On Fascism in Cinematic RPGs
Being asked to play politician, poor little ghost boy, let me be your reaper toy
I’ve been playing the Mass Effect trilogy, recently remastered, and it’s dredged up old feelings and frustrations from when analysis and exegesis of video games were as natural to me as breathing, as it was for so many autists of my generation. It’s been some years since I did it with any regularity; it’s not that I’ve moved on so much as I’ve become a little mistrustful of the volume, both in terms of space and sound, that people like me can take up. These days, thinking about and writing books is a quieter, more fulfilling outlet than writing about games. And that’s to say nothing of what seems like a fundamental corrosivity at the heart of game consumer culture. It’s hard to be generous to the thing you say you love in that context.
Still, though, Mass Effect, those were the days. I think I’m probably more nostalgic for the era of “cinematic RPGs” than most. For a good decade firms like Bioware and Obsidian mined a vein of storytelling in games that was overtly steeped in the visual language of film, and that had knock-on effects to the form of play that I still think are interesting; Mass Effect 2 and Alpha Protocol hit what was, for me, a platonic ideal of video game formalism, with gameplay and story arcs neatly parceled into roughly hourlong units of gunplay that are then interspersed with shorter sequences of character intrigue.
As a thinking and feeling consumer in 2021, it can be extremely difficult to tolerate the Mass Effect trilogy. It’s not a relic, necessarily. Arts and crafts are still made without a single thought given to their ideology — Zack Snyder’s DC Universe seems as much a descendant of Mass Effect as anything, for reasons that will hopefully be self-evident by the end of this essay — but it feels like, if the games were new concerns in the present day, they would be met with a lot more opposition.
This is the way I have to compel myself to see these games in order to play them in 2021: Under the delusion that Mass Effect does not have thematic concerns, either as a full trilogy or in its individual games, that are worthy of textual exegesis. They have a lot of aesthetic concerns, but very few thematic ones.
I absolutely believe that this is the most charitable read you can give to the series: It’s the product of a lot of nerdy craftsmen whose major touchstones were (1) the plot beats and dialogue rhythms of action movies from the 1970’s through the 1990’s and (2) Joss Whedon’s TV show formula. You have to assume that the creators approached everything from the standpoint of “what would be cool to do here” in a complete vacuum. You have to assume there’s no grand plan or auteurist vision, despite the fixation on filmic elements inherent to “cinematic RPGs”.
If you don’t assume any of that, then you have to recognize and take seriously how the most urgent and considered throughline in the entire series is not even the veneration of the sacred profession of soldiering, but the ways in which the populations that Troops serve are infantile and nameless / faceless. The names and faces not belonging to Troops, in the Mass Effect trilogy, are either civilian authorities who are uniformly venal, fearful and feckless, or Troop analogues (cops, Troop veterans unhappily assuming civilian leadership roles, wealthy civilian ”human supremacists”) who really get and sympathize with the struggle of the Troop, not in protecting those nameless, faceless civilian masses from existential threats, but in dealing with callow “politicians” and the barriers to action that they pointlessly erect.
In Mass Effect 1 and 2, it is relatively easy to assume that these aspects are little more than playground mimicry, less of Schwarzenegger / Stallone / Willis action movie beats than their white panic granddaddies, Bronson and Eastwood. Bailey, the rule-flaunting police chief who gets things done is nothing more than a trope, the Dirty Harry cop whose burden of duty reflects Shepard’s similar burdens as Troop. Likewise, Commander Shepard’s mentor Admiral Anderson is nothing more than Sean Connery’s Untouchables character with the father figure vibes turned to 11.
You can just let that all be meaningless noise, a kind of juvenile glossolalia, if you really try. Mass Effect 3, though? It takes itself and its themes seriously, and in so doing it becomes gleefully, overtly fascist. The “damned politicians!” sound bite that you got occasionally in the preceding games becomes a thrumming echo. Over and over again, the player is subjected to some beloved character (Joker, Garrus, James, even Liara) bemoaning how ignorant and offensive the quietude of civilian safe zones / hubs are given that elsewhere in the galaxy, a comparably faceless menace is committing unimaginable genocide.
Functionally, this refrain is meant to serve to remind players of the stakes and how things are really, truly serious now that the Reapers have finally arrived. But the cumulative effect is to enforce the notion that the Troops of the setting are the only people with any legitimacy or point of view, full stop.
As a Troop, you as Shepard are given the choice of pitying the peaceful civilians, in recognition of how their illusory civil society will soon dissipate (at which point they will regrettably come to know just how important Troops like yourself are), or you can take offense and be disgusted by their softness and ignorance of the debts they owe to you. These are your options. The latter, in particular, is fascism personified. The conception of a virtuous, idyllic, but curiously unembodied and perpetually endangered populace (volk for short) is the seed in the center of the fascist imagination. Like a bad father, the fascist swells with pride at the thought of the volk, while also simultaneously finding himself repulsed by its need for him.
The germ of that repulsion is always evident through the game’s persistent, pathological anger toward journalists and civilian constraints on action, even when playing as the “good” version of Commander Shepard. If you’re playing as Renegade Shepard, the “bad” version of the character, then you more fully embody the other pillar of fascist ideology, the totalizing urge to exterminate external and internal threats to the volk. Even Javik the Prothean, who is surreally presented as a kind of ur-Renegade, is not castigated for his at-all-costs pitilessness, but rather at how little he recognizes and respects his fellow Troops, whose sacrifice serve his ends. His arc, as a brutal, imperialist fish-out-of-water, is coming to realize that the primitive races that he once conquered and enslaved are capable of doing his work.
I would rather not do any of that textual reading. I would rather Bioware’s writers just be gleeful, enthusiastic novices. I would rather keep in mind that writing in games has historically been a vestigial role, one technical and craft employees have been obligated to fill. I would so love for all of this ideology to amount to a kind of tragic accident. But even when I fast forward through Mass Effect 3’s dialogue whenever I can, it’s still not enough to avoid that ideology; how Riefenstahl the cinematography routinely gets and how some of its most egregious examples, such as the slow-motion dream sequences featuring the specter of a nameless (white, human) child in various states of hopeless danger, are not skippable at all.
But I’m bored, and it’s too hot to go outside, so when I need a break from reading journals and cold-soliciting weird writers, I’m out here shooting robots and soberly reflecting, once things settle down, on how thankless it is to make Hard Decisions.