Authors: Tom Bissell
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.