Mass Effect – Trapped in Thatcher's gravity well

#sf #games #fiction

Contains spoilers

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his now infamous The End of History and the Last Man, commonly understood to proclaim that with the victory of liberal market democracies, history had run its course and we could all kick back and relax in the knowledge that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. A lot of history has happened since then, and continues to happen. Yet our collective cultural imaginary remains singularly foreshortened, giving rise to the oft-cited observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we might say that Fukuyama’s book would have been better titled ‘The End of the Future’.

The hegemony of the present and the absence of a plausible alternative future is particularly noticeable in much science fiction. I’m with Ursuala K. le Guin in that good science fiction tells us something about the present, but sadly much of it simply is the present, with added spaceships. Mass Effect, originally released in 2007 but re-released as a remaster in 2021, is a prime example of the latter type of science fiction. I decided to replay it partly for nostalgia, and partly because I never played the third installment of the trilogy.

In Mass Effect you play as Commander Shepard*, the first human to become a ‘SPECTRE’: special operatives acting for the Galactic Council (think Iain M. Banks’ Special Circumstances, but far less cool). You get this promotion as the result of another SPECTRE having gone rogue and destroying a human settlement. The plot of the game is to hunt your rogue colleague down, but in doing so you discover that he is working at the behest of ‘Reapers’: intelligent machines from beyond the edge of the galaxy. For reasons known only to themselves, the Reapers occasionally cull sentient organic life. It is your job, and that of the merry band of allies you make along the way, to prevent this.

Mass Effect’s gameplay is very of its time. You build your company of heroes and level them up, although space marine regulations dictate you can only ever take two of them on a mission simultaneously. These missions are of the ‘go to place and shoot enemies / retrieve object / push button / have dialogue’ variety. The main story is a linear path, but there are lots of sidequests available. There is the obligatory romance option, which makes conversation with any NPC the game deems a potential love interest extremely awkward, and the obligatory morality system that requires you to guess the consequences of the the cryptic conversation options the game provides you with. Some elements of Mass Effect didn’t survive into future iterations. Nobody will miss the planetside missions where you drive a tank that controls as easily as a drunk ping-pong ball in a washing machine. The game also spams a bizarre amount of loot at you, so that by the end of the story, my Commander Shepard had managed to become a multimillionaire through a lucrative sideline as an arms dealer.

Even on replaying, the conceit of Mass Effect’s story still feels interesting. It takes the somewhat worn trope of the Ancients, but this time, the player discovers that what they assumed were the relics of a past civilization are actually an elaborate trap created to contain successive evolutions of organic life. And while the game’s ultimate baddies are synthetic lifeforms bent on exterminating all organic life, elsewhere the game takes a more nuanced approach to synethic/organic conflict. When introduced to a companion whose species (the Quarians) has been driven off their homeworld by a robot revolt, the player can point out that this might not have happened had the Quarians’ response to their robots asking if they had a soul not been to instantly try to genocide them all.

It is thus extra disappointing that Mass Effect doesn’t know what to do with this interesting premise and fails to escape the gravitational pull of reactionary neoliberalism at both the level of the story arc and of the worldbuilding.

Mass Effect’s problem at the story level is that it is constrained both by what the game is – a first-person shooter – and its need to put a human at the centre of the story. It therefore needs to contrive a situation where the existential threat is not adequately handled by any of the galactic community’s more established institutions, and where the solution to the problem is necessarily the use of force. Granted, it would otherwise make for a dull game, but this narrative cul-de-sac leads Mass Effect to construct its story out of the most banal and reactionary tropes: politicians are incompetent, security services too constrained, intelligence services backstabbing, and criminals rampant. The only honourable institution in this morass of incompetence and corruption is, of course, the military (specifically the Marines), which therefore can be trusted to always make the right calls and shoot the right people. In theory a player could play the ‘bad’ Shepard and subvert this narrative, but that wouldn’t change the institutional logic that the game is built on.

This outcome is perhaps not surprising given the world that the story is embedded in. The game is so focused on its cool spaceships, diverse planets and plethora of barely distinguishable armamaments, that it had no attention to spare to consider what multi-species galactic community might plausibly look like. The result is an utterly mundane world where any potentially interesting concepts fail to develop in the hostile environment of actually existing space neoliberalism. As the newcomer on the galactic stage, humanity is confronted by a range of, mostly conveniently humaniod, other species. The game tries to introduce variety by telling us that species X is violent and aggressive, species Y is short lived but very scientific, and species Z is long-lived and matriarchical. We are also told that many of these species have possessed faster-than-light capability for centuries and been in contact with one another for a similar length of time. And then, after lining up all this alien variety, we discover that the best the universe could come up with is an intergalactic market economy, complete with poverty, MegaCorps, corruption, unrepresentative democracy, and, for some reason, a lot of sleazy nightclubs. Neoliberalism clearly must be the ultimate governmental form, given that across centuries and lightyears, every single alien species landed on it. Is your species strongly communal? Doesn’t matter, you can just adopt a mercantile client race. Are you a long-lived unisexual matriarchical society? No worries, you can be excellent mercenaries and night-club dancers. All interstellar roads lead to the Washington Consensus.

Of course, there are reasons for this. To make a human hero even faintly plausible, the game needs to have arrested the technological development of every other species at the same level, and kept the world sufficiently intelligible for a 21st century human player to navigate. Still, would it really have broken the game to have a species of feudal jellyfish or fully automated luxury communist amphibians? To have something that isn’t just more of the world as we know it, but with spaceships?

But no, there is no future. There is just the endless present. With spaceships, talking robots and obligatory sexy blue space elves, but still, ultimately, functionally, the present. You can almost understand why the Reapers put an end to it every so often. What, after all, is there left for a culture that has neither history nor future, but extinction?

*Characters with a variant of the surname Shepherd seem oddly common in (science) fiction.

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