Mass Effect – Wis[s]e Words

Romance ALL the things!

Published on November 24, 20141 Comment

Richard Cobett talks about Bioware’s continuing evolution of sex ‘n romance in their games:

With each game though, Bioware has gone out of its way to Do Better, and not always by heading down the obvious path. Dragon Age 2 for instance infamously made all of its romanceable characters (the entire party save for Varric and Aveline) bisexual so that any player would be able to get with anyone they wanted. Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect 3 reverses that approach, deciding that sexuality is an important part of the characters and that it can be as jarring for everyone you meet to be an option as to be politely refused. Some characters are still bisexual. Most now have their preferences, with Dragon Age expanding on gender to factor in species as well. Qunari especially seem limited in who they can give the horn.

From a Watsonian, in-game point of view I can understand this, but from a Doylian, gamer point of view I’d rather the gaming world did reshape itself around my romance preferences. One of the greatest disappointments coming to the Mass Effect series years after everybody else and hearing so much about the incredible romance options –some of which may have been sarcasm, in hindsight– was finding out that actually, my options as Femshep were either Kaidan, the Dullness that Walks Like A Man, or Liara, with no options to woo Garrus, let alone Ashley. From a game playing point of view, for games like this, I’d like the option to romance everybody, even if this doesn’t make that much sense from within the game world. I don’t want the game to decide for me who is and isn’t romanceable, just like I don’t want the game to do decide what I look like.

That’s the whole point of open world RPGs like the Dragon Ages, Mass Effects and Elder Scrolls after all, that freedom to create your own character within the larger storyline. Freedom of romance fits in with that.

And no, the idea that everybody you romance has to be bisexual if you can romance them in both your female and male persona is wrong, though an understandable error. It’s just that in one leg of the trousers of time Ashley happened to be gay, in another straight…

Your Happening World (July 1st through July 3rd)

Published on July 3, 2014Leave a comment

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Re: oorsprong van wat zullen we drinken – What's the origin of th 1976 Bots song "Wat Zullen We Drinken (Zeven dagen Lang)?
[PC] Mass Effect Won’t Start – A New Solution – Answer HQ –
You Need to Hear This Extremely Rare Recording — The Message — Medium – A story for the millennials in the room: Once upon a time, owning a rare media object was sorta cool. But some people used these objects to project their cultural superiority, which was pretty lame.
I’d Like to Force the World to Sing | HiLobrow – In every particular, the “OK Soda Manifesto” exhibited those criteria which the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton identified in 1961 with the practice of “thought reform,” or mind control. As in all mind control cults, for example, the manifesto forbade OK drinkers from associating with outsiders, and restricted their vocabulary to what Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés.” They were told how to think and warned that the individual’s own experiences could not be understood except via the group. The Reverend Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid had nothing on this stuff. As a 1995 OK promotional sticker that came bound into an issue of Might magazine put it, “OK-ness is that small thing that holds everything else together.”
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Emotional Mass Effect

Published on March 27, 2013Leave a comment

I’ve been feeling a bit meh the last couple of weeks, both physically and mentally, for all sorts of not very interesting reasons, so I’ve been fleeing into computer games for a while. Specifically, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Yes, two years after everybody else. I’m not done with the latter, as I don’t want to end it quite yet.

To be honest, as a game it’s not that impressive: an action-rpg with first person shooter sequences, mild puzzles interspersed with lots of cut scenes, the mandatory resource strangled research tree to get your team all the goodies, plus a lot of talking to people. The story meanwhile, at least in it’s broad outline, isn’t that special either: you are the only one standing between Galactic Civilisation and the existential threat of the Reapers and in the second game you have to assemble a crack squad of humans and aliens to deal with their latest scheme.

Part of what does make the Mass Effect games special I’ve already talked about a while back: the heroine, Shepard herself (you can also play with the male version of her, but only dullards do so) and her relationships with her crew and allies. BioWare created a great character, but ultimately it’s your own choices in playing the games that make Shepard who she really is. That’s where the depth of the games, especially the second game — which you can start with the full history of what you did in the previous one– lies in. And it all starts with the character creation.

Femshep

In my case Shepard is a Black, lesbian woman who has a thing for pink and yellow armour, who tries to do the right thing in every situation, has a thing for aliens, always tries to persuade rather than force people to help her, but who does sometimes have a temper on her. She’s respected, feared and admired, as well as a bad dancer. The games give you just enough information and guidance for you to make up what your Shepard is really like; the rest is up to you.

But what really impressed me in Mass Effect 2 was the way in which several of the missions and asssignments you can play bring home the effects of the war you are fighting. In one mission you have to find a murderer one of your potential teammates has been pursuing for centuries, where you interview the mother of her latest victim; in another you learn that one particular Asari saleswoman is so hostile because she lost her partner in an earlier war and now distrust all aliens. There’s also the background on Jack who did not have a happy childhood to say the least. Apart from that, there are also more mundane assignments, like reconciling two lovers, or getting somebody’s precious memento of their dead husband back.

The usual games I play tend to be either first person shooters with little plot other than shoot everything that moves, or fairly abstract strategy games of one sort or another, with no story other than the gameplay. The Mass Effect games are the first story driven games I’ve played in a long time, apart from Saints Row the Third (which is much more cartoonish) and the first games to have immersed me as deeply as a good science fiction novel can.