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.

Half-Life was my formative FPS. I have replayed it so many times that I can recall entire sections of it better than real places where I have lived, and I cannot help run its opening sequence in my head whenever I’m on any form of light rail. When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004 the payoff felt worth the long wait, and Valve displayed their expected panache for storytelling and game design, introducing physics in ways that had never been seen before, laying the groundwork for their next hit, 2007’s Portal. Next, however, was an abortive foray into ‘episodic’ games with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, each with development times that rivalled those of full, standalone games. The long awaited Episode 3 never materialised, nor did Half-Life 3, and from here Valve’s creative output effectively ceased. My suspicion that Valve were holding out for another step-change in gaming technology was confirmed when Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020 as a virtual reality (VR) exclusive. Alyx did not advance the Half-Life story however, and nothing has emerged from Valve since, leaving the Half-Life universe the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones.

The most memorable commute in videogames. Video is from the original Half Life.

It was therefore exciting to see the development of the Half-Life remaster running in parallel with Valve’s metamorphosis from a vanguard game developer to toll collector on Steam, the largest PC game distribution platform. As the community effort consolidated into the Crowbar Collective and was eventually endorsed by Valve, I played several of the incomplete and demo releases, until the definitive version of Black Mesa finally landed in 2020. Now a recent replay presented an opportunity to assess how well a six year old remaster of a 28 year old game stands up against the games of today.

Welcome to the Black Mesa Research Facility. Have a safe and productive day

The strongest quality of Black Mesa remains the organic storytelling and worldbuilding it inherits from Half-Life. From the moment we enter the Black Mesa Research Facility using the iconic monorail train from Level 3 Dormitories to Sector C Test Labs, we know that there is a whole intricate world out there beyond the player's direct experience, and this approach is sustained throughout the game. It is one of the areas where Black Mesa outdoes its source material, because Crowbar Collective was able to significantly expand and enhance the last four chapters set in the alien ‘Xen’ world, using materials Valve omitted from Half-Life to meet its release schedule, as well as retconned references to Half-Life 2, strengthening the connection between the two games. Black Mesa tells this story without cut scenes, dialogue, quick-time events or an extensive encyclopedia of lore. Instead, we build our understanding of this world from environmental clues, snippets of overheard conversation and brief interactions with NPCs.

This lack of interruptions means that Black Mesa maintains excellent pacing. There are slower and more frantic sections, but the core gameplay is hardly ever interrupted by cut scenes or other non-playable events. Chapters build logically on one another, with a gradual and sensible escalation in terms of weaponry and enemies. Despite eventually carrying the armaments of a small platoon and wearing high-impact reactive armour, Black Mesa mercilessly punishes any attempts to Rambo through combat, forcing the player to think and strategize while on the move. As ‘cover’ was not a mechanic supported by the Source engine there is no sequence of conveniently placed chest-height walls to hunker behind, and instead the most taxing combat sequences require mobility and careful use of the environment to overcome.

The logical, linear structure makes Black Mesa delightfully simple (if not necessarily easy), but can feel contrived and railroading when contrasted with contemporary games. Funnelling the player down a single path means that the Black Mesa Research Facility has an unusual number of locked doors and explosive-proof windows, which can occasionally break suspension of disbelief or cause frustration, in particular when the ‘correct’ path is not immediately clear and the game refuses to offer multiple routes to the same objective in a way that we have come to expect from more modern games.

That annoyance of being railroaded is felt more strongly when confronted with various platform or physics puzzles that now feel anachronistic and interfere with flow. While Black Mesa vastly improved on the jumping challenges in the ‘Xen’ chapter, we still have an entire chapter of platforming through a waste processing plant that was clearly designed before Health & Safety was invented and which is both tedious and unconvincing, especially when contrasted with the rest of the in-game environment.

Graphics are where Black Mesa is weakest, which is no surprise for a game using a game engine, textures and assets from over two decades ago, some updates by Valve in the intervening years notwithstanding. Half-Life 2’s NPCs were a massive step up in 2004, but two decades on appear mildly wooden and repetitive, with the the player facing the same four soldiers over and over again. As someone not too invested in the latest graphics I would say the environments hold up okay as a whole, as long as you don’t look too closely at any of the textures.

Somewhat outdated graphics notwithstanding, the Xen chapters are an enormous improvement over the original, infusing the last third of the game with a sense of wonder that it did not previously possess.

The right man in the wrong place

Despite its age, there remains something refreshing about Black Mesa, in particular when compared to more expansive modern games. It is proof of the adage that less can indeed be more. This is a game that still features the mute protagonist, without conversation trees, side quests, morality points, or weapon upgrades. Repeatedly I found myself comparing Black Mesa to the last shooter I played: the Mass Effect remaster, and doing so favourably.

Despite being set in a single facility, Black Mesa feels grander than the world of Mass Effect, even though the the latter is spread over much of the galaxy. It achieves this not through the multiplicity of locations or the size of the game, as 1998 technology seriously limited both. It convinces you because throughout the game, the Black Mesa Research Facility implies that at any time, you are only seeing part of a greater whole. Every area is littered with signs pointing to other locations, processes or activities that you never experience. All around you NPCs are taking their own actions: marines fighting aliens, security personnel trying to survive, scientists desperately seeking a solution while being massacred by aliens and the military alike. Mass Effect, by contrast, always feels small. Even in the third game, its locations feel oddly circumscribed, and plastering some flying cars on the skybox does not fix that. This is not true for all parts of the game, but for a surprising amount of it, its locations are so obviously designed around gameplay that they don’t really convince as ‘real’ locations, let alone as parts of a greater universe.

This sense that you are not the centre of the universe extends to the player as well. Playing as Gordon Freeman in Black Mesa, you start as a recent PhD graduate at the bottom of the academic pecking order, paying off your student loans by shoving mysterious samples into the ‘anti-mass spectrometer’. When this accidentally makes you instrumental to creating the dimensional rift that starts the alien invasion of the research facility, the key reason it is you and not anyone else who has to go to the surface for help is because you happen to wear that convenient armour. For the first half of the game you are directed by other scientists and events, and it is only as the game progresses and the military starts hunting you specifically that the game acknowledges that you are somehow special. Contrast this to Mass Effect, where from the opening sequence it is established that Commander Shepard is a very special boy/girl. Mass Effect opens with your superiors at the highest levels of government discussing why you, and only you, are uniquely qualified for consideration for the galaxy’s most prestigious special forces outfit. Black Mesa opens with you running late on your commute to work. It is unavoidable for an FPS to make the hero(ine) the central character of the story, but Black Mesa tells you right up to the end that there were others like you who tried and failed, and that your ultimate victory was in no way predestined. In Mass Effect, everyone agrees (and tells you, ad nauseam) that you are the saviour of the galaxy. In Black Mesa, on winning the game you effectively get told you were just the statistically expected victor from among a larger pool of contenders.

Community action

At sixteen years of development, Crowbar Collective’s successful release of Black Mesa feels almost as unlikely as Gordon Freeman’s victory over Half-Life’s endboss. Gaming is now a mature enough industry to have its fair share of reboots and remasters, but in the main these are pushed by studios themselves, or whoever ended up with the relevant intellectual property. That is, when studios care enough to continue looking after their legacy. Recent years have seen controversial decisions by studios to discontinue games altogether, leaving players with unsupported and at times unplayable software. It has brought into focus the insidious nature of an industry that sells players ‘licenses’ to play, rather than ownership of games. While not the worst offender, Valve itself has come in for scrutiny over its lacklustre updates to its portfolio of legacy games, in particular given the dearth of new releases in recent years, as well as its facilitation of large studios extracting every last drop of value from games through Steam. Though unlike some of its competitors, Valve has at least shown itself willing to support an ecosystem of modifications and spin-offs, with Black Mesa probably the most elaborate example of this.

Black Mesa is a testament to both the enduring impact of Half-Life and the perseverance of its community of fans. With its somewhat outdated graphics and gameplay it may not hold much appeal to a new generation of gamers who did not experience the original and can choose from a plethora of games inconceivable in 1998. That would be a shame however, because Black Mesa's storytelling remains outstanding, and the game still offers a balanced, well-paced challenge to players. As an entry point for one of gaming's most iconic series it is superior to the original. The Black Mesa Research Facility, while cutting edge in 1998, may now look a bit dated, but it is still worth a visit.

Notes & Suggestions

• In response to studio decisions to discontinue games that still had a vibrant (albeit often small) gaming community, gamers have banded together in the Stop Killing Games initiative. One of the asks of the campaign is for studios to adopt legacy arrangements for games, rather than simply shutting them down. Good Old Games, a competitor platform to Steam, also runs an extensive library of older games as well as a ‘games preservation programme’.
• The honour of most extensive fan-built project probably goes to Tamriel Rebuilt, an effort to build the entire fictional world of Tamriel from the The Elder Scrolls series as a modification of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Bethesda games generally attract lots of player-made modifications, especially for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has resulted in fully-fledged standalone games such as The Forgotten City. While Bethesda’s openness to player involvement has always been welcomed, this has not prevented the studio from occasionally trying to monetise players’ free labour, with connivance of our friends at Valve. The efforts of the Tamriel Rebuilt community were also covered in Tribune and Ars Technica.
• Yahtzee Croshaw has one of his usual entertaining videos on Black Mesa, covering some of the same points.

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Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

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Warning: Some minor spoilers

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.

The novel’s first move is immediately brave and unconventional. The Ten Percent Thief foregoes protagonist and linear plot for a linked chain of chapters that carry the narrative arc over a period of, I’m guessing here, about fifteen years. From the first chapter where we meet the titular Ten Percent Thief, we jump to a middle-manager within Bell Corporation fearing their performance review. Then we jump back over the force field separating the glittering Virtual city from the Analog slums to a young teenager drawn into the resistance, then back to a Virtual citizen stuck on a trajectory down into the bottom 10%. And on it goes. Each chapter offers both a different vantage point for the workings of Bell Corp society, and a different character through which our perspective is filtered. We meet frantic influencers and supervised retirees, upper management and frontline workers, exiles and infiltrators. The Ten Percent Thief does precisely what Ada Palmer and Jo Walton call for in their essay on the Protagonist Problem, and it does so brilliantly.

It is a creative and courageous choice, with excellent results. The kaleidoscopic view that Lakshminarayan gives of the world of the Ten Percent Thief helps us see it from different angles and perspectives, much more so than a story confined to the point of view of a single or small set of characters. Lakshminarayan artfully uses her succession of vignettes to construct a holistic picture of the world of the Bell Curve emerges, showing us the injustices of this world at both the macro and micro level, and the harm it inflicts on both its victims and its supposed victors.

For while Apex City’s Virtual citizens may have access to the latest technologies and amenities, the constant spectre of potential demotion for insufficient productivity prevents any real enjoyment. The ‘virtual’ in Virtual citizen denotes an abundant access to technology that fosters isolation and conformity rather than connection and community. This is not fully automated luxury communism, but fully automated precarious capitalism.

Capitalism though, but to what end? From what we can tell, Bell Corp is a monopolistic megacorp with full control over the Earth’s remaining resources. It is not in competition with anything, is mostly autarchic, and has achieved remarkable levels of automation. In other words, while its ethos is based solely on the valorisation of productivity, it is never clear what this productivity is for. Most of Apex City’s citizens appear to be engaged in proper bullshit jobs, with productivity measured through social media presence, body function monitoring or online popularity contests.

This paradox allows The Ten Percent Thief to deliver its satire with a two-punch effect, because you realise that every element that seems implausible does actually have a parallel in our own world. From the ultra-wealthy influencers to the pointless upper management, every time your willing suspension of disbelief is about to break, you remember that Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and their ilk exist.

If I was being critical, I would say that Lakshminarayan trades off the impact of her satire against the coherence of her political economy. Absent a market economy, BellCorp has to simulate competition through internal contests. Cultural conformity is enforced through social pressure or, failing that, electroshocks and cybnernetic neural rewiring. There is an obvious critique of online culture here, and while it is largely on point, it misses the nuance that under actually-existing-capitalism it doesn’t matter if people tire of your flagship superhero franchise, as long as you also own all other shows available. For capitalism, diversity is just another opportunity to sell people the means of individuation.

Neither do Apex City’s top 10% need the armies of impoverished and precarious workers that underpin our own capitalist economies, as most socially necessary production (manufacture, teaching, healthcare, agriculture) has been automated. It is difficult to say for sure as you never really get a feel for the size of Virtual society, but it’s reasonable to wonder if its lower rungs merely serve to make the elite feel good. There is no point in being on top if you cannot lord it over some other humans in a sort of Nietzschean master/slave dynamic. Maybe the purpose of the Bell Curve is simply to sustain the Bell Curve. It wouldn’t be the first system that came to care mostly about perpetuating its own existence.

Still, I was reminded of one of the futures in Peter Frase’s Four Futures, in which the elite eventually conclude that they don’t need the proles anymore, and the sunlit uplands of fully automated luxury communism are reached by deleting the entire ‘surplus’ population. It is not entirely clear why the upper echelons at Bell Corp haven’t long reached the same conclusion. It is not as if we’re short of Malthusian ultra-rich in our own world, after all.

The weaker political economy in The Ten Percent Thief’s worldbuilding is maybe the reason why the novel’s ending, while satisfying, feels a bit contrived. Having thoroughly disempowered the subaltern classes in her world, Lakshminarayan has to reach for a technological deus ex machina to resolve her plot.

These criticisms, however, are minor. On the whole, The Ten Percent Thief is an excellent novel that captures and excoriatingly satirizes our present moment, while also managing to step away from the eurocentrism that remains so pervasive in science-fiction. Its creative form brilliant supports its substantive argument, and it was great to read an example of a novel that overcame the ‘protagonist problem’ so effectively. On the Bell Curve of works of speculative fiction, I would most certainly put The Ten Percent Thief in the top 10%.

Notes & Suggestions

• It was particularly stimulating to read a novel that overcame the protagonist problem so soon after grappling with it in my review of Mass Effect 3.
• For a more in-depth analysis of how neoliberal capitalism manages to extract value and maintain compliance without the type of direct coercion we see in The Ten Percent Thief, Hegemony Now! is a good starting point.
• It has been nearly a decade since I read it, but I remember Peter Frase’s Four Futures as a short, sharp, stimulating essay on four potential extreme endpoints of our current capitalist trajectory.
• The depiction of a ‘resistance without a centre’ reminded me of the precepts from the Tao Te Ching and The Art of War that a formless or empty force cannot be defeated.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

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.

Compared to its two predecessors, Mass Effect 3 operates on a grand scale. As the war continuous, you travel to parts of the galaxy referred to but never visited in the previous games, including the homeworlds of all of the key species. As you return to the Citadel, increasing numbers of refugees, injured and casualties make tangible the impacts of the ongoing war, with news updates from distant fronts and defeats adding to the sense of impending doom. And the game makes this personal, with key NPCs from previous games joining the lists of those KIA.

Those casualties are part of a thread woven through Mass Effect 3 that reflects on the decisions, actions and friendships you made along the way. Assuming you carried forward your character from Mass Effect 1 and 2, you discover how your actions influenced people, and how they perceive the person you have become. There is a deliberate, and generally successful, effort here to humanize Commander Shepard and to make the player connect with them as more than a mute protagonist carrying a gun around. This representation of ‘Commander Shepard, the person’ is an essential counterpoint to core thread of ‘Commander Shepard, the saviour’, and without it the narrative would have collapsed in on itself under the weight of its own messiah complex.

Mass Effect 3 is an excellent example of the ‘protagonist problem’ as proposed by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton. Their original essay is available via Uncanny Magazine and I strongly recommend giving it a read. What Palmer and Walton diagnose is an unhealthy overabundance of stories that centre a protagonist, someone without whom the story cannot progress, and the effect that has on our collective imagination. As with any systemic condition, any individual instance is never in and of itself the problem. It is the aggregated impact of a multitude of individual instances that creates the systemic effect, but I think Mass Effect 3 is an instance worth highlighting. Both because of the extreme level to which it takes its ‘protagonismos’, and the game’s own struggle with how to parse this.

The endgame of Mass Effect 3 is predicated on the notion that only Commander Shepard can save the galaxy. This is the inevitable culmination of a narrative arc that makes our character central to every major action during the Reaper War. Nothing moves without Commander Shepard. Alliances are forged, interstellar disputes dating back to a time when most humans would barely travel a few kilometers by cart are settled, ancient artefacts are uncovered, but only by Commander Shepard. We are told there is an entire galaxy out there engaged in a fight for its very existence, but for all that we can tell, they might as well all be playing Space Invaders.

And it is not just the key missions or diplomatic interventions that rely wholly on Commander Shepard. While you are busy saving the galaxy, the game offers a plethora of side-quests. So while you are trying to make peace between a race of synthetics and their creators who have been at war for centuries, you have to make a brief detour to pick up some fossils or acquire some encryption keys, because you overheard a random NPC express a desire for these. All of this feeds into a game mechanic where you acquire ‘assets’ to help you in the final assault on the Reapers, with a higher asset score securing a better outcome. Both your main missions and the side quests contribute to this, in a way that can often feel somewhat uncalibrated, as individual NPCs rate equally to entire squadrons of warships. But what it comes down to is this: only Commander Shepard can make the number go up.

Mass Effect 3 does try to undercut this overwhelming focus on its protagonist with humorous self-reflection and greater investment in your companions. Your allies make frequent references to your inability to dance or complete any mission without causing extensive property damage. As you walk around your spaceship, you can overhear your allies have conversations with one another, unlike in either of the previous games. The game works hard to create the impression of a world outside Commander Shepard, where people have experiences not mediated by you. But it cannot help itself, and still makes the ultimate fate of your companions at the end of the game dependant on whether you engaged them in conversation at crucial points or not. It is Commander Shepard: Galactic saviour, courier, and therapist.

Some degree of protagonismos is of course unavoidable in an action-RPG or first-person-shooter (FPS) where you inhabit your character. A videogame has to give you the power to act in the world, and for it to be compelling those actions must be meaningful. But it is not necessary to make the entire universe revolve around the player. I am reminded of Half-life, featuring perhaps the most famous mute protagonist, where despite your centrality to the plot it is clear that things happen in the world that are unaffected by your actions, and that you are only one of many heroes sent to deal with the game’s core threat. You just happen to be the only one who succeeds. Or Citizen Sleeper, a game where your actions make small but meaningful change to a community at the edge of civilisation. Or Subnautica, a game based entirely on surviving a natural environment that is fundamentally indifferent to your existence. Or Helldivers 2, where you are indistinguishable Starship Trooper #588102, until you are killed and become indistinguishable Starship Trooper #588103. Even the original Mass Effect itself was more grounded in the limited role it had you play in a wider galactic context.

None of this makes Mass Effect 3 a bad game. On the contrary, I regard it as the best of the trilogy, keeping the best parts of its predecessors while discarding the worst. The combat is fluid and challenging but not frustrating. The story is great and excellently paced. The annoying minigames have been removed. The morality system is still there, but feels better calibrated than in Mass Effect 2. And evident care and attention has been given to deepening the relationships between the player and their companions. But in the end the game simply tries to do too much. It cannot restrain itself. Even its attempts at self-deprecating humour or humanising reflection still end up having life-or-death consequences. So strongly does the game desire to make the player feel consequential, that it makes you into a black hole for everyone else’s agency.

Of course it is fun, and flattering, to be the hero, but as Palmer and Walton remind us, no actual conflict or problem depends so critically on the actions of only one person to resolve it. By making the player so central to everything that takes place, Mass Effect 3 diminishes the world it has created and makes its universe feel oddly empty. It feels like a play with only one actor, on a stage otherwise filled with lifeless props. Its culmination in an act of self-sacrifice that ushers in a new galactic era is the antithesis of One Battle After Another’s recognition that we all make our contribution to an intergenerational struggle for justice that may never really end.

Palmer and Walton persuasively argue that a surfeit of protagonismos in our cultural environment can disempower those of us who do not identify as heroes, and cause reckless arrogance in those who do. At a time when so many of us feel a distinct lack of power in our lives, there is great attractiveness to an escapist fantasy in which we, and we alone, can solve an entire universe’s problems. Yet Mass Effect 3’s very excess of heroic agency leaves us feeling smaller and more depleted when it is game over. At that time, it is worth remembering that instead of cosmic heroism, it can be the small acts of kindness that save the world.

Notes & suggestions

• As noted in the blog itself, I strongly recommend the original essay on The Protagonist Problem by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, which you can find here.
• Citizen Sleeper is an excellent little science-fiction game that isn’t interested in saving the galaxy, but explores how being human means being part of a community. In Other Waters by the same developer plays with similar themes and is also worth it, but does veer even more to the meditative side.
• I’ve already linked to them earlier, but for completeness, here are my reviews of Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2.
• Zero Punctuation (of course) also has a review of Mass Effect 3, as well as the previous two games, which you can find here.
• It may be that theatre as an art form is more amenable to stories lacking a clear protagonist. It’s not something to which I have given much thought (yet), but writing this blog reminded me of Small Acts of Love and its insistence on the agency we have in each and every one of us to make the world a kinder place.
• If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenges that face us in the present day, from inequality to climate catastrophe, consider joining a collective effort to make a difference. This could be a workplace union, a tenants association, a community organising group, a political party or something else. Unlike Commander Shepard, you do not need to save the world on your own.

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