’t intended, we look at ambiance.

I haven’t really written about a specific game. I’ve been obsessed, lately, with making my way through the perception of the world given to us by modernization, modernization theory, and the enlightenment. It clouds our thinking in specific ways and perverts a lot of other things in not-so-specific ways. Part of that is why I ended up writing about Mass Effect. So, let’s go.

Mass Effect is the perfection of the system of gaming started in the KOTOR series. There, I said it. There’s a lot of people who say otherwise and they’re not really wrong from their perspective. But it is their perspective that makes it a bad game, not the game itself.

As I’m reading a book at the moment, that book’s messages will make it into this. This book, Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, is part of a path I have been taking in Social Theory. While this book’s quotes will be in this, it is the path that brought those quotes to have meaning. Where possible, I’ve tried to include the context that brought that realization to be. One thing that should be quoted before I begin is:

“Today more and more design problems are reaching insoluble levels of complexity. This is true not only of moon bases, factories, and radio receivers, whose complexity is internal, bt even of villages and teakettles. In spite of their superficial simplicity, even these problems have a background of needs and activities which is becoming too complex to grasp intuitively.” – Christopher Alexander Notes on the Synthesis of Form page 3

Dividing this into two sections: Game (Ludology) and Story (Narrative)

Game

As a game, Mass Effect managed to take the KOTOR system to new heights. There really isn’t much to say here. It’s been amazing to see the complexities and infinite glitches of the two KOTOR games fall by the wayside. I have yet to really find any game destroying glitches in this game aside from the Doctor on the Citadel buying items higher than most shops sell them back to you for and a scene with a Turian whereupon you can max out Renegade and Paragon for free.

The battle system is much easier to deal with. No matter how powerful I am, the game has so many enemies to throw at me that I can still be overpowered if I am not careful. There’s something to be said about a constant level of difficulty in a game. I’m sure than once I play through the entire game again, this will change. But my first play-through has been very even keeled on the difficulty map.

My only complaint has to be one aspect of the morality system. Morality in games is typically very shallow. Choose GOOD or Choose BAD. The fact that I can be a renegade with some folks while being a paragon of excellence and adherence to duty to others is something of a fresh breath to morality in games. I think that games need to look at this system. It would have been nice though; if characters that expected me to be a paragon would give me a second chance if I accidentally picked a renegade choice. Being punished with renegade points by accidentally picking a renegade option seems to be a bit unfair. I suppose this would be difficult to manage.

One thing about the game that strikes me is how much the system has improved. With how much gamers complain about the two KOTOR game systems and even this one, I am reminded of a constant battle going on between designers and users in the form of a “good fit”. One of my favorite quotes about the design of an object comes from Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, “A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly.”

Game systems are incredibly complex things. That this much “improvement” has been made is something of a miracle. Almost all of the complaints I’ve seen about the game system has been remedied. It is as if the designers of the system managed to capture the voice of their critics. The unfortunate thing, however, is that this gives them leave to complain about other things. With the Star Wars universe gone, Bioware was left to create their own world.

Story

Because video games have become more complex, a more complex variety of world is necessary for video games to exist in. Science Fiction finds its way into video games because it is unbelievable and part of the crowd that game designers are catering to. In this way, we look to the future and make assumptions about what will happen. Mass Effect is no different. We found an “advanced” item on mars and turned it on. It then gave us hundreds of years of technological progress in a short amount of time. Here is where modernization theory comes into play. Science Fiction has to follow, most times, the idea that societies progress in a predictable, universal path. Some societies are more advanced than others and therefore, some societies are better than others and it is this conflict that stands at the center of Science fiction (in general). Mass Effect epitomizes this.

Humanity found some thing, turned it on, and some time later started to expand into space. They’re new to the “United Nations” of planets and humanities thirst for expansion and power frightens the space “UN”. Here is another theme in Science Fiction, human spirit.

Humans fear that their ideas about development are correct. They fear that a more advanced civilization is out there and will end up coming here. There are two outcomes, typically, enslavement and death or enlightenment. There is a third theme in science fiction (self-destruct) but it’s not important here. Both of these outcomes then move onto human spirit. It’s either our defense mechanism for the oppressors we use to escape their grasp, or the thing that we use to eventually surpass our alien captors.

In Mass Effect, they chose enlightenment and we begin playing at the moment when our mighty human spirit is about to tip the scale in our favor as eventual rulers of the galaxy; or in this game’s case, head of the citadel council.

The Science Fiction impulses that this game uses are present in all Science Fiction. It is what makes science fiction, science fiction. The thing that separates it is in the details of the universe. Bioware had a difficult job in trying to create a world that was better than, or as rich as, Star Wars. While it would be unfair to judge them from how good it is compared to Star Wars, it is the judgment they would receive.

This game is not Star Wars. It does, however, have a galactic council and a myriad of races that make it up. This isn’t really anything new and to the Science Fiction fan, this game might seem a bit boring at first glance.

At the center of the galactic council is a spaceship so huge that it could be called a planet or a city. This ship was not designed by any of the races that use it. This is also common in science fiction. It was designed by a race that almost all technology of the races that do use it is based on. Sometime in the past, that race died. About halfway through the game, you find out that there have actually been a lot of other races that came before them.

This leaves to question where all of the technology started. It’s that detail that brings the universe of this game to be above Star Wars. The other parts of the game are mostly squad-based shooter using machine guns or shotguns with different types of bullets. The only time it really feels like a Science Fiction game is when you’re on your ship deciding where to go next, on board the citadel or on your rover on a strange planet with space suits on. The integration with current (present-day) technology is pretty much a constant in science fiction. The gun is the best weapon to fight with.

I’ve heard this game called a space opera and I don’t really believe it is. If this game is a space opera, then star trek is also a space opera and that, I can’t agree with. Star Wars was a Space Opera insomuch that it was about a boy who learned he was sometime more than he thought because of a wizard visiting his farm and telling him so. It was a fantasy in outer space. Mass Effect is a politically motivated, perils of modernization tale. There is a quote I found that I agree with about Space Opera, "what used to be science fiction is now space opera, and what used to be space opera is entirely forgotten."