Riding in Lifts with Girls
I’ve been posting mostly about Mass Effect lately. Which is odd, because for the past year I’ve just picked away at the thing, despondently moving the pieces around my plate with a fork, playing for little twenty minutes chunks every couple of weeks and never mustering any strong reaction other than horror at the aesthetic paucity of the future it presents.
But this past week I’ve been so fixated on it that the only time I’ve thought about anything else has been when I’ve felt my family tapping on my shoulder and reminding me that I’d said I’d cook tonight. What’s changed here?
One thing is that I’ve decided the baddies are, in fact, baddies after all. When I read/watch a lot of “MACHINES WILL REPLACE ORGANIC LIFE!!!” sci-fi stories I’m left thinking, “Oh, okay. Good.” Because the machines these stories present often seem to have conciousness, culture and sexuality. If we get to preserve that holy trinity, in a more durable form going forward, then all the universe has really lost is pooing. “MACHINES WILL REPLACE ORGANIC LIFE!!!” Fine by me. How do we facilitate a smooth transfer and is one of them Lucy Lawless?
But the Reapers…fuck those guys. They aren’t any sort of forward motion, they’re just a level cap on progess. They wait until civilisation’s getting close to Getting Somewhere (which from their perspective I suspect means building a machine race better than them), kill everyone off and then go back to sleep. Useless bastards. Once this backstory was on the table, I was much happier trying to kill one.
The other thing that finally drew me into the game, was finding my Shepard’s character. By which I mean projecting a mountain of headcanon onto everything she said and did. I think the game takes up 15 GB on my hard drive, and about double that in the bit of my brain where I’m storing “personality traits I have ascribed to this woman.” Mostly sitcom flaws and frustrations as I have trouble relating to military characters outside of Dad’s Army and Bilko.
I know I’ve written about this sort of thing before, but this really is one of those games where all the important bits aren’t happening inside the program. You’re collaborating with the script writers to decide what she says, at the mercy of the actress as to how she says it, but in complete creative control of why she said it and what she meant. If you’re doing it right the game is oblivious to your imaginative experience.
So, yeah, that’s a thing that drew me in. Moving from “What would be fun or advantageous to do here?” to “I completely know what my character would do here, and therefore that is what I must do.”
The only threat to this immersion was the bloody Paragon/Renegade system, the most absurd morality index since Baldur’s Gate had the evil party members threatening to leave if the group was too popular and demanding that we try and be more hated. So I just completely fingers-in-my-ears ignored this aspect of the game. Except where it was too WTF not to give it some incredulous attention - “I just stopped that wanker from stuffing his neuroses up his sister-in-law’s uterus, and you’re giving me Renegade points for this? Because I raised my voice?”
Anyway, that’s why Mass Effect finally clicked with me. Now a few last thoughts on the matter before I try and shut up about it for a bit and write about something sensible like Avengers Versus X-Men…
I love that everyone in the game wants a slave race. Not slaves, oh no no no, that won’t do at all. It has to be a slave race. That Oscar Wilde quote could have been printed on the box. You know the one.
The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
Mass Effect’s world is built on this logic, but complicated by everyone having seen from the Quarian example where this goes. Galactic Civilisation’s put itself in a position where it either needs mechanical slaves, or it needs to rip everything up and start again. Because AI slaves are the necessary next step in the progression of the shitty society they’ve built, but they can’t have them ‘cos they know it all goes Battlestar Galactica if they do.
So everyone’s casting around desperately for an alternative… “Maybe the Rachni can be our slave race!”… “Maybe Plant Zombies can be our slave race!”… “How about balloon animals?”… there’s a pleasing socio-economic consistency behind all the Mad Science going on.
Though of course the “ugly, horrible, uninteresting work” that needs doing is all Fighting Shooty Space Battles. Because that’s all that gets done in this universe.
I’ve a recurring nightmare that I live in the Pokemon world and am the one person with no interest in Pokemon. Forelorn and isolated I wander from town to town, talking to everyone I meet, hoping each time this new individual will want to talk about something other than Pokemon, or at least be capable of forming a sentence that doesn’t include the word ‘Pokemon.’ But I know it’ll never happen. The lives of everyone in that world revolve around that one concern.
Mass Effect’s the same, but because its ostensibly more ‘realistic’ than Pokemon it’s a lot funnier. There’s a perfect correspondence between the concerns of the people who live in the game’s universe and the themes and mechanics of the game. This is a galaxy where all retail is either of weapons, weapon modifications or armour to facilitate Shooty Space Battles or of information to determine the course of Shooty Space Battles. There’re only two viable discourses within which anyone communicates or thinks; Militarism and Capitalism, and the capitalism operates entirely as an adjunct to the militarism. All the powerful corporations we hear about aren’t up to anything except building weaponry or slave races for Shooty Space Battles. It’s Eisenhower’s Farewell Address: The Video Game.
My favourite example of how focused Mass Effect characters are on being Mass Effect characters is that barman in the ambassador’s lounge. He offers you a drink then, if you ask what he’s selling, says, “Information, mostly.”
The dialogue wheel denies you the chance to respond with, “REALLY? NOT, SAY, DRINKS?”
