Neo-liberal Multiculturalism in Mass Effect: The Government of Difference in Digital RPGs
This chapter examines the neo-liberal multiculturalist ideology of the Mass Effect series of digital role-playing games. I show that both games in the series profess the unmitigated superiority of neo-liberal multiculturalism as a form of dealing with difference. While the narrative conceit of the Mass Effect series is an alien threat to annihilate all sentient life in the galaxy, its key thematic is the biological and cultural differences that render the spacefaring races populating the Milky Way vulnerable to such a threat. In this context, the various systems of rules and the procedures for sorting and executing those rules valorize players’ heterogeneous configurative practices and the neo-liberal multiculturalist performances they enact.
The following section outlines the theoretical and critical project upon which this intervention is grounded: Michel Foucault’s genealogical pursuit of the regimes of truth that govern political, institutional, and cultural deliberative rationalities. This is followed by a brief look at the Mass Effect series of digital role-playing games, focusing on the narrative discourses that articulate the science-fiction series to contemporary cultural politics of difference. The final substantive section of this chapter examines processes of party management in the Mass Effect series as procedures within a truth game rule-bound to reward diversity and trumpet the truths of mainstream multiculturalist ideology.
For much of his career Foucault was preoccupied with ‘truth games’, though it was only retrospectively, in the later years of his life, that this crystallized in his theorizing. At a lecture given at the University of Vermont, Foucault explained:
My objective for more than twenty-five years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific ‘truth games’ related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves. (1988, 18)
Truth games entered Foucault’s lexicon around this time as a shorthand for describing the intersection of three distinct concepts integral to Foucault’s critical project: the subject, power, and governmentality.
Foucault defined his life’s work as an effort to study the processes through which human beings transform their selves into subjects (2003b, 126). Unlike the ‘self’, a term Foucault uses nonchalantly in various contexts, the ‘subject’ describes a self in a specific relationship to power. Foucault explains, ‘There are two meanings of the words “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (2003b, 130). In the first instance, the self’s relationship to power is one of domination and dependence, but in the second instance the self’s relationship to power is more difficult to discern and requires a theorization of power divorced from any notion of the sovereign exercise of authority.
As Foucault writes, ‘Power’s condition of possibility […] must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms emanate’ (1990, 93). Though persons, institutions, and states remain important sites where power is applied, it is decentralized and diffused throughout the social matrix. In the neo-liberal politics of economic deregulation (Foucault 2008), the films shown by the YMCA (Greene 2005), god-games (Miklaucic 2003), and a myriad other cultural forms (Bennett 2003), power is ubiquitous. Even then, power does not originate from, nor is it exercised by, any of these entities, though they are sites where it is applied.
Rather, power is an effect of knowledge, or, more appropriately, truth. This truth is not transcendental. It is constructed by the very persons and populations it entangles, and is in this way immanent. It is doxological – consensual and contingent – and dynamic – subject to change but neither fleeting nor fickle. Foucault explains, ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth – that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true’ (2003c, 316). It is within specific regimes of truth that certain actions and patterns of practice come to be perceived as intelligible options that, in short, make sense (Biesecker 1992, 356). This, ultimately, is how power/knowledge is applied – by means of deliberative logics and governing rationalities, or, as Foucault termed it, governmentality. As practical reasoning constituting a governing rationality ‘for the purpose of making judgments and planning reality’ (Greene 1998, 35), power produces ‘material judgment’ (Sloop and Ono 1997) resulting in the materialization of practices and the performance of identity (Butler 1993). As an effect of truth, power is not an antagonistic competition between institutions and individuals, it is an agonistic contest played out in the various fields of human knowledge.
We are not its pawns but its players. Subjects make themselves subject to power. Foucault insists that one’s capacity for this engagement is a precondition to power, which ‘operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself […] [I]t is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions’ (2003b, 139). Like the possibility space of a game (Salen and Zimmerman 2003, 66–7; Bogost 2007, 42–3), this field of possibilities Foucault describes is an extensive array of potential configurative actions determined by the rules. The actions are enacted by subjects ‘freely’ exercising choice in order to negotiate the weighted outcomes of the various dilemmas, obstacles, and encounters that constitute everyday life.
The Mass Effect series is a site where power is applied; both games make claims about the correct approach to managing difference. In this regard, the series is an exemplary popular cultural artifact. Miller explains, ‘[Power’s] principle task is the engineering of relations between subjects. The primary site of this engineering is at the level of governance through culture’ (1993, 40). Perhaps more profoundly, the operation of the digital game is homologous to the operation of the truth game. Unlike other media making claims about cultural difference, the titles in the Mass Effect series provide players with feedback, thus relating the outcome of the truth game directly to the player’s input in the digital game. In this fashion, the series operates as a truth game governed by multiculturalist rationality and validates play practices that embrace heterogeneity in response to difference.
Moreover, a very specific notion of multiculturalism is put forward. Unlike liberal multiculturalism, which posits some essential sameness beneath the differences that define us (Žižek 2003), this multiculturalism accepts differences as long as they contribute to an already defined commonweal. The type of multiculturalism celebrated in the Mass Effect series is premised upon the other’s ability to contribute something useful1. As Baerg argues in this volume, neo-liberalism is defined by the rationalization and economization of everyday life, and RPG characters are both products and producers of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberal multiculturalism, then, is multiculturalism that embraces the other to the extent that the other has a calculated worth that ‘brings something to the table’.
As a cultural logic, it involves the commodification of the other for easy consumption (hooks 1999). Aihwa Ong analyzes this logic at work in the transnational cosmopolitanism of South Asia. Guest workers and international transplants at both the bottom (unskilled, manual laborers) and the top (highly skilled professionals) of the social hierarchy are more accepted than South Asian cultural and national norms typically dictate because they are perceived to fill vital functions local workers either cannot or will not fill. In America, it has most recently taken the form of policy proposals that seek to grant citizenship for undocumented immigrants who serve in the military or go to college, and it can be heard plainly whenever someone ‘defends’ undocumented workers by claiming that they fill niches in the American economy. And while neo-liberal multiculturalism is more progressive than racial animosity, it displaces a disregard for the other as other by accepting the other as a return to the same (Derrida 1985).
The following section looks at the Mass Effect series as a truth game centrally concerned with the relations between subjects. That the series is also an outcome of a truth game, a product of the relationship between political ideology, neo-liberal economic policy and the culture industries, does not negate that each iteration of Mass Effect is also ‘a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the basis of its principles and rules of procedure, may be considered valid or invalid, winning or losing’ (Foucault 2003a, 38). More specifically, the next section argues that the games allow players to enunciate their own response to the contemporary condition of a society defined by difference. Most significantly, the games also make procedurally generated valuations concerning the player’s configurative performance, an implication that will round out the discussion in the final section of this chapter.
The Mass Effect series of digital role-playing games includes two titles, Mass Effect (2007), which sold over 2.3 million copies worldwide across platforms, and Mass Effect 2 (2010), which sold almost 2.5 million copies worldwide across platforms (VGChartz.com). Mass Effect 3 has been in development since early 2010 and is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2011. Not just commercial successes, both games in the Mass Effect series have been praised for their exemplary story and gameplay by numerous game review forums (Metacritic.com). The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences recognized Mass Effect (ME) as 2008 Role-playing Game of the Year and awarded Mass Effect 2 (ME2) the distinction of 2011 Game of the Year.
The series is set in the year 2183 AD, thirty-five years after humans have learned to use the titular ‘mass effect’ technologies. Thought to be remnants of a lost Prothean civilization, mass effect technologies discovered on Mars allow for faster-than-light travel and the ‘biotic’ – essentially, magic for science-fiction – manipulation of gravity. After ten years of interstellar colonization, the human Systems Alliance extends itself far enough into the galaxy to make contact with other spacefaring races – Turians, Asari, Salarians, Krogans, and Quarians. First contact is rough, and several years of war ensue as a result of miscommunication before peace is brokered and humanity is granted an embassy in the Citadel, a recovered Prothean space station that serves as the seat of the galactic Council. The Council races – the industrious Turians, contemplative Asari and scientific Salarians – are the most populous and politically powerful races in the known galaxy. Several other species with embassies at the Citadel, including humans, are termed Citadel races and are considered members of the galactic community. In the margins are the non-Citadel races – outsiders who, for a mix of biological and cultural reasons, fail to adhere to the Citadel norms and laws. There are dozens of non-Citadel races including the war-like Krogans whose population is controlled by a Council-sponsored biological weapon of Salarian design and administration called the ‘genophage’, the planetless but technologically adept Quarians who travel in a Migrant Fleet of assorted salvaged ships after their home world was overrun by sentient machines of their own making, and the Geth, the artificial intelligence that rose up against the Quarians.
The first game introduces Commander Shepard, the protagonist and player-character. Both a ‘heavy hero’ – a character in an interactive drama, and a ‘digital dummy’ – a placeholder representing the player’s intervention in the game (Burn and Schott 2004), Shepard can be configured in a number of ways. The player can choose to make Shepard male or female and alter eight aspects of Shepard’s face by selecting from preset options for eyes, jaw, forehead, ears, nose, and lips. In addition to these purely representational characteristics, players also configure Shepard’s sociocultural background and service history – decisions that affect gameplay by modifying the rate at which Shepard’s reputation is altered. Also affecting gameplay, players configure Shepard’s character class and in so doing determine Shepard’s capacities to act in and upon the Mass Effect universe. Following Newman (2002), I maintain that in order to understand the significance of gameplay it is essential to approach game characters as ‘sets of available capabilities and capacities’, as vehicles, ‘equipment to be utilised in the gameworld by the player’.
In this regard, it is important to note that as a human, the player can choose for Shepard one of six different character classes differentiated by the skills they avail the player and their capacity to act in the gamespace: Soldier (primarily physical prowess), Engineer (primarily technological know-how), Adept (primarily biotic powers), Infiltrator (some physical and technological capabilities), Sentinel (some biotic and technological capabilities), and Vanguard (some physical and biotic capabilities). This is reminiscent of a trope in fantasy role-playing games, inspired by the fiction of Tolkien and codified in the prototypical Dungeons & Dragons, that represents humans as more versatile and adaptable than other races, which tend to be articulated to one or another essential characteristic or affinity. In this vein, other races in the Mass Effect universe appear to make life choices under more restrictive, determinative constraints. Asari, known for their biotic prowess, diplomatic sensibilities, and sensuality, can be found in commando units, dancing in nightclubs, and administering trading houses and shops. Krogans, with their fierce reputations for physical strength, are all mercenaries or thugs, and any Quarians the player meets reveal abilities to access and manipulate technology. The Citadel, furthermore, is replete with Turian soldiers and police, as well as Salarian scientists. Hundreds of characters the player can meet during their travels conform to, and thus confirm, the prevalence of these generalities, including the characters recruited into Shepard’s squad.
Like other popular RPGs, games in the Mass Effect series index identity by articulating characters that afford players different capacities to distinct representations often grounded in racially or ethnically charged constructions (Voorhees 2009; Tronstad 2008; Smith 2006). As Douglas argues in this volume, the conventions of digital role-playing games tend to conflate race and culture, and the Mass Effect series is, in the main, no exception. By ascribing racially essentialist properties to culturally learned dispositions, the series conflates race and culture in order to speak to both biological and ideological difference. This is especially significant in that, like the Warcraft franchise, race is not simply a part of the Mass Effect universe; it is also a central pillar of its narrative discourse, further encouraging players to engage the games as discourses centrally concerned with difference.
When a routine mission goes awry, Shepard is thrown into intrigue, and then into the spotlight. Made a Spectre, a special operative with the Council’s mandate, Shepard goes off in search of a rouge agent, Saren, in order to uncover a Trojan Horse plot for an invasion of the Citadel by the terrifying Reapers. Shepard is accompanied on this mission by human crewmates Ashley Williams and Kaiden Alenko, and along the way recruits a Turian ex-cop, Garrus Vakarian, an Asari researcher, Liara T’Soni, a Krogan warlord, Urdnot Wrex, and a Quarian scout, Tali’Zorah nar Rayya. This mission, significantly, highlights the importance of biological and cultural difference. In-game dialogue and cutscenes emphasize that, as a Spectre, Shepard is a pawn in the politics of recognition; he represents humanity’s potential to contribute to the Council and its aims. Before Saren is exposed as a traitor, he mocks Shepard before the Council, saying: ‘Your species needs to learn its place Shepard. You’re not ready to join the Council. You’re not even ready to join the Spectres’ (BioWare 2007). In a cutscene following Shepard’s induction into the Spectres, Shepard’s mentor, Captain Anderson, reminds Shepard that his appointment is part of humanity’s struggle for political agency, and is necessary because the Council is unwilling to commit resources to an issue primarily affecting human colonies. As the narrative backbone of ME, this mission defines gameplay as an effort to secure cultural recognition and political representation.
It is reinforced by the repeated motif of interracial conflict. In one of the first missions available, Shepard and crew discover an alien species, Rachni, being studied in a weapons lab. These are the last Rachni, the player learns through dialogue, as the entire species was thought to be pursued to extinction after a terrible war. The player can either destroy the Rachni in line with the Council’s will or, more benevolently, spare them so that they might live out their lives in peace. At another point in the game, Shepard discovers that Saren has a cure for the genophage and is using it in order to breed an army of Krogan slaves. This prompts Urdnot Wrex to demand the player’s help in securing the cure and, under the great majority of circumstances, force a confrontation with Shepard that requires Wrex be killed to advance the game. Another encounter is with Cerberus, a pro-human paramilitary group widely considered a terrorist organization. The token human Spectre, an ‘ambush journalist’, asks Shepard to publicly advocate human-centered politics and the player is given the option to support Cerberus’s militant ideology, disambiguate, or support the Council’s more conservative path to full political parity.
The theme of biological and cultural difference is also prevalent in ME2. In this game, Shepard works for Cerberus because the Council will not take the continued Reaper threat seriously. Shepard is tasked with hunting the Collectors, an alien race that has taken up where Saren left off, attacking human colonies and working to facilitate a Reaper invasion. Though the player starts with the company of two human Cerberus agents, Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor, other companions are acquired through various missions. One such mission involves recruiting a Salarian scientist working to develop a cure for a virus. In order to recruit the Salarian, the player must help the plague-ravished community and in so doing learns that the virus was unleashed for the purpose of casting suspicion on humans, who only recently moved into the community. Talking to one Turian character in the community yields dialogue lamenting how property values fall whenever humans integrate into a community and suspicions that humans engineered the virus in order to make room for more humans in the community. Another mission has the player recruit Krogan warlord Okeer, only to find Okeer assassinated for his effort to breed Krogan that exemplified the strength and cunning the genophage saps from the Krogan gene pool. With Okeer dead, Shepard can recruit Okeer’s finest specimen, Grunt, but doing so also means later helping Grunt discover what it means to be a Krogan. And toward the end of the game, after Tali, the same character from ME, has been recruited to Shepard’s team, the player receives assistance from a Geth fighter, Legion. Legion may also be recruited to join Shepard’s squad, but only if the player is prepared to handle the cultural and political friction that arises between Quarian and Geth squad members.
In drawing the player’s attention to the theme of cultural and biological difference, these scenarios highlight how the games in the Mass Effect series function as cultural technologies that legitimate neo-liberal multiculturalist ideology. They construct a context for understanding the processes of gameplay enacted by means of the series’ dialogue events, dialogue wheel, and paragon and renegade dialogue choices. The ability to choose from a range of dialogue options does more than pepper the story with the player’s own personality; it ultimately affects the outcome of the story. As Travis argues in this volume, the player’s performance of Western exceptionalism is indexed in Shepard’s paragon and renegade scores. Dialogue options that contribute to the player’s paragon score are located in the top left of the dialogue wheel and reflect concern for others and commitment to interracial cooperation. Dialogue options that contribute to the player’s renegade score are located in the bottom left of the dialogue wheel and reflect selfish and aggressive responses that underscore commitment to human interests above all else. Paragon and renegade scores not only open up additional dialogue options, they are also evaluated at the end of the game in order to determine how certain circumstances are resolved.
In the final act of ME, Shepard and crew confront Saren after he has allowed the Reaper vanguard, Sovereign, access to the Citadel. After defeating (or talking down) Saren, Shepard makes contact with the human fleet speeding to the rescue and is informed that the fleeing Council is in danger. In what is arguably the most important dialogue choice in the game2, the player can either order the fleet to save the Council, focus their efforts on attacking Sovereign, or ‘let the Council die’. Sovereign’s defeat is a foregone conclusion, but the player’s performance is consequential and affects the scripted scene that follows this cinematic battle. In the instances where the Council is present, humanity is offered a seat on the Council. If the player has a higher paragon than renegade score, the Councilors laud Shepard as an exemplar of humanity’s capacity to contribute to the greater good as a fully fledged member of the galactic community:
Salarian Councilor: Your heroic and selfless actions stand for everything humanity and the Alliance stand for …
Asari Councilor: Humanity has shown that it is ready to stand as a defender and protector of the Galaxy. You have proved you are ready to join our ranks and serve beside us on the Citadel Council.
However, when the player has a higher renegade than paragon score, the Councilors praise Shepard’s force of will as evidence that humanity can contribute to the greater good as a fully fledged member of the galactic community:
Salarian Councilor: Your species has an indomitable will, a fierce, savage spirit that will not bend or yield. We used to believe that this made humans stubborn, even dangerous.
Turian Councilor: But now we understand that these traits are what make you strong … The Council needs humanity, and its strength.
In this manner, the paragon and renegade scores function as indexes of the player’s position on the question of exceptionalism and internationalism (for another take on this, see Travis, this volume). This is made explicitly evident in the resolutions offered if the Council perishes in the battle. Udina leads the conversation and explains that the losses suffered by the Citadel fleets have made the human Alliance stronger by comparison. If the player has a higher paragon than renegade score, Udina argues that a Council should not only include a human but be led by one as well:
Ambassador Udina: They believe in us because of you, Shepard. You saved the galaxy from Sovereign. You’re a symbol of everything good to humanity; our courage; our strength.
But, if the player has a higher renegade than paragon score, Udina proclaims that it is time for humanity to ‘ascend to its rightful place in the galaxy’:
Ambassador Udina: They believe in humanity because of you. Your ruthless pursuit of Saren and the Geth. Your defiance of the Council. That’s what humans are capable of. That’s how we’ll defeat the Reapers. The others will follow us Shepard. We will have a human Council with a human chairman.
These various endings are the consequence of two conditional operations. The survival or death of the Council is determined by a single instance of user input, while the Council’s assessment of humanity (or human plans for the Council) is the result of the player’s configuration of dialogue events over the course of the entire game. In addition to the notable dialogue events (the Rachni queen, genophage, etc.) throughout the Mass Effect series where racial disparity is put into direct consideration, the repetition of this core mechanic in both games ensures that players have ample opportunity to perform their identity vis-à-vis the Council and the international community it represents3.
The Mass Effect series does offer some narrative assessment of the player’s performance of dialogue events. In the first game, paragon endings are accompanied by uplifting music and set in open locations that affirm the player’s performance as a good response to contemporary social difference. Renegade endings, on the other hand, are accompanied by ominous music and set in cramped spaces that emphasize that something has been diminished in this performance and subsequent outcome. ME2 offers a more nuanced narrative assessment of the player’s configuration of dialogue events and considers the player’s attitude toward difference as well as the player’s knowledge of the different races and cultures represented in Shepard’s crew. In the final mission of the game, squad-mates die when assigned to the wrong task (that is, one that is culturally alien to the character) and are especially vulnerable when Shepard has not secured their loyalty by engaging in a side quest, most of which are rooted in an issue arising from biological or cultural differences. The gloomier endings of ME and the ME2 scenarios in which the majority of Shepard’s crew perish are, arguably, procedurally determined evaluations of the player’s performance. In this way, configurative performances of heterogeneity are validated by the (truth) game’s procedures.
The Mass Effect series also makes value claims about players’ performances in relation to another set of gameplay mechanics: squad management. Like the narrative claims generated in response to the configuration of dialogue events, these claims are procedural. Mass Effect, like the Final Fantasy RPG series4, validates the player’s willingness and ability to configure heterogeneous squads by enabling greater success in combat (Voorhees 2009). Though the Mass Effect series otherizes opponents, like most all RPGS and many digital games in general, this should not obscure how the series also advocates the coordination of difference.
Whenever Shepard’s ship docks, the player must choose two members of the crew to accompany Shepard as a squad. It is only as a squad of three – never as Shepard, or any other character, alone – that the player fights opponents. While the player directly controls Shepard, maneuvering through a three-dimensional environment as well as aiming and firing weapons and abilities, the two characters in the squad are governed by the game’s artificial intelligence and engage opponents based on a minimalistic set of player-defined parameters. However, the player can also pause the action and issue direct orders to characters in the squad, facilitating more direct squad management. The player’s squad management is constantly evaluated and assessed, and performance is indexed not by means of an abstract set of scores; rather, it is represented through the evolving state of every shoot-out and battle.
Even more than the first game, ME2 explicitly encodes the relationship between a character’s capacity to act and racial and/or cultural identity. And even though ME2 features a larger cast of characters where not every character exhibits a unique composition of attributes, each non-human fulfills a specific niche
A couple of playable characters, Garrus and Tali, return from the first game. Tali is a notable squad member both because she belongs to a non-Citadel race and because both her characteristics are technology. This is the same for Legion, the Geth construct also from a non-Citadel race. The final character representing a non-Citadel race is Grunt, the Krogan rescued from Okeer, whose characteristics are both physical. For these and other non-human characters, their racial identity is an essential component of their profession. Tali’s character class is listed as ‘Quarian Machinist’, Legion’s is listed as ‘Geth Infiltrator’, and Grunt’s is listed as ‘Krogan Berserker’. Non-human Citadel races get the same treatment. Mordin the ‘Salarian Scientist’, Samara the ‘Asari Justicar’, Thane the ‘Drell Assassin’, and Garrus the ‘Turian Rebel’ are all identified in a manner that conflates their biological and cultural identities. Of course, these titles all serve as a shorthand for indexing the different sets of capacities the characters add to the squad.
When more than one character shares the same set of traits – for instance, both Thane and Jacob have one physical and one biotic characteristic – each character still offers the player distinct capacities for action. Jacob’s skills are more suited to close-quarters combat and Thane’s skills are more suited to ranged fighting. The two characters with two biotic traits are easily distinguishable too. The human biotic, Jack, has powerful attacks that affect all targets in the area while the Asari, Samara, has highly focused attacks particularly effective against individual opponents. These different sets of capabilities, each powerful but limited, can be combined and recombined each time the player docks Shepard’s ship and forms an active squad. With each different configuration of characters, the squad’s offensive and defensive capabilities can be altered to adapt to a variety of situations defined by the opponents that populate them.
There are five primary groups of opponents in ME2: the Blue Suns, Blood Pack, and Eclipse mercenary outfits, as well as the Geth and the Collectors. Each set of opponents employs different tactics and brings their own unique offensive and defensive capabilities. This means that different squad configurations are more effective against different opponents, with their distinct strengths and weakness. Facing off against the Eclipse mercenary outfit means fighting against biotic and tech powers – defensive shields and barriers as well as ranged offense. This means putting together a squad with sufficient tech and biotic abilities to neutralize the opponent’s defenses as well as the capacity to inflict damage while fending off attack. The squad configuration of Shepard, Tali, and Miranda would suit this task fine, but the same squad would be less suitable up against the Blood Pack mercenaries. Because the Blood Pack fights at close range and uses armor for defense more than biotic barriers and tech shields, this squad configuration would likely encounter difficulty. However, Shepard, Samara, and Garrus, having the combined ability to disable individual enemies and attack from afar, could more easily handle the Blood Pack. The player is given background information about each mission, making this type of preparation possible, and sometimes necessary.
It is through the commonplace, core mechanic of squad management that the games in the Mass Effect series most explicitly operate as cultural technologies reifying neo-liberal multiculturalism. Just as the player performs their identity through dialogue events, squad management is a platform for players to enact possible responses to a society saturated with difference. As a discursive formation within a regime of truth, the Mass Effect series affirms configurative performances that embrace heterogeneity. As a truth game, the series allows players to enact responses to specific states and then determines whether those responses are adequate or inadequate, and to what degree. This determination is objective to the extent that the rules are enforced by the game software, but partial and subjective to the extent that it represents an outcome determined by the game developer’s (cultural) logic.
Another name for this operation is procedural rhetoric. According to Bogost, procedural rhetoric is how computational media makes arguments. It is premised on the core characteristic of computational media: procedurality, a term that describes how the execution of rules produces specific behaviors (2007, 4). In this light, Mass Effect can quantitatively evaluate the player’s performance because the games ‘make claims about how things work’ by ‘assembling rules together to describe the function of systems’ (Bogost 2008, 125 [original emphasis]). The series’ rules are structured in a manner that mirrors the conviction that differences, racial and cultural, are best embraced and managed toward a common end. To this end, in combat, every moment of gameplay generates feedback assessing the player’s performance.
In this chapter, I have endeavored to explain how the Mass Effect series of digital RPGs functions as a truth game that reifies neo-liberal multiculturalism. According to this notion of multiculturalism every difference is valuable – but not inherently – only to the extent that it can be made to contribute to some pre-established goal. As the analysis has shown, this cultural logic is affirmed procedurally, as a result of the systems of rules that structure the game. This applies to the rules governing the resolution of story elements as well as those that dictate how combat is resolved. The Mass Effect series makes the cultural logic of neo-liberal multiculturalism more tangible than other media forms by enabling players to test the validity of their propositions within its regime of truth.
The conclusions generated in this analysis are generalizable. As I have argued elsewhere, several more recent iterations in the Final Fantasy series celebrate a similar neo-liberal multiculturalism (Voorhees 2009). But, other RPGs that task the player with party or squad management – the Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and Xeno series, for example – also exhibit characteristics that could be articulated to this form of responding to cultural difference. It is also possible that other squad-based games such as Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy series and multi-player shooters such as Valve’s Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead series could be analyzed in order to examine potential procedural rhetorics of multiculturalism. Multi-player games, in particular, promise interesting complications as the procedures enacted by artificial intelligences are complicated with real patterns of lived play.
Notes
1 The same can be said for the notion of multiculturalism expressed in the Final Fantasy series (Voorhees 2009). However, in the Final Fantasy series, this construction of multiculturalism was abandoned for a neo-liberal model of self, at which point Final Fantasy games began to endorse radically different responses to the proliferation of ethnic, national, and cultural difference.
2 Aside from the decision about the fate of the Rachni and the confrontation with Wrex, only one other scenario (involving a corruption inquiry at the Noveira spaceport) enables the player to gain as many paragon or renegade points as the decision to save or abandon the Council.
3 Mass Effect 2 also features a substantial number of dialogue events configured by means of dialogue wheels with paragon and renegade options. These options represent the same set of values they referenced in the first game and, like Mass Effect, are indexed and affect gameplay by enabling additional dialogue options but do not affect the story directly.
4 However, unlike the Final Fantasy series, Mass Effect maintains a consistent message. In both games in the series, characters are similarly differentiated and the player is required to successfully coordinate them in order to succeed.
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