On 19 November 1998, videogaming changed forever when game developer Valve released Half-Life. 50+ ‘Game of the Year’ awards and inclusion in various ‘most influential games’ rankings attest to the fundamental shift Half-Life represents within the first-person-shooter (FPS) genre of videogames, taking it to a new level from the standard previously set by 1993’s Doom. In terms of immersion, storytelling and worldbuilding, there is a before and after Half-Life.
Valve followed its success with Half-Life 2 in 2004, the six year development time a first indicator of what would infamously become known as ‘Valve time’. Like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 represented another levelling up in the standards of FPS videogames through the introduction of realistic physics effects, advances in rendering of NPCs and the more extensive setting compared to its predecessor. Included with Half-Life 2 was an updated version of Half-Life, rendered on Valve’s new game engine. Without any real upgrades to graphics or gameplay, however, this was such a disappointment that some fans set out to completely rebuild Half-Life themselves. The product of this work is Black Mesa, a full remaster of the original game, completed after its very own 16 year long development journey. When the definitive version was finally published in 2020, the world of videogames had again moved on, and Half-Life 2 was hardly cutting edge anymore. Nonetheless, Black Mesa’s positive reception and the ability of a fan-based team to deliver a critically acclaimed remaster are a testament to the enduring legacy of Half-Life and the potential for a games industry not wholly captured by risk-averse triple-A studios.
Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar.
You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.
Some of my blogs share a theme or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:
#boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
#protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.
Finally, if you do want a chronological list of all published reviews, you can find it in the archive.
There are two common misconceptions about meritocracy. The first, that we live in one and that our position in society results from merit rather than luck, wealth or other structural factors. Second, that living in a meritocracy would be desirable in the first place. We have forgotten that ‘meritocracy’ entered the English vocabulary as a pejorative and something to avoid. Evaluating people on merit rather than connections or wealth is certainly desirable, but the corollary of granting power based on merit is the disenfranchisement of everyone considered insufficiently deserving.
The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s debut novel, skillfully takes aim at both misconceptions. It is a bold, creative and excellent satire of contemporary fixation on merit and productivity, true to Ursula K. le Guin’s dictum that the best science-fiction illuminates the present rather than prophesises the future. The title of the book is derived from an eponymous stratum in Lakshminarayan’s fictional society, which divides its citizen into an upper 20%, middle 70% and lower 10% based on their productivity. One’s placement on this curve within the corpocracy of BellCorp, a self-described ‘meritocratic technarchy’, determines one’s rights, privileges and access to consumer technology, creating a constant race to the top. Failure to perform results in demotion, expulsion from BellCorp’s Virtual City to the adjacent Analog slums, or a one-way trip to the vegetable farm. The Ten Percent Thief is not always subtle in drawing its parallels with the present, but that makes it no less effective.
Weaving the threads from its two predecessors together, Mass Effect 3 brings the trilogy to an an epic conclusion. As war erupts across the galaxy and sentient life fights for survival, the game brilliantly reflects the stakes in its narrative and pacing. Mass Effect 1 was a spy thriller and Mass Effect 2 a heist movie, but Mass Effect 3 is the disaster film. With the Reapers (sentient AI that exterminate all advanced organic life every 50,000 years or so) swarming across the galaxy and conquering Earth before the game even properly begins, Mass Effect 3 sets a frenetic pace from its opening salvos, and rarely gives you time to catch your breath. You escape Earth to be sent to Mars, then to the Citadel (the galactic capital) to ask for aid, only to immediately divert to the home planet of another species which is also under Reaper assault. The pace does let up somewhat as you get further into the game and the number of sidequests proliferates, but I was easily 10 hours in before it felt like I had any opportunity to choose what to do next, rather than running from one disaster to another. Combined with the significant and effective use of cutscenes, the dramatic pace and the cinematic feel of the game are seriously improved.
Much rests on the shoulders of Commander Shepard, and hence the player, as they are sent off to rally a reluctant galaxy to humanity’s aid. This is a marked departure from Mass Effect 1 and 2, where the player was the hero of their own story, but those stories were embedded in a greater galactic whole. Not so in Mass Effect 3. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that Commander Shephard is the fulcrum on which the entire war effort moves, and without whom no successful action can be taken. Heroes holding the fate of the known world in their hands is a story as old as Achilles, but where the known world is a galaxy of trillions engaged in a collective struggle for surival, positing that only one person can be its saviour plays dangerously with our willing suspension of disbelief. All games have to make the player feel important enough to entice them to continue playing, but Mass Effect 3 does so excessively, diminishing both the potential of its worldbuilding and the emotional pay-off we might feel on its completion.