Mass Effect Isn't Star Trek
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
Mass Effect isn’t Star Trek. I won’t say I’m surprised. A little disappointed, but not surprised. Before proceeding, a confession: I’m playing through the trilogy for the first time. I took a long hiatus from gaming during college and graduate school, only returning to the hobby in 2012. I’ve dabbled with Mass Effect before, thanks to the Mass Effect Trilogy on PS3, but I’ve never completed the games. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy what I played, but the public fervor had already died down, the PlayStation 4 was on its way, and other virtual worlds beckoned.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition has been the perfect opportunity for me to warp into this now more than a decade old spacefaring experience. I’m still playing the first game and, despite the clumsy combat, I’m having a blast. How could I not be enamored with the game’s rich lore, its mysterious alien artifacts and galactic political struggles? Or with the ability to plot out courses to different planetary systems, dashing between corners of the galaxy as if they were so many city districts? Or the cutscenes showing my approach to the Citadel, reminding me so much of the opening sequence to my beloved Star Trek: The Next Generation?
But Mass Effect does leave me wondering what the trilogy might have looked like if the Reapers really were a myth, if combat weren’t so prominent, and if exploration weren’t simply the means to save interplanetary civilization. Don’t get me wrong: I recognize the appeal of being a messianic figure leading a multi-species battle against extinction. (Did they really need the Christian overtones of the name “Shepard,” though?) But I still can’t help imagining a different game, one with the budget and technical skills of a BioWare but with an ethos more akin to Star Trek: The Next Generation. A game in which exploration isn’t married to automatic weapon fire, even if phasers – set to stun, of course – occasionally make an appearance.
To that end, I want to indulge in a thought exercise, posed in the form of a question: How does Mass Effect differ from Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)? First, and most obviously, the narrative of Mass Effect dedicates itself to the pursuit of an enemy, Saren and the Reapers. The protagonist, Shepard, demonstrates their heroism through the exercise of violence. Granted, it’s violence aimed at preventing more violence, but it still requires the spectacular destruction of swaths of alien life. Mass Effect is more than Gears of War with conversations, but it’s still a cover shooter in which a military alliance saves the day by exterminating dangerous hordes.
In contrast, Captain Jean-Luc Picard – the wise, dreamy protagonist of TNG – devotes his efforts to resolving conflict in a non-violent manner. Sure, the Enterprise occasionally fires off photon torpedoes, but hostilities signal a failure of communication and imagination. The mission of the Enterprise is exploration and discovery. That’s why Lieutenant Data – everyone’s favorite cat-loving android – is so emblematic of the series. In Data’s pursuit to figure out what it means to be human, he demonstrates that exploring the universe implies not just discovering new star systems but grappling with the strangeness that is the human species. In other words, exploration isn’t so much about acquiring knowledge as it is about questioning what we take for granted, including our own identities.
Mass Effect and Star Trek: The Next Generation also feature starkly different social systems. The economy of the Mass Effect universe remains resolutely capitalist, which is why the requisitions officer on board my own ship insists that I pay for weapon and armor upgrades. (I’m ready to dump him out of an airlock!) No surprise, then, that so much of the architecture on the planets Shepherd visits resemble the industrial infrastructure of non-renewable energy extraction. BioWare’s sci-fi realism extrapolates from the social systems of the present, while introducing alien elements that don’t so much transform human social interactions as supplement them: humans are still so many Robinson Crusoes trying to eke out an existence in the harsh wilderness (read: the cold void of outer space).
From a game design perspective, the drama of an individual wrestling with a hostile universe is a useful fiction. It easily lends itself to leveling systems. Overcoming material obstacles results in experience points, and experience points can be traded for new skills and upgraded attributes. This is the hero as entrepreneur, or human capital. Third-person shooting action and energy extraction are a perfect fit in this game design logic. They are two forms of targeting external objects (enemies, planets), extracting resources (experience points, minerals), and converting them into value (leveling up, upgraded equipment).
TNG solves the problem of economic scarcity through technological idealism. Replicators capable of creating food and daily items rely on an energy source – the ship’s antimatter engine – but one never gets the sense that this resource requires strip mining the galaxy. With a vague nod towards subatomic physics, TNG leaps over the law of the conservation of energy. Everything can be free, because energy is basically free. When Doctor Crusher needs new medical equipment, she replicates it, or maybe she requisitions it. In any case, money doesn’t change hands.
If this seems like a minor point, consider it this way: what we’re talking about is an entirely different paradigm of social value, a post-capitalist framework in which value can’t be quantified, in which material needs never get held hostage by the demand for financial compensation. If TNG’s mission of exploration looks different from the colonial violence of European exploration on Earth, it’s because discovery no longer means transforming alien landscapes into raw material for capitalism. Granted, there’s a wishful quality to TNG’s post-capitalist dream, but science fiction has always involved utopianism as much as hard scientific realism. Its alien life-forms and worlds have always been glimpses of other ways of existing.
I could go on. I could talk about how the Normandy never feels like a complex technological artifact compared to the Enterprise, how it’s really just a flying container for characters and conversations. But I don’t want to bash the series. Instead, I wonder what kinds of AAA games might emerge if action-based design sensibilities were loosened and if the principles of compelling world-building weren’t confused with internalizing the social values of the status quo. Maybe instead of simply meeting aliens in a virtual world, we might also discover alien versions of ourselves – new ways of being human, new desires, new hopes.
