For the Love of Anomie

Recently, I was asked to do a podcast with the Brainy Gamer himself, Michael Abbot. I started to say something but couldn't think of the right words to finish the thought. It has to do with innovation and trending in times of need. It's linked to the sociological concept of anomie (Merton's not Durkheim's).

In a nutshell, Anomie is: The gap between the culturally favored goals and an individual's access to the means to achieve those goals. In other words, the culturally favored goal here in America is money, success, to be on top. There are several things that happen here in the breakdown. Merton called these the five modes of adaptation.

While there is a lot of exposition to be done on these concepts, the crux of this is innovation. New and maybe 'not so legal' ways of making the money. Drug dealing, for example, is an innovative coping mechanism for achieving culturally favored goals while ignoring legitimate means.

I started talking about lower classes having to be innovative to achieve the culturally favored goals but I couldn't think of a way to describe the application of this idea to the game industry.

This is what I wanted to say:

"During difficult times, large companies are going to do exactly what they have been doing; more of the same with less personnel. In gaming industry terms, they will produce sequels and games similar to those that have been successful before. Gamers will enjoy these games because they have little else to find, little else to do BUT play those games given difficulty now with job layoffs and the depression that is going on now. However, during this time, those who have A). Time because they might not be working in a corporate environment as much and B). a want to create a 'new and innovative' game will try and do so. This is why, as we have seen recently, small game studios or even just individuals with enough time and expertise, produce such amazing indie titles lately.

A depression equals unbridled room for innovators to explore due to normal business being stagnant. Typically, these innovations, once conditions improve, will become the norm. Those innovations might even provide a means through which the depression ends."

There, I feel better.

Building Blocks: Methodology, Sociological Background, Sample Methods

There is something to be said about trends. Being in a college atmosphere, you see it a lot. The same kids discovering the same knowledge taking the same roles, looking down on the same people and listening to the same (culturally the same) music. It's trending, it's predictable. However, it is these trends that allow us to study the social in a way that is both defining and meaningful. How else would we know that hipsters like stuff like deerhoof or bjork or that the Axe marketing campaign would actually work on its intended audience? How would we know who to target for Volkswagon or Hummer advertising? How would Glen Beck be able to find his intended audience and get it riled up by crying all the time? How would Obama have been able to accomplish all he has without trends, without predictiblity?

Ok, it's a double edged sword. But it is useful.

This entry is more about building blocks. The last entry I made had to do with the basics of feminist theory. In short, gender and sex, the former learned the later ascribed, is also the product of imitation. We grow as people and, as we grow, we imitate the things we see around us. This imitation keeps gender rules alive and that imitation is the major source of male power. It's time to move on from there. This study is to look into video games and the representation of gender. I need to define some terms here.

Video Game: I need to have a definition for video game that comes from the way my discipline understands them. This definition comes from the Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology:

Video games are played via a dedicated console connected to a television (e.g., Sony's Play Station) and computer games are played on a personal computer, or PC. These two forms of digital play comprise a lucrative sector of the global entertainment complex, an immersive, simulation-based interactive medium, a high-profile domain of youth-oriented popular culture, and a preferred leisure activity for millions of media consumers. Emerging early in the new millennium, game studies is the field of multidisciplinary scholarship devoted to the analysis of video and computer games.The origins of digital play lie in the US military–university complex. Cold War-era technologies that were intended to combat the “socialist threat” and to boost industrial productivity were turned upside down – from work to play – when, in 1962, student hackers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar?, one of the first computer games. This breakthrough was harnessed in the 1970s by Atari, the US corporation that led the transformation of digital play into a cultural industry. A harbinger of the “information society,” the spread of video arcades and the launch of the first home-based consoles in the 1980s saw interactive entertainment suffuse cultural space, commodify “free time,” and prepare many young people for the digital age.

This seems reasonable. It goes a little against the definition and history that the ULTIMATE VIDEO GAME ENCYCLOPEDIA gives, but this is to be expected. More extrapolation, more rigor.

Social Communication: This is simple enough, communication meant to serve a general purpose. This could be, for this definition, magazine ads, television ads, spam email, banner ads, television shows, movies, photographs, video games and more. Basically, things that deliniate a specific type (type being a standard in society (teacher, wife, husband, nerd, hipster).

Manifest Function / Latent Function:

Manifest Function: intended consequence of an action. An example of this is the posting of speed limits.

Latent Function: An unintended, often unrecognized, consequence of an action. An example of this is the sudden braking of cars at speed traps causing more money to be spent on brake work over time.

Manifest functions are all around us. For example, society has a need for punishment of deviant behavior. So, it creates these punishments through a system of law. The creation and enforcement of these laws are manifest functions of this social action. An unintended consequence, a latent function of this new system of laws is the creation of deviance through marking behavior that was previously unmentioned as deviant. The sudden appearance of deviant individuals where there was none before is an unplanned consequence.

These two concepts are part of the central function of sociology. Whereas we would get called finger pointers and rable rousers, Sociology is supposed to point out the unintended consequences of social actions by studying that action. It is here that uneven power structures, class structure building and differences appear.

Content Analysis:

"In content analysis, researchers examine artifacts of social communication. Typically, these are written documents or transcriptions of recorded verbal communications. Broadly defined, however, content analysis is 'any technique for making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying special characteristics of messages.' From this perspective, photographs, video tape, or any items that can be made into text are amenable to content analysis...objective analysis of messages conveyed in the data being analyzed is accomplished by means of explicit rules called criteria of selection, which must be formally established before the actual analysis of data.

The criteria of selection used in any given content analysis must be sufficiently exhaustive to account for each variation of message content and must be rigidly and consistently applied so that other researchers or readers, looking at the same messages would obtain the same or comparable results.

Qualitative Research Methods For the Social Sciences (pages 267-8)

In other words, you set up a survey that you basically take all of your social communications through, code it all, look at the data, and interpret it. It is a lot more sophisticated than that! but this is the gist of content analysis.

Over the next few weeks, i'll be developing this further. I probably shouldn't post every part of every tool that I develop but I probably will. It is more useful to me to post stuff and make sense of it for a given audience of people who probably don't know how social science works than it is not to.

My subject matter again is video games and the representation of the female. As I go through and think about categories and selection criteria for the games themselves, I need to find a sample to pull from. I only have 16 weeks to complete this analysis so I am going to take a smaller group than I would have liked. I believe I am going to take the top 10 selling games on the xbox 360.

I will select that top 10 with these criteria:

No Sports Games

Only 1 of a particular genre

No music based games (rockband or guitar hero are out)

This leaves me with a list that sort of looks like this:

1. Halo 3
2. Call of Duty 4
3. GTA 4
4. Gears of War 1
5. Assassins Creed
6. Fable II
7. Oblivion
8. Fallout 3
9. Left 4 Dead
10. Bioshock

I chose the 360 simply because I want to target the age category that the nielson data says are playing the 360 12-17 year olds. Further, Xbox 360 users are the fastest growing group of video game users behind the Playstation 2. They also replace most time behind a television with game playing rather than television watching. It also avoids PC Card games in which the female population is often given as the primary focus of this category. I think that this will allow for a more solid beginning for further projects in this light.

I need to go buy those games. Ugh, Oblivion and Fallout 3 are going to be the most time needy. I believe I am going to put around 20 hours into each of these games. 20 * 10 = 200 hours spread out of 14 weeks with 2 weeks to finish everything up.

Seems fun.

Building Blocks: Feminist Theory (sans video games)

This will be part of a series. I want each post to be a layer, a coherent building block of a bigger analysis. Feel free to call me on my shit as i'm sure I will be making some mistakes as I travel further into theoryland.

A while back I decided to do a paper on Gender and video games. I’d like to do a content analysis of the most selling games on the American console, the Xbox 360. I am limiting myself to this for several reasons. First, I wanted to minimize the cross-cultural influence. Video games are cultural artifacts. They are created using the subconscious assumptions of fun and play and are imbued with fictional aspects that, while the inspiration might be cross-culture, are created and forced into native form. Second, with limited time, I needed to focus on a very specific group of games. A criticism of my work, and you can see it in this blog, is that I tend to focus, not on the thing I am talking about, but on the things causing the thing I’m talking about. For instance, I’ve written more about the trappings of the enlightenment and its current use as a trap of perception in the “post-modern” times than I have about video games as a whole. And this is a games blog (or is supposed to be).

In any case, gender and video games, xbox 360, top 25 best selling games that aren’t sports or racing or board games. Why leave those three out? Well, these three (while not so much board games anymore) are quite studied as it is. So, no need to talk about that. While it literally hurts me to do such a sad thing, I feel as though I must.

So for the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about gender and video games. I’ve been reading about it for weeks now. It’s time to do some exploration of it. I figured I would start with a portion of a social theory exam that I had as a graduate student. I love social theory as much as I love video games, so this is fun for me. It may be boring as fuck for you, but stick around and I’ll try to be entertaining as these things can be!


This is a classic question. It’s difficult for males to answer and this question actually took twice as long as the rest of the test did. I won’t get into first wave or second wave as it doesn’t really matter in the long run. What does matter, is the difference between everyone that isn’t Judith Butler. Butler is a post-modernist thinker. For Sociology, this is (or can be) something of a bad word. However, in this case, she raises a lot of interesting (albeit contrary opinions).

I should explain the terms of the question. Keep in mind these are definitions as my discipline has defined them for this question. These definitions are subject to change and I’ve tried to simplify them:

Epistemology: For the purposes of social theory and simplicity, think of this as a way of knowing things. For instance, growing up where you did, in the country you did, shaped your perceptions. Your parents imbibed you with how they saw things, you saw an infinite amount of things and those things shape what and how you understand things.

Ontology: In the sense that epistemology is a way of knowing, ontology in this sense is a means through which we start. Here, ontology means metaphysics or simply, knowledge used before primary assumptions. Think of this as the building blocks of an impulse where epistemology is the end result of these building blocks.

Pragmatist: simplest or most practical answer or solution.

The questions was:
Using the works of Judith Butler, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, and other readings, make the case that feminism is an epistemology. Would Collins say feminism is an epistemology or epistemologies? Explain. Is Collins a Pragmatist? Explain.

Using the notes of Karl Marx, Frederich Engels wrote The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In this book, Engels makes the case that women are not subjugated by men because of their biology, rather, women are subjugated by men due to men having been the mobile tool makers. When the first farms were established, the men used those strengths to gain the upper hand and through that, created a labor force that was controlled by them; women (Ritzer 2008: 472-4). Through this early victory, men were able to keep women dominated in all aspects of life. Because of this, almost all thought processes, belief systems, and cultural ideals come from men, in favor of men. However, over the past 200 years the woman has slowly gaining power and while inequality is far off, it is closer now than it has ever been. Feminism is an epistemology in that being a woman represents a different way of knowing the world than a man does. If it was not an epistemology, women and men would see the world in an almost identical fashion. Using this assumption, the works of feminists such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins demonstrate this epistemology; or lack thereof.

Dorothy Smith wrote of the anomical gap between the way a female lives and the knowledge of how their male counter-part lives. Smith goes further using her term, “relations of ruling” (Ritzer 2008: 477). In this term Smith implies that there is a system of tendencies that have created the patriarch in which we live. Further, there are various unseen ways that maintain it. These ways and means women function throughout the day to day activities of normal life. Through media like magazines, television ads, and other visual displays, the patriarchy communicates to all who woman is. Through those same invasive mannerisms, men control women by patterning advertisements and all aspects of life by creating a separate way in which women are expected to do things. To Smith, studying these things will create a body of knowledge that will identify those aspects of the feminine identity, and separate them from the epistemology of women. Patricia Hill Collins added a few things to this idea.

Patricia Hill Collins wrote of the “matrix of domination” (Ritzer 2008: 478-480). In this view, she adds to the body of feminist theory by stating that not all females share the same epistemology. The black woman is oppressed much the same as women everywhere are. Unlike white women, however, Black, minority women, are further oppressed by not only gender, but class, race, and sexual identity. To Collins, “Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination” (Collins 1990: 554). This multitude of ways in which women are oppressed changes how various groups of women understand the world. While a white woman might see a glass ceiling with her male counterparts, a black woman would be oppressed further because of her race; the later may never even know there is a ceiling. Collins, in Marxist fashion, moves past theory and seeks to empower those whom are oppressed. She seeks to improve the lives of women by finding practical knowledge that will benefit all women. In this way, Collins is a Pragmatist.

Judith Butler is an opponent of the general idea of the “woman” as feminism has defined it (Ritzer 2008: 484). In fact, she would say that feminism is a way of knowing but not in the way that feminism has defined it. In true post-modernist fashion, Butler states that the focus of Sociology is incorrect, that all theories are wrong. It is the idea that of a female gender that is created outside of the physical body that we are born with that should be in question. Butler questions the amount of agency that is present in the construction of gender. In order for the heterosexual world that we live in to exist, there needs to be two sexes. Men and women are formed not by socially constructed gender roles, they simply, according to butler, imitate the world around them. Because men have always been men and women have always been women, the likelihood that a change will come about is not an individual choice, but a cultural one. Butler says, “…we never know our sex outside of its expression as gender. Lived or experienced ‘sex’ is already gendered” (Butler 1986: 39). It is up to culture to change the idea of gender will change with it.

Ritzer, George. 2008. Socioogical Theory: 7th Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Mass Effect, or how I came to appreciate the difference between a male and female's orgasm

So, I finished Mass Effect.

This post will have lots of spoilers. I don’t normally warn but this game is new enough to actually matter if I spoil anything. You have been warned!

I went through the game on normal difficulty, got to level 43, maxxed out paragon, had very little renegade, and everyone but Kaidan lived. It’s time to start over on new game plus and play through on difficult or insane and max out to level 60.

I had only a few problems with the game. But this is a function of something that seems to happen in almost all science fiction. It ends with a sloppy orgasm as performed by a first time lover. I wish I was clever.

Orgasm? Yes, orgasm. Metaphor with me.

Writers often do this in different ways. Game makers are starting to catch up to this sort of thing. It’s fascinating to watch. Movies aren’t really prone to this sort of thing, but movies based on books often have to approach it. I’m sure there is a real term for it but I’m going to go with orgasms. There are two kinds, with a third looking far off in the distance. Male Orgasm, Female Orgasm, and Tantric Love. Extremes will be taken.

The fiction with a male orgasm you could also call two grunts and a squirt. Lewd, eh?

It’s these games that spend a lot of time fumbling about with the zipper and the bra. They don’t seem to really get what’s going on but they know it’ll be great once it starts. You could also call this drunk sex. Your character fumbles around, gets the clothes off, gets on top, gives two grunts and is done. Mass Effect did this a bit. However, like it’s name, it took a hell of a long time to get the clothes off. Once they were off, however, it was over quick.

For instance, my drunken antics confused the poor blue girl in this game. Despite never actually speaking with Ashley after rescuing her in the first mission, the blue girl thought I was in love with her. Further, like a drunken person, I could talk anyone out of some of the most insane things. Wrex finds a cure for his whole race’s genetic disease and I talk him down by giving him a pat on the back and tell him it’s cool bro.

Sweet, he says. And the biggest bad ass lizard guy in the world puts his gun away and is cool with it. Then, back to the Blue girl (liara?), I ask her some personal questions like some suave badass and up until that point, I had never spoken to her. I was fumbling around like an idiot looking for the spot where Liara could unhook her one-piece archaeologist suit. But she tells me that, “All the promiscuous blue lady legends aren’t true. But I’ll sleep with you right now and it’s like the universe coming to exist inside your body.”

“Well cool, sure, let’s do it.” I say. I mean, why not. Apparently she had been waiting and thinking about this for ages after my two sentences to her. And then you get to the denouement. Like a retard, you drive your moon buggy into a warp drive and blast off across the universe to take out a scorpion pied piper and his crazy band of rats. After blasting at the crazy band of rats with my shotgun for what seems like an eternity, all my frat guy brothers crowd in to cheer me on. “YEAH! DO IT!” I hear them call.

And I let it out, all my precious two grunts building up in the excitement of a 3 second high only to begin the game 10 minutes later to max out the character.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anything is wrong with that, but maybe it’s time to find some way to bring deeper satisfaction to the gameroom.

The female orgasm is long, deep, and comes along in waves. It is a satisfaction that men can only dream of. To date, I don’t know that any game has really managed to create this sensation. If they have, I have yet to play them. Sure, there are games that leave you feeling satisfied, but is it a satisfaction that is lasting? Or, is it just the satisfaction brought about by a male orgasm? That is a difficult call.

And then there’s tantric sex. I think this kind of sex is reserved for the MMO. It just keeps going and while it may take quite a while to build up to orgasm, once you do, it’ll feel great…but not orgasm great, just great enough to keep the tantic motions going. Eventually you’ll get bored and, as was pointed out to me on Twitter, you’ll ask Sting to just get off and go home. But during the build up to that, you’ll have some truly wonderful feelings.

To complete this metaphor, let’s think about types of games.

As gamers seem to be a promiscuous lot in the game room, there are several non-unique types that show up. The action gamers are the frat dudes of the gameroom. Quick, surrounded by thousands of others like them, played in a crowd, these games aren’t about the build up to orgasm so much as they are about how many orgasms you can have from as many partners as possible. The RPG flirts with tantric sex but in the end, they’re just nerdy little shut-ins who learned that foreplay is nice because they probably won’t last too long once the real action starts. The hipster games like Braid or Blueberry Garden are our experimental phase. What happens if I have an orgasm in a different place than usual? I might have asked myself. It’s fun for a while but you begin to miss the pristine shine of the college age frat boys that are action games. The puzzle game is just a drawn out weekend one-night stand. You might achieve something, but in the long run all you really did is get to know someone well enough to make it to three grunts and a squirt.

Lewd, but useful. I doubt I’d ever actually talk about games this way but if I did, I think maybe more people would get it.

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."