This will be the second last microtheme in which I post! Since a review on Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 will be coming soon, I'll post this microtheme on Mass Effect and race.
When examining Mass Effect in terms of Alexander Galloway’s idea of “unplayable” race, it seems to go beyond the typical racial and stereotypical notions found on Earth and tends to venture out into multiple Galaxies where “Humans” are considered their own race on a whole. The entire human race is subjected as one, where colour, gender or even class, do not have an impact on the opinions about humans. Instead, all of the preconceived notions about humans fall directly under one category. This being that the humans are not worthy and have not proven themselves to hold a seat in the Citadel Council.
The game attempts to allow total control with the creation of your character (a human named Shepard). You can decide the gender, race/colour, and appearance. It does not however, allow you to control the size or height of your avatar, but this is not truly important. Next, there is a choice of abilities/talents, which range from Soldier to Vanguard (Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, and Sentinel being the other four). These classes either allow you to specialize in weaponry (skill in all four weapon types), tech-ability (able to hack and open all interfaces), biotic powers (similar to Force Powers), or it allows for half specialization in two fields. After choosing your class there is no changing; you can upgrade your character traits or weapons in the squad menu (where the entire squad is fully customizable). This simply adds another level of control within the game.
The one region which is completely left out of your control is which alien race you will be. There is a combination of both real races and imaginary races (human versus alien). There are many races in this game including Asari, Turian, Krogan, and Quarian, with each possessing their own special abilities and excelling with different talents. These other alien races are merely part of your squad and are essentially static and unchanging. You can continue to modify and choose who will join you in your adventure and even have the chance to start a relationship with the female or male human (Ashley Williams for male Shepard or Kaidan Alenko for female Shepard), or the single gendered Asari (Liara T’Soni for both male and female Shepard). Each relationship impacts how the story turns out in the sequel, showing that no matter what you do in the game there will always be consequences. In a way it takes the freedom out of video gaming, adding in turn a new and some ways a more welcomed element.
I think that with this human alignment and unplayable (alien) race factor greatly intensifies the ideological world of the game. When making decisions throughout the game, earning “paragon” and “renegade” heavily weighs on your psyche whether or not you are going to prove that the human race deserves to be on the council, or if you want to ruin the entire human reputation. This fear of alien race invasion and apocalypse can also be seen in relation to Shiu’s article when discussing Duke Nukem 3D (Sze-Fai Shiu 111). I feel that this cause and effect interface/control of the game influences how the player ultimately decides what to do. In certain ways there is an “unplayable” nature to the game, but I believe that this game fully attempts to integrate total control as seen with character responses, character creation, good versus evil decisions, and even alien/racial determination and hierarchy. Race does matter though, and the significance of this game would be lost if these newly constructed racial images, identities and ideologies were not present (Leonard 1). Without these racial overtones in the game, Mass Effect may have turned out to be a failure and the second instalment may have not seen release.
It appears as though when the future is being discussed in video games, that race among humans is no longer a problem. Colour and gender do not matter anymore, so in a sense the future allows for race to become more “playable”. What become the new limiting factors are the alien races which exist in the universe (even though you can have the similar talents as the other races, the traits and appearances are always a discrepancy). This could potentially be related to the variety of races which live on Earth and could be seen as a critique of racial differences, but I do not believe that this is the overall message that the game is attempting to promote. It looks more on the human race as a whole and how racial differences can be put aside, or at least this is what Shepard is attempting to accomplish in the Mass Effect universe.
Works Cited
Leonard, David. “‘Live in Your World, Play in Ours’: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Other.” SIMILE: Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education 3.4 (2003): 1-9.
Mass Effect, BioWare, November 20, 2007.
Mass Effect 2, BioWare, January 26, 2010.
Sze-Fai Shiu, Anthony. “What Yellowface Hides: Video Games, Whiteness, and the American Racial Order.” The Journal of Popular Culture 39.1 (2006): 109-25.
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