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How the game directs perceptions may be seen early in the first game, the first time that Shepard meets major character Garrus, a Turian, an alien species which is known to disdain humans and reject their growing significance. The development of alliances with different species builds across the many many hours of gameplay, and serves to constantly ask questions of the player in the general ethical area of sameness and difference.
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Despite numerous complications, Shepard manages to make it through to a final showdown with the Reapers, wherein the fate of all galactic species will be decided. Over the three games, Shepard will lead the fight against the Reapers and the entities the Reapers use to further their agenda. This protagonist is a human named Shepard, who we can choose to play as a man or a woman. Not everyone believes in this threat, so the protagonist / player must build alliances with those members of other species who will help in combating the threat, and then work with their very different priorities and cultural specificities to prevent the annihilation of all of them. It will later be explained by a representative of the Reapers that this is done in order to prevent more powerful species from oppressing and retarding the development of as yet less-advanced species. All species however face a threat from an ancient apparently artificial intelligence, called the Reapers, which wipes out all advanced species every fifty thousand years. Humanity are the newcomers, looked down on to some extent by other species. The game is set in distant space next century, when the discovery of so-called mass relays which make intergalactic travel possible brings humanity into contact with numerous other intelligent species. Even so, aspects of the games have been thoughtfully critiqued, such as their gender politics (Lavigne, 2015 Youngblood, 2018), use of time and history (Carvalho, 2015), and their multicultural agenda, albeit from different perspectives to this article (Voorhees, 2012 Patterson, 2015 Fuchs, Phillips & Rabitsch, 2019). 1), or that the game's "level of interactive immersion sets the game apart as a unique experience in today's saturated digital game market" (Kuling, 2014, p. Scholarly articles on the games claim such things as "it cannot be denied that Mass Effect matters" (Zekany, 2015, p. Kyle MunKittrick's blog article "Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation" serves as a good summary of the passion of many fans' response to the games, as do the several responses to MunKittrick's reflections (2012).
#DAWN OF THE REAPERS SERIES#
Within video game criticism, BioWare's series of three Mass Effect games is considered a benchmark for a type of video game invested in ethical reflection and attempted psychological depth. This article will also be dealing with this area, in the attempt to argue further for the games' status as Canadian cultural texts, as well as briefly considering two overlooked aspects of the debate: the issue of Indigenous belonging, and the groundedness or otherwise of human ethnicity as exemplified in scenarios set in the future. It is accordingly not surprising that the broad area of dealing with difference has become one of the principal focuses for content analysis dealing with the games. Keywords: multicuturalism, morality, Canada, race, ethnicity, space opera, Indigenous peoples Revisiting Mass Effect's MulticulturalismĪt first sight, Canadian company BioWare's critically and commercially successful action-adventure video game series, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, is one more text supporting multicultural respect. The article examines the games' leveraging of these issues by way of their status as Canadian cultural documents, and therefore as participants in conversations about multicultural respect, but also in terms of two issues which exemplify gaps in the games' would-be respectful politics of difference: 1) questions of Indigenous ownership, priority and hierarchy 2) the common space opera supposition that politicized ethnic identity positioning will have largely disappeared as populations become more mixed. At the same time, the games' generally sensitive treatment of difference can be seen to be using some of the conventions of the space opera to elide certain aspects of Canadian cultural history and politics which have proven resistant to self-congratulatory discourses concerning the conviviality of the non-coercive nation. Don't Fear the Reapers, Fear Multiculturalism: Canadian Contexts and Ethnic Elisions in Mass Effect by David Callahan AbstractīioWare's critically and commercially successful roleplaying video game series Mass Effect has legitimately been read as supporting multicultural respect through its gameplay and narrative content.