Diversity in Mass Effect
by Guest Contributor BomberGirl, originally published at Girl in the Machine
I’ve recently been replaying Mass Effect, Bioware’s 2007 action RPG, and I’m totally in love. Though there’s plenty of things I could babble on about, I want to discuss the first thing I noticed when I brought the game home back during the holidays.
Women and people of color. They aren’t invisible . . . in fact, in this game, they’re all over the place! Just like, you know, real life! Way too often, sci fi falls into the trap of showing us a universe where PoC and women have been sucked into a black hole or something and no longer exist. Mass Effect introduces a galaxy that’s truly diverse, an experience we don’t often get in video games.
An interesting facet of Mass Effect’s immense cultural salad is the absence of racial tension among humans. Humanity’s discovery of advanced Prothean artifacts is only quite recent; their technology jumps two hundred years, and thus all contact and interaction with alien races is relatively sudden. These aliens all look down on the human race and treat them as lesser beings. As the first human member of an elite agency called Spectre, the protagonist Shepard must combat prejudice and bigotry as well as your typical monsters and other foes.
Mass Effect pitches humanity into a situation where all racial tensions seem to vanish in order to unite against the prejudice of the alien races. Now, I realize that Bioware did not craft this game for the purpose of social commentary, so I don’t blame it for not directly addressing human racial interaction along with the new problems presented by alien prejudice. It’s a fascinating thought, though: could humanity put internal racism aside when all of us, collectively, face the same from an outside source?
Mass Effect’s major hub of human-alien interaction is the Citadel, a massive space station in the Serpent Nebula. As Shepard, you’re let loose there after the game’s prologue, free to collect sidequests or continue the main storyline. Sidequests have always been my favorite part of role-playing games, and so I was thrilled to see the sheer variety of characters that seek your help. There’s eldery crime boss Helena Blake, who sends you off to take out her competition. A mourning widower named Samesh Bhatia pleads you to retrieve the body of his wife, a marine who dies during the prologue. Reporter Emily Wong needs you to dig up some dirt on an organized crime syndicate. And there’s many, many more.
So we have some pretty great diversity going on in this game — with the special bonus of none it feeling forced or patronizing — along with a springboard for racial discussion due to alien prejudice. However, Mass Effect takes things a step further.
It would have been easy to treat prejudice in a two-dimensional fashion with snarling, discriminative aliens and cowering humans, but many alien characters find such prejudice deplorable and many human characters despise aliens as a whole. Notably, two human members of Shepard’s squad deal with their own race issues.
Ashley Williams begins the game with a deep mistrust of all alien races and often confesses to Shepard that she doesn’t think the nonhuman squad members should go unsupervised. As Shepard, you can bring two squad members with you on your quests, and if you pick Ashley and a nonhuman member, such as Tali the quarian, they have some interesting conversations during the game’s many elevator rides. In Tali’s case, Ashley points out that the quarian’s strange dress makes many humans think of the evil geth, and admits that she shares this opinion. As Tali answers her questions, Ashley displays a growing understanding of alien differences and slowly overcomes her prejudices.
Kaiden Alenko is a biotic (Mass Effect’s “mage” class) who was subjected to Biotic Acclimation and Temperance Training, or “Brain Camp,” as a child to temper his powers. He describes the experience as particularly brutal, staffed only by aliens since humanity had yet to fully understand biotics. Kaiden had a violent run-in with one of his instructors, an ex-military turian named Vyrnnus who loathed humans. After tragedy strikes and all is said and done, Kaiden points out that Vyrnnus, though terrible, was just one turian, and not representative of an entire race. Despite his traumatizing experiences at the hands of this instructor, Kaiden does not allow them to slant his own views of an entire race.
Over all, Mass Effect does an exceptional job on many accounts. Women and people of color share important roles and characters tangle with race issues that are relevant to us in the real world. Though the game is far from perfect (expect a post about the asari Consort in the future), it’s a solid effort from Bioware and addresses many topics that most games won’t even touch.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
TierList E wrote:
*excited* I knew bioware was awesome! I have no idea how Mass Effect got under my radar but now I’m definitely going to go fetch it. I still play Jade Empire like 5 million times in a row.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 10:41 am ¶
RJG wrote:
GAMER NERD TIME
It’s nice to hear about something other than the fact that there’s the opportunity to have sex in the game (even though the media was touting that the game had virtual rape orgies etc etc etc). I don’t have a PC or XBox so I never played this game, but I’m a big fan of Bioware and this review is good to hear.
From what I do know about the game, which may be good for the purposes of this blog, is that you do get to fully customize your character not only in your appearance/gender, but upbringing and social background as well — all of which apparently have [minor?] influences in the storyline.
I’m wondering if BomberGirl has any thoughts on how the social situations the main character experiences are influenced by choosing if your character is male or female or born on Earth or born in space or etc etc etc, since it sounds like she didn’t feel there were any notable human to human issues in terms of race.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 11:14 am ¶
Monie wrote:
“could humanity put internal racism aside when all of us, collectively, face the same from an outside source?”
No, a certain group (which although easy to guess, will remain nameless) would try to show that they were superior to everyone else. So it would be just like it is now in the real world.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 11:51 am ¶
Myles wrote:
#3
You mean Asian people? Or White people?
Oooh, you mean Black people, right?
I’m pretty sure every race would go scrambling to show off how cool and superior they were when faced with alien overlords.
If course that might have been your point when you left out the name of the people you were talking about. More to expose the reader’s racism than your own, right?
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 1:54 pm ¶
Philly Phil wrote:
“could humanity put internal racism aside when all of us, collectively, face the same from an outside source?”
this question has echoes of the intense conclusion to WATCHMEN, which some of you may have seen a trailer of before Dark Knight.
the graphic novel was written by alan moore.
sorry for that tangent. i think this game sounds awesome! where do i buy?
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 2:05 pm ¶
Juan wrote:
I’m with Monie on stating ‘No.’ Heck, the boot on the neck would probably get heavier.
And I really really wish I had a better computer so I can run the PC version. =/
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 3:04 pm ¶
magda wrote:
My guess is that our alien overlords would use race to pit us against each other, just like European imperialists have done throughout history.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 5:27 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
Why not? I thought the “Asian American” identity was putting internal racism aside because of the outside racism. Then again, for second-generation Asians, there probably isn’t that inter-Asian conflict in the first place.
Then again, I see foreign-born Lebanese and Syrians uniting as Arabs, foreign-born Indians and Pakistanis uniting as desis, etc.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 5:53 pm ¶
Numa wrote:
I think it’s a bit presumptive to assume that aliens would differentiate between humans the same way humans differentiate between each other. I mean, who’s to say aliens who invade earth rely on their vision the same way we do? So potential alien invaders may not even pick up on race tensions!
That being said, I definitely think being subjugated by aliens would unite humanity. Because at least humans, are well, humans! So prejudice against race would just be replaced by prejudice against different species.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 6:51 pm ¶
Tony wrote:
While I’d love to beleive that under prejudice we’d all get along.
Sadly I sort of side with Monie, only the ‘certain group’ in my case is all of humanity.
Look at African Americans today and all the way back to post-slavery.
Instead of “We’re all black and under Jim Crow” we often get people questioning ones “Blackness” and some tension between the “lighter skinned” and “darker skinned” black people.
Truth is, humanity will probably always bicker some about race, perhaps it’d become a bit less important, but some people (of all races) will probably always choose to say the people who look like them are the best and everyone else is inferior somehow.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 6:58 pm ¶
Tony wrote:
Oh, and I have to note of Mass Effect, one of the things I do love about Bioware and other games like this is that we get to create our own characters.
It’s so nice as a multiracial (white, black and Choctaw tribe native american) person to actually be able to play a hero who atleast looks multi-racial.
As opposed to some obviously white or (more rarely) other enicity lead character who is supposed to be “me” in the game.
It’d be nice if more games had deep create-a-character options that allow people to make the lead character look like the player. (or atleast an idealized version of the player.)
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 7:03 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:
@RJG -
I’ll ask BG and see what she says.
And it is interesting to note that the customization of characters was a big selling point for Rockband, after Guitar Hero underwent a few character changes.
@Philly Phil -
*makes note to get watchmen*
@Tony -
We are all star bellied Sneetches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneetches
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 7:28 pm ¶
TierList E wrote:
Yes, Rockband even lets the browner characters have lighter palms! And they’ve created *several* brown women as some of the auto-characters. Several! They even had a dark brown woman with a mohawk on lead guitar.
As rock is stereotypically more involved with the majority and are not crawling with black women as famous artists, they actually had an excuse to leave us out, or just give us a token. They didn’t! They even made brown non-black PoC.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 8:15 pm ¶
no one important wrote:
Dadgummit! Finally there’s an RPG that’s reasonably progressive in its depiction of women and minorities, and it just HAD to be a game that I couldn’t get into to save my life (too FPS-ish for my tastes).
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 8:22 pm ¶
Kelvin wrote:
Not trying to derail the Mass Effect thread but COD4 has a minority starring as one of the main characters in the game (although he dies after his CH-47 gets caught in a nuclear blast).
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 10:21 pm ¶
Shauna wrote:
Wow this is so crazy I learned about this in my political psychology class: one of the ways to overcome intergroup conflict (in this case, interracial conflict) is to create a superordinate identity that unites the groups (in this case, humanity). The idea, which is well-supported, is that there will always be intergroup conflict because we get our own self-esteem from the status and characteristics of our own group. Therefore the best way to fight destructive intergroup conflict is to create new groups with conflicts that are less destructive, rather than trying fruitlessly to end all intergroup conflict.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 1:45 am ¶
Mogs wrote:
“could humanity put internal racism aside when all of us, collectively, face the same from an outside source? ”
well, i’m a firm believer in looking to history for answers to questions like this one. at a certain point in US history, both black and Irish people faced racism from the majority. and yet, blacks and Irish also harbored intense racist feelings towards each other, each community blaming the other for stealing jobs, creating crime, etc. Tony in comment 10 also gives a good example of this type of situation.
so, not necessarily
@Torontonian: I think what you’re referencing is nationalism, not racism. in my opinion, they are two similar but distinct issues; what do other people think?
side note- Harry Turtledove’s series Balance, in which aliens attack earth during WW2 and the warring nations try to unite against them, sort of deals with this topic. but again, more nationalism than racism.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 6:49 pm ¶