Nature is not treated kindly in videogames. If it is not merely a backdrop in first-person-shooters for the game to hide your adversaries in, then it tends to exist to be exploited to grow an empire or fuel a war machine. Especially in real-team strategy, ‘4X’ (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and colony builder games, nature is relegated to the role of resource pool, waste sink, or both. And while over the years some games have tried to provide a more nuanced interaction with the environment, for example through introducing renewable resources or penalties for pollution, on the whole game dynamics have not moved on much since the days of Age of Empires when a player might frequently find their entire map depleted of gold, iron and wood. Watching your average trailer for a civilisation or colony building game (it’s there in the name, really), it rapidly becomes clear that success is measured by how much of the playable map is brought under human cultivation. While in the real world we are now reminded daily that we cannot forever impose our will or demands on the web of life, videogames remain mostly wedded to the Promethean promise of full human control over the natural environment.

It is exciting therefore to see games that take a radically different approach, especially given how rare this sadly remains. One such game is Terra Nil, developed by South African studio Free Lives. The game’s name is a play on ‘terra nullius’: the concept of unclaimed land that may be legitimately occupied, which was instrumental in legitimising European colonialist ventures in the 18th and 19th century. In Terra Nil, the land is not so much unclaimed as abandoned by humans as a result of total ecosystem collapse. It is up to the player to restore these barren landscapes to fully functional ecosystems.

Terra Nil is a remarkable achievement. Combining elegant gameplay with carefully crafted aesthetics, it does not just offer an engaging gaming experience, but effects a profound conceptual shift as to who and what games are for.

The core mechanics of Terra Nil are simple. The world is divided into zones, and the player must restore each zone into a viable ecosystem. Restoration always occurs in three phases. First, any damage must be remediated and a rudimentary ecosystem put in place. Next, the player must increase the complexity of the ecosystem by introducing different biomes, such as as arboreal forest, wetland, or tundra. As ecosystem diversity increases, key species will re-establish themselves, The third phase requires the player to optimise the animals’ happiness and to recycle all infrastructure to remove any human presence.

Each zone the game offers is different, requiring different techniques and buildings to overcome hurdles and create a sufficiently diverse and harmonious ecosystem. Some zones are arctic, whereas others are tropical. Some zones are contaminated with toxic or nuclear waste, or have unstable geological features that must be managed. Each map is its own puzzle, and as the game doesn’t impose a time limit, the player can carefully contemplate their every move without ever feeling rushed. It makes for a pleasantly zen experience, and for players who want any stress removed altogether, a special ‘zen’ mode is available.

An archipelago with some toxin scrubbers and minimal grassland.

To restore nature, the player deploys a range of buildings to remove toxins, irrigate the soil, reintroduce trees, etc. Some buildings have prerequisites, such as particular types of soil, power, or humidity or temperature levels, and the player may have to go through multiple preparatory steps before the desired biome is achieved. Construction is paid for using a single currency which is earned by achieving key restoration goals. This makes each map into its own intricate yet rewarding puzzle. My favourite part for each playthrough is when animals make their first reappearance, and a mostly static map suddenly becomes vibrant and dynamic.

The same archipelago from earlier, with beaches, wetlands, kelp forests and deciduous tree cover restored, and most infrastructure recycled.

One notable feature of Terra Nil is the complete absence of humans. There are no workers constructing or operating the buildings, or transporting resources to and fro. Although the buildings themselves have minor animations, their visual design blends them in with their surroundings. This means that the ecosystem is the most dynamic visual feature, foregrounding the landscape itself. It is a brilliant inversion of traditional top-down style colony builder games where the landscape is the passive tapestry on which the player’s grandiose schemes are played out. Terra Nil takes this to its logical conclusion by requiring the player to recycle all buildings in order to complete a map. Success in Terra Nil is full rewilding and the total absence of humans.

A restored volcanic caldera from which almost all infrastructure has been removed.

It is a radical departure from other games. In Terra Nil, the victory condition is not domination. Nor is it the success or survival or achievements of some human(oid) colony. Here, victory is lichen and happy zebras. It is restoring nature for its own sake, not as a means to an end.

Given the emphasis on ecological restoration, as well as its aesthetic, I have been reflecting on whether Terra Nil is a solarpunk videogame. Solarpunk as a genre is more associated with writing, visual artwork and television than gaming, likely because creating the mechanics for a game about cooperation is more difficult than doing the same for a game about shooting things. A key theme of solarpunk is ecological restoration, and this is clearly at the heart of Terra Nil. But as per this insightful essay by Ben Harris-Roxas, solarpunk also focuses on community and harmony between nature and humanity, as well as a more small-scale, ‘DIY’ approach to technology. By forcing the player to completely vacate the map, Terra Nil on the other hand implies that such harmony is not possible, and that ecological restoration can only be achieved through a separation between nature and humanity. In that, it follows more in the footsteps of Half Earth, and its spiritual yet historical-materialist successor Half Earth Socialism. The game developers also deliberately used a more industrial aesthetic for the game’s buildings on the grounds that large-scale restoration will require large-scale infrastructure, rather than local, community-based improvisation, which is another aspect in which it follows Half Earth Socialism.

Probably this is reading too much into the game, given it is ultimately a small project. Though it remains an open question for me where in the world of Terra Nil the humans have gone. With its focus on restoration rather than exploitation, its calm and natural aesthetic, and its intricate but forgiving gameplay, Terra Nil is certainly more solarpunk than any other game I have come across, and if it doesn’t fully fit into the genre, it is at the very least in constructive dialogue with it. Small nuances notwithstanding, Terra Nil definitely has the key feature of solarpunk in providing a welcome antidote of hope and harmony to a medium that is otherwise suffused with violence and dystopia. It shows us a path not just to an alternative way of relating to nature, but also a different role for videogames. Planting virtual trees does not directly save the world, but fostering a culture that values nature for itself, and chooses harmony over domination, may well get us there in the long run.

Notes & suggestions

• Wholesome though playing games like Terra Nil may be, it will not by itself bring about the changes we need to see in the world. If you are concerned about climate change, ecosystem collapse, or maybe just environmental degradation where you live, join or support an international, national or local environmental group such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or a campaign group in your local community. You can also consider joining a green or ecosocialist political party.
• If you want to take ecosystem restoration to a planetary scale, then consider Half Earth Socialism: The Game. Though I should warn that even with socialist command-and-control powers, maintaining a liveable world is dispiritingly hard. If you are more into boardgames, then Daybreak offers a similar challenge.
• The Ecologist is a magazine squarely focused on nature, and how it interrelates with society, economics and even spirituality.

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Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

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• #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.

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, 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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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

• Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s 5 minute review at Zero Punctuation covers much the same ground as this review, but is much more entertaining. Croshaw can now be found at Fully Ramblomatic.
• Despite its flaws, Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy has a much more interesting take on humanity’s discovery it is not alone among the stars. Other good examples are Ted Chiang’s Arrival, Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series and Olivia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy.
• Citizen Sleeper is a different type of game, but certainly worth it for a reflection on what it means to connect to rather than murder the people you meet.
• The inability of culture to do anything other than reproduce our contemporary political arrangements is touched on in both Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams’ Hegemony Now. Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void is an excellent disection of the evacuation of meaningful choice from the domain of politics.

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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 armaments, 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 matriarchal. 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 matriarchal 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.

Notes & suggestions

• After finishing Mass Effect, I’ve used reviews of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 to explore other elements of the series and how it interacts with contemporary culture.
• Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has a reliable entertaining review at Zero Punctuation. Croshaw has now moved to Fully Ramblomatic.
• Although I was not particularly impressed by the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, at least it imagines the universe in all its bizarre possibilities.
• While Citizen Sleeper starts with the same cyberpunk dystopian world as much science fiction, its purpose is to explore how to go beyond it, even if just at an individual or communal level.
• Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series is a much, much richer exploration of the possibilities of other futuristic social forms.

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It has been a long time since a game has made me cry.

Towards one of the endings of Citizen Sleeper, there is a choice. It is not the common type of ‘moral’ videogame choice that is as subtle as being hit in the head by a careening trolley. It is not a choice about acting, but about being. About what it means to live, to connect, to relate. It does not have a right or wrong answer. It offers a beautiful gift and a profound loss either way you choose. It is a choice that makes the player think, and even now I still don’t know if I chose wisely.

Citizen Sleeper is a game set on Erlin’s Eye, a decrepit and gradually decaying orbital space station, abandoned by its corporate owners and left to fend for itself. You are a Sleeper; a copy of a human mind imprisoned in a cybernetic body. You are not human, because you are an artificial creation. You are not AI, because your mind is a human intelligence. Where you come from, you were property. Where you’ve arrived, you are a fugitive.

Arriving at the Eye you have no money, no home, and no community. Your legal status is precarious at best. And on top of that, your previous owners built two fail-safes into you: a tracker, and a chronic dependency on medication called ‘stabiliser’ to keep your body from falling apart. By any means you need to find a way to rid yourself of the former, and obtain the latter, to stay alive.

The gameplay loop of Citizen Sleeper is elegant yet brutal: Each ‘cycle’ you start with up to five rolled dice you need to spend to perform actions. Higher rolls grant a greater chance of success or a bonus outcome. Lower rolls a greater chance of failure, and possibly damage. If your condition degrades, your number of available dice goes down.

Five dice, and so much to do. You need to ditch your tracker. You need food, medicine, shelter, and work. You need to understand this new place you don’t even dare call ‘home’. Especially in the early part of the game, all you can do is survive, and a bad roll at the start of your cycle can set you back immensely, hammering home the precarity of your situation.

As you find your footing, you become capable of small acts of kindness. These start as ways of getting something you want: stabilizer, food, a friendly conversation. Often the game rewards you for ‘completing’ a quest, but not always, and even where you do pursue a storyline, it isn’t at all clear that the investment in terms of dice and time spent was worth the return in terms of pure resources. The real prize is the relationships you forge: helping a bartender build a still, swapping stories with a streetfood vendor, being taught by a robot how to love.

All residents you encounter on the Eye have a richness you rarely experience in a video game, despite only being represented by dialogue text and a single image. Citizen Sleeper manages to say a lot even when it doesn’t talk much, and each conversation sublimely conveys how the people you meet have their own lives, worries, hopes and motivations. They are not NPC #6768, existing only for the player’s satisfaction. There is a true and distinct authorial style to Citizen Sleeper, which tends to be lacking from large studio productions, quite possibly because it is one person’s labour of love.

Ultimately, Citizen Sleeper is about community and connection. The game doesn’t really have an end, nor are you intended to ‘win’ it in the usual sense of the word. Of course it is also an anti-capitalist critique, and its dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic is now fairly familiar. But the real power lies in its contention that we are not defined by who we are, but by the relationships we form, and the communities we become a part of. Citizen Sleeper contends that even in the ruins of late stage interstellar capitalism, people will still be kind to one another. That communities will form and flourish. That solidarity and comradeship is possible, even in the face of countervailing systemic forces.

If I had one critique to make of the game, it is that the Sleeper’s actions remain confined to the level of direct interpersonal interactions. There is never a sense that the cumulative impact of your actions shifts the background environment on the Eye, if even by a little. Mutual aid and solidarity are prevalent, but collective action is absent. I imagine, however, that it would be a difficult mechanic for a game to express.

That is a very minor gripe though, and does not detract from Citizen Sleeper’s powerful reflections on friendship, community, and the power we have to shape the world around us. Play this game, then log off, and see if you can take its sense of wonder into the real world.

Wake up, Sleeper.

Notes & Suggestions

• Readers who enjoy the setting and/or a non-human main character might like the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, and the Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers.
• Kay & Skittles have an in-depth review on their Youtube Channel which is worth your time.
• The game’s sole developer explained both his design philosophy and the political message in Citizen Sleeper at a BAFTA panel.

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A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

Posts will be cross-posted to my Mastodon feed, so feel free to leave a comment there. Any feedback or response is much appreciated. You can also subscribe to receive future blogs via email using the ‘Subscribe’ button at the bottom of the homepage, or by adding this blog to an RSS feed.

How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism