If I don’t, maybe someone else will do it first.
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Or maybe I could wonder if “renegade” isn’t the default? How many times is the first thing I do drawing my gun when I walk in a room. They never reflect how we act in situations beyond talking to people. Paragon and Renegade are just ways you talk to people. When they’re not filled with mercenaries that’ll shoot you for walking through the door, they’re filled with prisoners or slavers. Every so often there will be some kind of base. So these planets are littered with valuable minerals, with hostile local creatures that need to be killed to progress. As a videogame, there must be mechanically, a purpose to be some where. Our mission of exploration is almost never one of recording or respect. Under these strange skies, there is quiet. It is in these moments that Mass Effect’s most difficult to reconcile parts come to head. While trying to save the galaxy, we can also explore it. Often, the laws of this universe make no immediate sense.Īs Shepard, our ship the Normandy has a secondary mission. Wash your hands of conflicts and let one race genocide another. Let someone get away so someone else can kill them later. The place where all decisions can be boiled down to “I can shoot you now” or “The law says I can shoot you now.” Compassion is examined by “Paragon” choices that are usually just embracing an idea of neoliberal lawfulness. One episode would go so far as to have a character say that compassionate ideologies had been all but eradicated. The callous need for superiority and domination. What was different was that it was a universe where humanity could not overcome it’s basest desires. Things weren’t different because there needed to be an “evil” universe, and the people there made decisions all their own. It’s been often parodied, but there’s something still compelling about it when it would still come up in later seasons. It’s where you go to find that another version of you has a goatee and sets other people on fire. Star Trek introduced the idea to pop culture of The Mirror Universe. If we’ve joined the stars in this galaxy, we have brought our problems into a civilization where everyone is still struggling from them. Is it more realistic than the optimistic science fiction of The Enterprise? Only a true cynic would say so.
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Slave labor and indentured servitude, mass colonization of indigenous worlds. Yet, on the whole level of the Galaxy, the struggles of the 21 st century persist. There’s both common friendship and romance between aliens and humans. There’s the perpetual filter of bloom, the pulsing bright neon. Mass Effect may take inspiration from Star Trek, and though it tries to wear hopefulness on its sleeve it is different in both politics and message.Īt first glance too, it’s easy to mistake what the game is saying. Whether the thread is centuries old progenitor races or rampant A.I. The rest of the plot isn’t worth getting into, because the pull is about whether or not Humanity can be the ones to save the galaxy. So our Shepard will be the one to show the rest of the galaxy that humanity is tougher, more terrifying and more important than everybody else. If someone doesn’t hate us they’re at least suspicious of is. We’re new to the realm of galaxy politics, and the universe hates us. Before the game even had me knowing the names of my crew, it was telling me Humanity First. What Mass Effect wants you to know about the universe before you even see most of it is known almost immediately. It is the bravado of American posturing and still before the depression of the Depression. To go back in now is to see the sci-fi politics of a world still holding onto the idea that someone else can come and change things.
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Mass Effect is best enjoyed, if at all, by having to reckon with when it was released. Bioware has announced there will be an HD re-release of the entire trilogy. I got to playing it the other week, though it looks like just a little early. To go to strange worlds and look upon their sky as if it was our own. A galaxy defined not by the vastness and emptiness, but the possibility of meeting other life. One of the versions of Space videogame developers try to give us (maybe not often enough) is the Star Trek version. The goal is always the same: We will give you capital S Space. From our earliest attempts, to latest monolith scams of empty promise and actor likenesses. We’ve been opining for a fully seamless universe to explore for decades now. The promises of space have long been a goal point for videogames.