Mass Effect 2 – Hyperspeed trolley problems

#videogames #SF

Warning: Contains Spoilers

At the conclusion of Mass Effect 1 we foiled the plan of the Reapers, sentient robot ships bent on eradicating interstellar civilisation, to teleport into the galactic capital and start their murderous rampage. Mass Effect 2 picks up the story shortly after, with our hero Commander Shepard relegated to patrolling the far reaches of space so that galactic politicians can more easily ignore your constant pleas to prepare for the delayed but not averted Reaper attack. No change here from the previous game where all politicians are inept and only the Space Marines™ can be relied upon to save the galaxy.

Though not even the Space Marines, as it turns out. In an unexpected turn of events, Mass Effect 2 kills off the player within the first five minutes, only for Commander Shepard to be resurrected two years later by our old friends Cerberus. Yes, the same human-supremacist, experimenting on live test subjects, rogue-black-ops-gone-terrorist Cerberus we encountered in Mass Effect 1. This setup presents excellent potential to challenge the player through the game’s morality mechanic, but predictably Mass Effect 2 is too timid to exploit it. You can agree with Cerberus’ ‘the end justifies the means’ philosophy or not, you can file your disagreement with their methods or not, the game will unfold as it unfolds. It is morality as aesthetics rather than ethics, and maybe there is a reflection here of a contemporary politics that is equally vacuous and free of stakes.

If the template for Mass Effect 1 was a spy thriller then Mass Effect 2 is a heist movie. There is the scene setting at the start and the big mission at the end. The intervening time is devoted to assembling and getting to know your crack infiltration team. This structure may work for a 2 hour movie but doesn’t manage to sustain narrative tension across a 20+ hour game. The sense of urgency simply dissipates when most time is spent solving your people’s petty personal problems. Nor does the story come to the rescue, given its sheer implausibility. Mass Effect 1’s ‘evil robots want to kill us all’ story was effective in its simplicity and had enough innovative elements to be engaging. By contrast, Mass Effect 2’s evil robots have decided that humanity is the apex species in the galaxy and as such deserves to be preserved through a Reaper built in its image. Despite their vast technological superiority though, Reaper biotech is more 1970’s comic book villain than Bene Tleilax and so they have to abduct thousands of humans to liquefy them to harvest their DNA.

This is taking the series’ anthropocentrism to a new level. Where in Mass Effect 1 humanity was still the new kid on the block, it is now presented as one of the dominant galactic players. This is despite humanity having at least a thousand years of catching up to do compared to the galactic community. This proposition is about as plausible as a small clan of lost Vikings arriving on the coast of North America today, fighting the US Navy to a standstill with their longships, and then managing to become a global superpower. It is not that I object in principle to making humans the centre of the universe, though stories that don’t do this like Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past or Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series tend to be more interesting. It is that Mass Effect only achieves it through the inexplicable complete technological, social, industrial and territorial stagnation of every single other species in its galaxy. Both story and worldbuilding are entirely reverse-engineered to somehow put the human player at the centre of the galaxy.

Gameplay wise there have been some updates. Gone are the hilariously uncontrollable APC and your sidehustle as an arms dealer, replaced by a tedious resource mining minigame and collectible weapons upgrades. You have even more romance options, making any dialogue with a potential romantic partner a conversational minefield where statements ranging from “Hello” to “I am sorry your parent died” can be interpreted as a declaration of undying love. Combat has seen a simplification of the space magic system and replacement of Mass Effect 1’s innovative heatsink mechanic with standard FPS magazine clips. Cover is now more important, but this has the comical side effect that every environment is littered with convenient chest height objects to hide behind. And of course, we still have the morality system.

Ah, the morality system. The main reason why despite the uncompelling plot and the unconvincing worldbuilding I still decided to write a post about this game. Because the odd thing about Mass Effect’s morality mechanic is that for something the game leans into so heavily, it ultimately matters so little.

Of course, one can argue that morality in games never matters, given they don’t have real life consequences. But it is definitely possible for a game to present moral choices in a way that makes the player think about them. In Mass Effect, your moral choices are linked to one of two tracks: ‘Paragon’ for altruicist/noble choices and ‘Renegade’ for selfish choices. Picking paragon or renegade dialogue options or quick-time events awards you with points in the chosen category, which in turn opens up more options further down the line. Regardless of your choices, Commander Shepard has to remain a hero, and so the Renegade path isn’t so much about being evil as preferring to use intimidation and coercion to resolve conflict, as well as having the Emotional Intelligence of a bolt gun.

Throughout the game, the player will encounter situations that can only be resolved with a sufficiently high paragon or renegade score, but because it doesn’t want to deprive you of content, either of the pathways will work provided you maximise it. That might seem like Centrism Is Not an Option, but in actuality the game firmly keeps you on its central narrative railroad regardless of your moral flavouring. You cannot, for example, decide to switch sides back to your Space Marine buddies and turn in your terrorist benefactors. Nor can you lean into your new human-supremacist allegiance and terminate any Space Marine standing in your way, because the game instead throws dozens of rent-a-goon mercenaries at you precisely to avoid creating this moral dilemma. The obvious moral quandary of Mass Effect 2’s setup is whether the player would actively murder a platoon of Space Marines if this helped fight the existential Reaper threat, but that is exactly where the game dare not go.

Instead, we can choose to be nice or obnoxious in conversation, or whether or not to adopt a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach in specific circumstances. An early mission exemplifies the inanity of this approach. You are offered the opportunity to taser a mechanic to prevent them from fixing an aircraft’s shielding, making a later fight easier. Doing this is a ‘renegade’ action. Yet less than five minutes later you will be slaughtering this mechanic’s entire mercenary company (aircraft included), and the game takes no moral view on that at all. The inference here is that subterfuge is somehow dishonourable, but setting up a killzone to snipe a platoon to death is fine because it is done in open combat. Or something. Killing enemies is intrinsic to a first-person shooter of course, but the consequence is that morality can only occur on the game’s margins and by disavowing what Commander Shepard actually does for 90% of the game.

To provide a counterpoint, I’d like to contrast Mass Effect 2 to three other games I have played that manage morality in a much more interesting way: Citizen Sleeper, Ixion and Frostpunk.

Citizen Sleeper and Ixion are both built on managing scarcity, of your own energy or your spacefaring society’s resources respectively. Both games force you to make choices on how to spend those resources. In Citizen Sleeper, I made more commitments than I could honour and landed a friend in prison because I had to prioritise my own survival. In Ixion, I abandoned dozens of colonists in stasis pods because I didn’t want commit the necessary resources and risk being vulnerable to disaster later on. What matters is those are real choices and trade-offs that you have to think about. I didn’t want to desert my friend or forsake those colonists, but it was a choice I made because there was something else that was more important. Nor is there a helpful colour-coding to tell you what moral flavour you’ve picked. There is simply you, the choice, and the consequences.

Frostpunk takes this logic to an extreme rarely seen in videogames. In Frostpunk you lead a small community through the frozen dystopia of a new ice age. Resources are scarce and disasters are frequent. The game offers you a policy tree with options to boost morale and increase resource production. But there is a catch. The whole tree is a slippery slope from ‘faith will bring us together’ to ‘I am your God King and we must kill the unbelievers’. Each step down this path is only marginally more ethically questionable than the last, and can always be justified on the grounds that it will improve your odds for survival. In one playthrough, I refused to put the children to work, only to see my entire city starve further down the line. So on the next playthrough, I did put the children to work. Frostpunk is a real ethical thought experiment masquerading as a game, asking the player how far they would go to ensure survival. To what extent will the ends justify the means?

Compared to these games, Mass Effect 2 offers the only most shallow of moral dilemmas: Choose the blue track to kill 1,000 people but be a nice person and feel some remorse. Or choose the red track to kill 1,000 people and revel in it. In my review of Mass Effect 1 I reflected on how it exemplified the lack of a political imaginary under late-stage capitalism. In turn, Mass Effect 2 feels like it exemplifies the contraction of politics into hegemonic centrist consensus. You can choose between the red team who will feel bad about implementing austerity, and the blue team who won’t, but what you can’t do is choose something else altogether.

In the end, you again foil the Reaper’s plan and terminate your employment with your fascist boss, either on good terms or bad. All we can do is hope that in the real world, we have some more options open to us.

Notes and suggestions