Mass Effect

My favorite style of fiction I never knew I had

Having recently seen Drive and looking around for interpretations about it, I came upon a term that I had never really paid much attention to.

Neo-Noir.

What is Neo-Noir? It really is pretty much the same as Noir except that it’s used for works made from the 80s forward instead of up to the 60s. Other good recent examples are basically the whole Nolan movie catalogue, with Inception and The Dark Knight standing out prominently. (Memento and Insomnia also really look like it, but I have not seen them yet.)

Inception is my second favorite movie of all time, beaten only by The Empire Strikes Back. And when you stop and think about it, that movie also has Noir aesthetics all over it. Pretty much everything happening in Cloud City is prime Noir material.

Looking back at it, the first works of this style that I really fell in love with were Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell (including the TV series). Of course, you could argue that these are perhaps the two biggest cyberpunk movies ever made. But what is cyberpunk other than Noir with futuristic elements?

Which reminded me of Mirror’s Edge, one of my favorite videogames that I’ve always been thinking of as “cyberpunk without the futuristic elements”. Yeah, once you consider Neo-Noir to be a distinct category, it falls perfectly into it. The socially isolated protagonist living in a blurry gray world on the edge of legality. Characters looking for meaning in a heartless world and coming to bleak realizations about their own lives. And they hang out in a place that looks like this.

And suddenly it all came together: Mass Effect 2 is also a work of Neo Noir. The first game had already blown my mind, but I was amazed when I came out to the street on Omega. And never had a game felt so perfect as when I first stepped through the door into Afterlife. It is my favorite game of all time, with no contenders.

After the really cool opening and time jump, the game starts with the Illusive Man smoking in a dark room with his Femme Fatale henchwoman Miranda next to him. I could write a whole article about that. (And I probably will, eventually.)

It might be a bit of a stretch, but I feel that there are at least a great deal of thematic elements of Noir in the Witcher books. The world went to crap, there’s no justice, characters with questionable morales are trying to do the right thing when dealing with those who are morally bancrupt, and there’s always a slight doubt that maybe everyone getting conquered by the Empire might not be the worst idea. And while it would probably be a bit nonsensical to call Bound by Flame a noir fantasy game, the mood of dignified despair is certainly there.

Bonus content: All my favorite episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. You know, basically everything with Garak in it. (The Wire, Improbable Cause/The Die is cast, and In Pale Moonlight stand out.)

It comes as a bit of a surprise after all these years that there’s an umbrella term that encompasses pretty much my entire top list of greatest works of fiction ever made. But then, many of the works I mentioned are considered to be really great by a lot of people around the world, so it’s not like this is a style that hasn’t proven itself over the past decades. The period of their making also started just before I was born, which probably isn’t a coincidence either. It’s a style that I’ve been exposed to all my life. While the aesthetics of Noir and Neo-Noir are generally pretty easy to pin down, definitions of the genre are usually rather blurred and unclear. Yet at the same time, works tend to fall into a pretty narrow band of stories. Socially isolated protagonists who are living with one foot in prison and one foot in the grave whose lives have become empty and who are searching for any kind of meaning in their seemingly bleak worlds. Sometimes they catch a faint glimer of hope they can pursue, other times they doom themselves.

Questions about identity and filling an inherently meaningless existence with meaning are the basic foundations of Existentialism, which to me is really the only thing worth exploring in a story. I’ve been watching, reading, and playing stories of this type for all of my adult life and so I probably already do know most of what there is to know about it on an intuitive level. But as someone interesting in writing my own stories this seems like a great opportunity to refocusing my research.

Update: Some more that I totally forgot and didn’t think about: Hellboy, Thief, The Big Lebowsky, Leon the Professional, True Detective, Breaking Bad. I think it’s probably much harder for me to come up with a list of movies, videogames, and TV shows that don’t have a strong Neo-Noir aesthetic.

Setting up conflicts in worldbuilding

While I am revising my Ancient Lands setting, I’ve set down to once more give some deep thoughts to the underlying conflicts of the world. I make no secret about my oppinion that the Mass Effect series has the best worldbuilding I’ve ever seen anywhere. Not because there is a lot of lore on the locations and a long detailed history. In fact, there is barely anything in that regard, at least if you don’t read up on it in the ingame codex. Perhaps there is some, but I didn’t read any of it and I still think the worldbuilding is superb. The Mass Effect galaxy is incredible because it has lots of factions that are tightly interconnected with each other, forming a complex web of conflicts and alliances in which absolutely everyone is included in some way. And these groups are friends or enemies with each other not simply because the writers say so, but because they share a common past which can be sufficiently explained in three or four sentences but gives them good reason to feel what they feel, and in a way that perhaps doesn’t make you approve of, but at least understand their views. The same company that made the Mass Effect games also made the Dragon Age series at the same time, and while I am not as much a fan of that setting, it also excels at having lots of conflicts that affect everyone in some way and in which each side has some good points.

This made me realize that conflicts are really what makes a fictional setting tick. Cultures, landscapes, religion, and magic are all nice, but to get your audience invested in what is going on in the world and its people, underlying conflicts probably define the world more than anything else. This applies both to settings for roleplaying games, in which you usually want to give the players the option to chose the side their characters are taking, and to episodic fiction in which different parts and aspects of the world are explored in each story arc. So I’ve been looking at all the other fantasy and sci-fi worlds I think have great worldbuilding with interesting conflicts and dynamics between factions. From Star Wars to the Witcher, and from Halo to Forgotten Realms. And I made an important discovery when it comes to creating conflicts: Even if you have a conflict in which both sides have a point and you could easily get into the mind of a character of either group, the conflicts still always started because someone was a giant dick!

Back to Mass Effect, lots of nice sidestories with difficult moral descisions involve the alien Krogans and the human Cerberus group. In many cases you can sympathize with them, perhaps even support them, and actually very much like individual characters of these groups, even though many people consider them evil and villains. But the thing is that in the past their leaders made some descisions and ordered some actions that were really total dick moves. No questions about that; those things were wrong and they got what they deserved. But those past wrongs were not commited by the specific people you’re dealing with right now. These people can be really nice guys and they might not have done anything wrong. But for some reason or another, they are now part of this group that has a long and violent conflict with some other groups. The source of the conflict lies in the past, but it established some facts that still matter a lot right now. And I think that’s really the key when setting up some underlying conflicts for a setting rich with ambigous characters and descisions. Creating a conflict in which neither side is truly bad is really difficult, if not outright impossible. But that does not have to prevent the existence of conflicts in which neither side is truly bad now. If you want to set up a conflict that lasts for generations and affects whole peoples, make the conflict start with one terrible person making a really unfair descision. Doesn’t really matter if it’s too much black and white, because that person likely is long dead or may not appear in the story at all. What does matter is the people who are on opposing sides right now, and being sufficiently removed from the original source of the conflict, they can easily be as ambigous as you want. In Halo 2, some of the alien enemies quit the Covenant and start a civil war against their former masters, which put them on the same side as the humans. But that doesn’t change the fact that they had been the officers in charge of the Covenant army that had been leading a war of annihilation against humanity for the last 30 years. They hardly could be called friends by any stretch, but from that part in the story they have to work together and fight their common enemy, whether they like it or not. There still is great hostility between them and from a worldbuilding perspective you can still regard them as two opposing sides in conflict with each other. You can sympathize with characters on both sides, but also have no trouble at all understanding accepting that they won’t be nice to each other and getting into fights.

So this is my appeal and my advice: Conflicts neither have to be black and white, nor fairly balanced. You can have very good underlying conflicts built into a setting, which started out with one side being the villain, but by now has developed into a state of regular agression from both sides.

Why Mass Effect is my favorite fantasy game

Most people are under the impression that Science-Fiction and Fantasy are very easy to tell apart. One has space ships and lasers and the other has swords and magic. But when you look a bit deeper, neither genre is actually described acurately that well. There is plenty of sci-fi, like for example Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix, which have neither starships nor lasers; just as there is fantasy with barely any swords, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or with very little magic, like A Song of Ice and Fire. And then you have something like Star Wars

The difference between sci-fi and fantasy is instead one of themes and narratives. Sci-fi is a genre that deals with technological progress and how it might affect our life in the future. Fantasy on the other hand deals with worlds that always have been fundamentally different and usually explore how our past could have turned out differently if some basics facts of life had been different; most commonly the addition of magic and monsters. And if we go with this definition for sci-fi and fantasy for now, it’s easy to see why Star Wars quite firmly falls into fantasy and isn’t really sci-fi at all. In this universe, the technologies of space ships and lasers have been around for thousands of years and different species from different planets living side by side just as long. There is neither technological progress nor social change, everything stays as it always has been. The story itself is the classic fantasy plot of the Hero’s Journey, about fighting a dark lord and his evil legions with magic and courage. Technology is not used as new tools to deal with old problems.

Now the Mass Effect series would seem quite different on first glance. It’s not set long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but is about humans from Earth just a little more than a century in the future, who just discovered advanced technology and met other intelligent species for the first time within living memory. And the writers went to great length of effort to include the most recent discoveries of physics and technology as part of the explanation how stuff in this world works. That all looks a lot lik science-fiction. But once you start looking a bit deeper and look at the themes and plot elements, it really turns to be a pure fantasy story at heart for which the technological elements are really almost entirely decorative. Very much like Star Wars, which isn’t a coincidence. A few years before developing the first Mass Effect games, the developer BioWare had made a huge commercial and critical success with the Dungeons & Dragons based series Baldur’s Gate and continues their amazing rise to probably the most important roleplaying game developers in the West with the Star Wars game Knights of the Old Republic. However, at that point they stepped away from doing licensed games and created their own series with their own setting. Dragon Age as a successor to Baldur’s Gate and Mass Effect for KotOR. Particularly the first game resembled KotOR greatly in style, presentation, gameplay, and controls. But, as I know want to show, it also is really a fantasy story at heart as well. Obviously total spoilers for all three Mass Effect games below:

The games have six character classes. Three pure and three hybrid. The Soldier, Engineer, and Adept are really the same thing as Warrior, Rogue, and Mage.
The main villains are the Reapers, who are immortal beings from outside the galaxy of incredible power whose sole purpose is to kill all living people in the galaxy. A classic demon invasion plot.
Their main soldiers are the husks, which are made from the bodies of their victims, and are basically zombies.
The plot of the first game revolves around a powerful madman with strong magic powers collecting ancient artifacts, which he then uses in an attempt to open a portal to the distant realm of the reapers and allow them to invade invade the galaxy. An evil sorcerer opening a gate to hell to summon an army of demons is an old fantasy classic.
On the search for the artifacts, you encounter an ancient immortal creature that has been living in the deepest chambers below the ruins for tens of thousands of years and is telepatically controlling the villagers of a nearby settlement and sends them to stop you.
Later, in a different ruin on a different planet, you encounter an old artifical intelligence, which is basically the guardian spirit of the place, which tells you how to use the artifacts to stop the evil sorcerer from summoning the demonic army.
Right at the start of the second game, the hero is killed, but two years later brought back to life with magic! I mean with SCIENCE!!!
At the end of the game, the hero and the team of companions have to travel through an ancient and mysterious portal to find the lair of their enemy. To do that, theh first have to find a special key that allows them passage through the portal without being destroyed like the hundreds who tried to pass through it before them.
They find that special key in the very heart of the gargantuan corpse of one of the ancient demons. Where of course it’s spirit is still present and turned the earlier explorers into zombies.
When they finally make it through the portal to the villains lair, it all looks as if they have travelled right into hell. And inside the lair they find a gargantuan monster that is being build from the bodies of thousands of humans.
In the third game, all the Free People have unite to find an ancient artifact that may be the only way to stop the demons. And of course to do so the hero has to assault the main base of the demons and confront the god that controls it all.
At one point, you need to get the Krogans on your side, butt they agree to help only under the condition that you cure a terrible disease that has been spread over their world as punishment for their endless invasions and conquests of other planets. Basically, they want you to life an ancient curse laid on their ancestors.
To do so, you have to access a science station on their planet where one of your allies will produce a cure and use the station to spread it over the entire planet. Said cure can only be made from the blood of a single Krogan woman, who also happens to coincidentally be one of the very few high priestesses of the ancient religion.
However, you can’t reach the station, as it is build behind an old abandoned temple, which is currently inhabited by one of the immortal demons. So what you do is to start the ancient machines that the Krogans used to summon the great titanic creature they revered as a destroyer and mother of the most terrible monsters on the planet. You really perform an ancient ritual to summon one of the old pagan gods, who arrives to destroy the demon!
On another planet, you discover that the most advanced species with the best technology and magic powers have actually been altered by an even more powerful but now extinct race of creatures. They also have another one of the artifical intelligences hidden inside their great cathedral, who is like a messenger from their old gods, who has been teching them all the secrets of their technology.
In addition to the demon army that wants to destroy the world and take everyone back to their realm, there is also another antagonist who believes he has the power to make the demons his slaves and through them become the ruler of the galaxy.

It may be a sci-fi setting, but the main story and many of the side stories really are fantasy stories through and through.