Extra Lives (16 page)

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.

•

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.