Role-Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire: Loyalty and War in BioWare’s Mass Effect Series

From the philosopher John Dewey to the contemporary gaming researcher James Agee, scholars have seen play and gaming as crucial tools for learning how to deal with others. For video game scholars like Simkins and Steinkuehler (2008), role-playing video games have emerged as a contemporary tool that can both instruct and convince players to tolerate different peoples, as they “engage individuals in forms of ethical reasoning that may very well foster empathy, tolerance, and understanding for others—aptitudes crucial for humane behavior in a complex and culturally diverse world” (p. 334). The games produced through the role-playing game company, BioWare, have earned recognition on this front. As the game scholar Jørgensen (2010) has observed, BioWare’s role-playing games (RPGs) are unique in drawing attention away from the player and onto supporting characters and their respective cultures “by equipping supporting characters with agendas of their own,” and by making the narrative experience “dependent on the motivations of supporting characters instead of that of the player character” (p. 315). Indeed, both gamers and scholars have praised BioWare for their focus on ethical decision making that requires players to consider complex moral situations, often as a means of educating their audience in values of diversity and multiculturalism.

The celebration of RPGs as tools for cultural tolerance has enabled games to appear as a democratizing “new media” form that will help enable a global multicultural future, one built off of the particular values of American multiculturalism. This article questions this celebration and considers how such RPGs, which require the player to learn strategies and tactics to engage enemies, use highly problematic assumptions about cultural difference to bolster suspicion and violence onto those cast as “monocultural” or “nontolerant.” As Wendy Brown and Slavoj Zizek have warned, texts and discourses that trumpet liberal tolerance can also work to make American multiculturalism appear exceptional and thus to legitimate the violence of U.S. imperial projects, especially when the nontolerant are cast as Muslims or “radicals” within developing countries.¹ Following this, I consider how the BioWare game series, Mass Effect, uses the “depth” of supporting characters to put the player in the curious position of managing—and often manipulating—those characters, reducing the value of their psychological complexity to abilities that must be manipulated and employed during battles. Indeed, I claim that by mixing the role-playing genre with the military first-person shooter, Mass Effect produces “in-depth” characters for the particular task of vilifying and dominating those too religious or too militarily weak to take part in the multicultural imperium.

The discourse celebrating the “art” and depth of RPGs has made it easy to ignore how such games are also uniquely positioned to garner support and influence for real political projects. As a science fiction series, Mass Effect appears apolitical, yet its commentary on the contemporary era seems more explicit when compared to BioWare’s similar medieval fantasy series, Dragon Age. Taken together, both series imply that contemporary society stands somewhere in-between the feudal race wars of the mythic past (Dragon Age) and the multicultural ideal of the distant future (Mass Effect). This depiction characterizes the contemporary United States with a “multiculturalist exceptionalism” that will eventually fit a destined future, thus legitimating imperial projects against supposedly monocultural or “fundamentalist” political groups. Yet since both of these texts are still games, this inevitable destiny of multiculturalism must come with a particular utility that will help one group (the multicultural imperium) win advantage over another (monocultural others). The harmony of different races exhibited in both games thus lends itself toward a particular system of divided labor. In Dragon Age, the race that the player chooses to play determines his attributes, elves make good mages, dwarves good rune makers and axemen, and so forth in a Tolkenien fantasy. While this should be of no surprise in a fantasy setting, this division of labor continues in Mass Effect’s supposed multicultural future. Here, each race yields specialized talents, and even the all-inclusive and pan-ethnic government, The Citadel, divides labor by its respective races. As fans have summarized on the Mass Effect Wiki (based on the in-game encyclopedia), “The Asari are typically seen as diplomats and mediators. The Salarians gather intelligence and information. The Turians provide the bulk of the military and peacekeeping forces.” In both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, humans, like “Whites” in Western multicultural imaginaries, are relegated to being “Jack-of-all-trades” who can perform any specialization or a mix of specializations. As a human, the player takes on a “neutral” role that determines and manages the specializations of their ethnicized teammates. While appreciating cultural difference, the player is also positioned toward ethnicized others as a “multicultural umpire” as one who sets the rules and ethics from a neutral (and thus universal) position.

The conflation of race and labor is visible in Mass Effect’s gameplay as well as its main narrative. As gaming scholar Aarseth (2004, p. 2) has pointed out, a video game’s semiotic system—where the story and narrative takes place—is most often coincidental to the game and rather the gameplay and rules should be seen as carrying the most meaning. I thus begin this article by investigating Mass Effect’s rules and gameplay, particularly its loyalty mechanic and its means of mixing the genre of role-playing with the military shooter. By focusing my analysis on gameplay and genre, I consider how BioWare’s signature emphasis on team cooperation and supporting characters can express meanings that value American multiculturalism as exceptional. Second, I close play a scene from the first Mass Effect to consider how mechanics like the loyalty mechanic, the ethic system, and the dialogue wheel form the player into a neutral power dealing with “particular” (or ethnic nationalist) interests. Finally, I consider how the player’s choice to play as female rather than male can shift the player’s experience from an imperialist attitude toward one of multiracial coalition that focuses on structures of patriarchal power and reproductive control. Overall, I hope to show how in Mass Effect, the in-depth bonds between multiracial teammates set the player on a course not only to manage multicultural identities into a culturally determined division of labor but also to assume the imperial role of the multiculturalist umpire who sets the parameters and casts monocultural others as villains.

The ambiguous meanings of Mass Effect can be partially explained through observing how its genre conventions impact the narrative and produce the game’s “dynamical meaning” (Bissell 2010). Dynamic meaning is a term coined by Jonathan Blow, creator of the game Braid, which Bissell (2010, pp. 92–93) interprets as “the meaning that grows out of exploring a game’s rules and boundaries.” Although a role-playing game’s gameplay mechanics (based on battle) seem divorced from the games’ narrative (based on story), they help construct meanings that impact a game’s overall experience and often influence its various possible meanings. In the role-playing game Final Fantasy VII, for example, the character Tifa’s attributes of strength are not only due to her rebellious and brazen attitude but also because the game continues the “monk” character class from previous Final Fantasy games. In Final Fantasy VII, the convention of “class” is absent, yet the RPGs tradition still demands a monk-like figure in the gameplay, forming the brazen Tifa. To trace dynamic meaning then is not to discover a hegemonic ideology that inculcates the gamer but to account for how a character, like Tifa, is formed both through her lines of dialogue and from her gameplay attributes of a monk, bare fists, no armor, and quick attacks.

Dynamical meaning, for Blow (2009), is not reducible to the developer’s intentions, as it is most often unintentional and grows out of the gameplay and the narrative with meanings that are not necessarily planned but are revealed in how the narrative and gameplay do or do not overlap. Dynamical meaning thus takes into account that the game’s story is most often created simply to give the player incentive to complete levels, which must be won through the gameplay elements. For video game scholar Ian Bogost, the meanings made through the game’s dynamics are not merely meaningful, but persuasive, as they can convince the player to do or think differently. Bogost (2007, p. ix) calls this a form of “procedural rhetoric,” wherein the art of persuasion occurs “through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.” Games, as a dynamic, rule-based medium, can “have a unique persuasive power” through the parameters of the game, the “processes it supports and excludes” (p. 43).

Although both Bogost (2007) and Blow (2009) consider meaning in gameplay elements and rule-based parameters, their primary examples are games like The McDonalds Game or other “serious games” meant to increase environmental awareness or activism—games that are rarely played except by audiences seeking such meanings. As popular games like Mass Effect are produced by teams of developers and writers, often in the hundreds, their narratives are often politically ambiguous and are left open to various interpretations. Yet their dynamics are made meaningful through a game’s narrative and gameplay experience, whether “intentional or not” (Blow, 2009). It seems necessary then to investigate dynamic meanings in high-selling games that purport to have no clear meaning other than entertainment but whose gameplay and procedural rhetoric make persuasive arguments toward the player.

Mass Effect’s unique method of gameplay can be organized as a subgenre of the live-action role-playing game. RPGs, first developed from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, have been one of the most popular forms of interactive storytelling, as they develop immersive narratives while also giving the player identities built from their own choices and aesthetic preferences. The Mass Effect series adopts and reinterprets two key conventions in RPGs (1) RPGs allow players to assume a new identity and participate in a story driven by their own choices, allowing multiple stories to be present in a single game and (2) RPGs usually feature team-based combat, where the player must weigh the teammates specialties in real time and strategically employ teammates based on the enemy at hand.

Final Fantasy VII (1997), perhaps the most successful and most famous RPG, influenced many traditions in role-playing for the 2000s. In Final Fantasy VII, the player is repeatedly given choices and often these choices can determine the outcome of a battle, or whether a battle even happens, yet the main storyline itself is linear and hardly changes, despite the player’s decisions. Cloud Strife, a clone of an ancient deity, Jenova, will always rise from the slums of Midgar to defeat his evil twin-like figure, Sephiroth, and bring on a new age of environmental growth, no matter how the player plays the game. The ludonarrative (the narrative events that unfold during the player’s engagement in play) is simply complementary to the formal narrative, the events in cut scenes, and the dialogue (Hocking, 2008). The player’s teammates, who must be strategically employed with weighted strengths and abilities, will never choose to leave the player’s crew once they join, no matter what ethical decisions the player makes. The teammates’ skills are also diverse and complex, with variations concerning speed, strength, healing, sneak, and magic. A supporting character’s race, species, or gender seems to have little impact on their skills and attributes. The skills reflect personality rather than race so that Aerith, the gentle flower girl from the slums, becomes the obvious healer of the group, while Tifa, the sassy bartender with enlarged breasts, excels in strength.

One of BioWare’s innovations on the role-playing genre is to emphasize the decision-making aspect of RPGs by placing the player on a developing and uncertain moral journey. Unlike in Final Fantasy VII, how “evil” and how “good” the player’s choices are often dictates which characters will team up with them and which ones will leave. Moral problems in BioWare games are complex and often function around values like “community” versus “individual” (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, 2003) or “peaceful” versus “aggressive” (Jade Empire, 2005). These good and evil stand-ins can overlap considerably, as both sides can encourage lying, murder, and destruction, depending on the context. These ethical decisions then determine the plot and story, shifting not only storylines but also the player’s appearance, their strength and attributes, and which teammates they can keep along the way.

BioWare games also reinterpret the RPGs’ strategic employment of teammates, since unlike in Final Fantasy VII, the characters’ specialties often directly reflect their race. The player’s friendship with these teammates is also determined by the ethical choices of the player. If a teammate dislikes the player’s own ethical positions, she might leave the group or betray the player. The goal of the player then is not only to strategically maneuver these teammates against an enemy but to appease, threaten, or systemically and ideologically control the teammates. If the player can earn a teammate’s loyalty, he can also unlock their hidden abilities (known as “Squad Bonuses” in Mass Effect).

Bioware’s Mass Effect series is unique in its canon, as it mixes role-playing conventions with the gameplay elements of “military shooters,” which I define as first-person shooters who allude to real military events, contexts, or language. Although Mass Effect’s story is science fiction RPG, much of the action-intensive gameplay is distinctly that of a military shooter. First, the game’s overhead role-play view zooms-in during battles to give an over-the-arm “shooter” point of view. Second, the lingo used during combat, like “hostiles,” “extraction point,” and “LZ” (landing zone) as well as the types of weaponry (pistols, SMGs, rifles, snipers, shotguns, and grenades) all lend a military element to the gameplay. Finally, during combat, the player relies on their squad mates for their racially inherent specializations, as in RPGs, but players must also strategically place those squad mates and send them commands in ways similar to military shooters like the SOCOM and Rainbow Six franchises. In combining role-playing conventions with military shooter gameplay elements, Mass Effect brings levels of ambiguity, world building, and in-depth character development to a military-affiliated genre.

Recent contributions to game studies have produced a subgenre focusing on military shooters. While writers like Halter (2006) and Turse (2008) have traced the growth of military shooters from military projects, more recently scholars have used the intertwining history of military technology and gaming to insist that video games (on a large scale) prime players toward military recruitment or at least toward giving consent and bolstering desires for war (especially the War on Terror). Shaw (2010, p. 799) has claimed that “play as a political practice [is] locked within a violent imperial topos,” and by looking at the Call of Duty franchise, Shaw claims that the aesthetics of (all) video games reveals an “entrenched colonial logic instrumental for military recruitment and consent.” In his 2013 article, “Rethinking Military Gaming: America’s Army and Its Critics,” Schulzke (2013, p. 60) criticizes studies on military gaming, claiming that critics “erroneously assume that any connection between the military and civilian entertainment is harmful to players and to civil society.” Indeed, for gamers themselves, games that are visibly produced through military networks, and games that carry obvious military alignments like the Call of Duty franchise, contain no ideological mystery. They are as clearly produced to align with U.S. military interests as are movies like Rambo and Independence Day. Gamers, like consumers of any American media, are likely used to the interpenetration of military interests and are likewise able to consume military-affiliated products without allowing the media to completely shape their views on war and foreign cultures. Although games created in the interests of gaining military recruitment, like America’s Army, so often reduces images of the terrorist to a simple “bad guy,” this bias is also obvious to most gamers, as the game “continually calls attention to its bias” and thus “the potential harm of this bias is reduced because it is overt” (Schulzke, 2013, p. 71).

By combining the role-playing genre with the military shooter, Mass Effect complicates the typical “bias” of the military shooter by not reducing the “enemy” to a simple fundamentalist or hostile for the player to shoot. Rather, the legitimate reason for imperial aggression is not to “defend America’s freedom” but comes as a moral imperative to integrate the enemy into a diverse multicultural order. The enemies in each Mass Effect game (the geth, the collectors, and the Reapers) have their own reasons for war, yet their reasons cannot compare to the sanctity of diversity and tolerance represented through the player’s squad and the multicultural federation that they fight to protect. In Mass Effect, military battles become fields of competing ethical discourses, with the side of diversity and tolerance reigning supreme.

BioWare’s signature emphasis on team cooperation and its development of supporting characters express dynamical meanings of liberal multiculturalism while permitting forms of patriarchal and imperial violence to continue unabated. Here I understand multiculturalism as a conception of social integration that expects racial and ethnic groups to visibly and proudly express their given racial identities in order to be recognized politically and to be accommodated socially by state institutions such as public schools and the armed forces as well as through positive forms of cultural and media-based representation. Although often these racial identities are claimed by racialized minorities themselves, they can also produce what Balibar and Wallerstein (1991, p. 22) has identified as a “neo-racism” that assumes racial bodies are fixed into “insurmountable cultural differences.” Such an attitude can actually work to keep racialized bodies within particular modes of labor while still celebrating their diversity. Multiculturalist projects commonly work by conflating notions of race, ethnicity, and culture so that race and ethnicity are often synonymous while ethnic types become associated with particular types of labor. To take a familiar example, the celebration of the affective and motherly traits of Filipinas and Hispanic women can read as tolerant while also supporting their association with nursing and domestic work.

For the philosopher and cultural critic Žižek (1997, p. 47), the race and labor bind of liberal multiculturalism works to benefit “nonethnic” individuals, or the “multiculturalists,” who treat “each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’.” On a global scale, the United States as a pluralist nation with a multiracial military is able to embody this multiculturalist position, positing itself as “the universal, so that U.S. government and military actions are to be understood as being for a supranational good” (Melamed, 2006, p. 16). As the scholar Melamed has argued, this notion of multiculturalism as a “supranational good” came partially as a response to the racial nationalist violence of World War II, which shifted values around the Western world against racist practices, while the 1960s civil rights shifts in the United States made multiculturalism a necessary political philosophy, one ready to merge the demands of Civil Rights activism with the managerial interests of the state. The emergence of multiculturalism in state institutions during the 1970s and 1980s solidified the extension of pluralist ideas into social life through the integration of ethnic studies and literature. As the dominant mode of antiracism, multiculturalism today operates as a framework in an institutionalized form of knowledge to manage ethnic difference and suppress political resistance, instituting what Bhabha (1998, p. 208) has called “an attempt both to respond to and to control the dynamic process of the articulation of cultural difference.”

Set in a mythical European fantasy, BioWare’s Dragon Age series depicts a time before multiculturalist attitudes, where segregation, race wars, and religious fundamentalism were the norm. Likewise, after choosing a particular race to belong to, the player is limited to siding with one nationalist group: the immigrant Qunari, the scapegoated mages, the enslaved dark elves, the religious chantry, or the power-hungry Templars. Each race is associated with particular attributes. Elves are best suited to use magic (+2 willpower and +2 magic), dwarves have greater vigor (+1 strength, +1 dexterity, +2 constitution), while humans, as a Jack-of-all-Trades, have a versatile spread of racial bonuses (+1 magic, +1 strength, +1 dexterity, +1 cunning). Mass Effect, set in a science fiction universe, continues Dragon Age’s linking of race and class but allows the reader to assume a role of cultural management. In Mass Effect, the player must be human, and their choice in skin color is reduced to a purely aesthetic decision, since skin color does not affect any in-game interaction, while gender and origin story sometimes do. Although Dragon Age—especially Dragon Age 2—sets races against each other in feudal grabs for power, in Mass Effect, the player joins a galaxy-wide multicultural alliance, the Citadel, with its own paramilitary force, the Spectres. As a Spectre, the player must manage a multiracial squad to defeat an army of machines, the Geth, and later a species of possessed drones, the Collectors. Both species contrast the tolerant races within Citadel space, as both prefer isolation to the multiracial alliance symbolized by the Citadel Council (2012).

The theme of liberal tolerance in Mass Effect is tested in the player’s squad, which must be kept in an imposed racial harmony if all characters are to survive or if the player is to gain all the bonus powers from his or her squad mates. The Asaris, for example, are a monogender race distinctly feminine in appearance who are known for their elegance, diplomacy, and talent with biotics, a type of magic or “force.” The Asari teammate Samara, likewise, will no longer be in the team if the player makes decisions that disrespects cultural differences, while Wrex, a fierce Krogan with a natural desire for violence, will leave the party if the player is too weak or shows too much kindness. All the supporting characters, restricted as they are to their culturally determined world, feature a great deal of psychological depth that is “established through elaborate backstories, as well as character growth and development” (Jørgensen, 2010, p. 318). These backstories allow the player to empathize with their teammates and, thus, to appreciate their cultural difference. Indeed, the need to impose racial harmony can sometimes seem pedantic, as the player typically earns “renegade points” by showing cultural intolerance and earns “paragon points” when they choose tolerant dialogue choices. As Bissell (2010, p. 118) writes in a parenthetical aside “(The degree to which you can inflame or dampen alien racism among your own crew is one of Mass Effect’s most interesting quandaries. I almost always inflamed it—and felt enjoyably bad in doing so.).”

By putting the player in a position to evaluate racial attributes and manage teammates, Mass Effect challenges the player to derive military labor from otherwise disinterested teammates. Both BioWare series make racial attributes useful to the player insofar as they can be used to identify the military labor that those characters can provide. In his essay “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” Balibar and Wallerstein (1991, p. 22) find similar associations of race and class in the cultural politics of the 1980s, fearing that the ghettoization of cultural ways of life could lead to a rigid multiculturalism, where culture functions “like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of looking at individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.” Cultural appreciation, for Balibar, can often work to conflate race and labor so that one’s cultural heritage and cultural practices (like Malaysians who sew textiles) can mark a population as specialists in certain labor practices (like building the microprocessors needed to play BioWare games). In using cultural appreciation as a gateway toward identifying labor roles, part of the dynamical meanings of Dragon Age and Mass Effect supports a racialized division of labor, where each race is given special military attributes, while the humans—analogous to Whites in western multiculturalism—are seen as managerial classes able to appropriate any specialty they wish. Although the worlds of Mass Effect and Dragon Age often make labor invisible, or done by synthetic beings, the main labor of interest to the player is military force so that tolerance becomes a means of incorporating racialized groups into military assets. Throughout Mass Effect, military ability is recognized as the only commodified labor power that matters, as we see in the Citadel’s open exclusion of the Volus, a race that was “instrumental in establishing a standardized galactic economy” (KaineShepard, 2012, 1:45). The Volus is blocked from sharing a seat on the governing council because they lack military resources, and their ways are “not violent,” or in other words, not useful. In this post-9/11 worldview, a seat at the table of multinational governance only comes in proving one’s military prowess.

Mass Effect’s multiculturalist dynamical meanings are perhaps best traced through its loyalty mechanic, which allows the player to make decisions that, if done without the respect given to his teammates, will offend or even drive away his companions. Consisting mainly of side quests meant to obtain a squad mate’s loyalty, the loyalty mechanic allows the player to complete a unique quest of personal importance for each squad member that unlocks a teammate’s special ability (or an alternate outfit) and has some effect on the game’s ending. One of these loyalty missions includes taking Grunt, a Krogan, through the rite of passage on his home planet, while in others, the player must help a squad member kill their personal enemies.

In a particularly memorable scene from the first Mass Effect, the player must convince the team’s strongest member, a Krogan named Wrex, to accept that the squad will destroy a base containing a cure to the genophage, a biological weapon unleashed on Krogans after they were “uplifted” as a military force but then became too militarily aggressive. The genophage has effectively made Krogan females sterile, only allowing birth to one out of a thousand stillborns. The Krogans are an extremely strong and hot-headed race, and Wrex, the most “civilized” Krogan, still must be managed as a potentially violent and irrational savage. As Wrex tells the player (as the human protagonist, Shepard):

Saren created a cure for my people. You want to destroy it. Help me out here, Shepard. The lines between friend and foe are getting a little blurry from where I stand. (“Mass Effect - Ashley Williams kills Wrex,” 2009, 0:27)

The player has several options: they can kill Wrex, intimidate him into submission, or convince him that destroying the cure is in fact in his people’s interest, since the person who created it (Saren) only seeks to control the Krogan. Most likely, the player will kill Wrex, as the other options are only available through the player’s deep investment in either paragon or renegade decisions. Upon killing Wrex, Shepard says “He just wasn’t going to listen to reason” (1:30). The player here role-plays a positions that devalues the ethnicized alien’s own point of view over Shepard’s universalist “reason,” as he calls it, and positions the player to reinforce and manage racial difference from a universal ethical position. But the player is given choices in how he presents this argument to Wrex. If the player is too arrogant or heartless, Wrex will overact and the player will lose the strongest player on his team just before facing the game’s most difficult enemies. In this scene, Wrex can be killed in the name of reason or he can be convinced to come along and see reason over his own divisive interests. Never, however, can the player choose to rescue the cure and help keep Wrex’s people from going extinct.

In the context of the continuous War on Terror, Wrex seems to resemble the most extreme element in the political and moral alliances of Shepard’s squad. As a Krogan whose people are known for aggressive violence, he plays the role of what Puar and Rai (2002, p. 121) have called the “terrorist–monster,” a figure who “has become both a monster to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected.” The terrorist-monster associated with extreme intolerance or an absence of reason produces the American as a “docile patriot,” who, in terms of multiculturalism, is the tolerant individual who seeks not to “rock the boat,” and for whom racism is most apparent in individual language and speech, rather than in structural elements that include American imperial projects abroad.

The game’s representation of Wrex is not entirely reducible to a terrorist–monster. Although Mass Effect’s main storyline nearly requires his death after representing his irrational sense of justice, his casual in-game dialogue, which only appears when the player includes Wrex in his squad, reveals a more complex personality who often reveals the player’s own position as a manager of ethnicized bodies. Wrex’s in-game dialogue delivers what the blogger Alex (2009) calls “withering smackdowns of ignorant privilege,” and often “teach[es] the player about privilege”. During spontaneous in-game dialogue, Wrex openly calls the protagonist, Shepard, “ignorant” of his people’s suffering while refusing to play cultural ambassador for the other human teammate, Kaiden:

Wrex’s cynical attitude toward the cultural knowledge that the player seeks from him mirrors conversations of racial authenticity and knowledge in the United States, making his life or death conflict over the genophage, especially emotional to players. As Bissell (2010, p. 125) notes, “The first time I played Mass Effect, I had grown immensely fond of the aggrieved [Wrex], and each time a new conversation option appeared [in Wrex’s death scene] I felt a noose of real dramatic concern tighten.” After killing Wrex, Bissell opines that “I reloaded my last saved game and tried again. Once more, my friend and teammate took a bullet for his trouble. In my bewilderment I pressed on, and when the menu for squad selection came up, the slot for the dead character was now a darkened silhouette. It seemed as stark and inarguably final as a tombstone.”

Mass Effect’s emotional investment in Wrex exposes the privileged position of the player as the squad’s multiculturalist manager (as the adequately named Shepard). Through Wrex’s gameplay persona, the player might become aware of the abuse of his universalist status. As Simkins and Steinkuehler (2008, p. 339)have pointed out, such reflection of the player’s position is integral to an RPG, as such games involve “performing a socially defined position or status with its associated duties and functions.” Role-play gamers have called this the “bleed effect,” where the personalities encouraged in character influence (or bleed into) the player’s real-life decisions and vice versa. As the leader of a multicultural team, the player of Mass Effect practices tolerance and multicultural acceptance but only on the presupposition that it will reward them with the squad mate’s specialized labor. Performing this role is crucial to not only winning the game but also to obtaining what the designer and scholar Lazzaro (2004) calls “Fiero,” “The Ultimate Game Emotion” which, in Italian, means “personal triumph over adversity.” Lazzaro (2004) explores “fiero” as the most common and most powerful emotion unique to gameplay, experienced when players are “overcoming difficult obstacles, [and] players raise their arms over their heads.” This emotion is especially prominent in RPGs, where challenging battles follow hours of emotional investment in the game’s story and supporting characters. Similarly, game designer David (2004, p. 32) has suggested that emotions in games are linked primarily to facing challenges that affect supporting characters, rather than the protagonist. For Freeman, it is the supporting characters who “move the player through an interlocking sequence of emotional experiences.” Although Mass Effect integrates elements of the military shooter, the excitement of war is overshadowed by the player’s emotional bond to their squad mate, which is put at risk by the demands of war (in this case, bombing a base that contains a cure for the genophage). Thus, in killing Wrex, the game’s narrative of remorse is made more intense through the absence of fiero, an absence created not because the player failed to complete a mission or to survive a battle but because he was unable to show enough tolerance to keep squad mates in line.

The player’s position as a rational and tolerant team manager is contrasted by monoethnic others, like Wrex, who must either be trained to submit his military labor power to the multicultural alliance or be killed for corrupting the multiculturalist imperium as a terrorist–monster. This tension between the player and the squad mates reflects multiculturalist ideology, as Žižek (1997, p. 40) describes it as negotiating “the tension between ‘open’ post-ideological universalist liberal tolerance and the particularist ‘new fundamentalisms’.” In Mass Effect, the universal/pluralist versus the particular/monocultural is represented as the player’s universalized sense of reason and rationality against the nationalist interests of his squad mates who must be managed and brought into a more tolerant imperium (inside Citadel-controlled space). Like the assigned protagonist of Mass Effect—the “Shepard” of the ethnicized squad mates—multiculturalists are able to take a managerial position by not seeing themselves as belonging to any ascribed culture. Instead, they occupy what Žižek calls “the privileged empty point of universality,” a neutral position that operates like an umpire over the chaotic realm of ethnic warfare, able to “appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures,” turning the tolerant respect for the other’s difference into “the very form of asserting one’s own superiority” (p. 44). In a postcolonial context, the cultural theorist Chua (2010, p. 345) has argued that multiculturalism in Singapore has yielded a similar multiculturalist who is not individual but collectivized through the cosmopolitan class and their use of English. The multiculturalist collective thus appears to reproduce imperial structures, operating as “the autonomous, neutral umpire that allocates resources equally and adjudicates disputes among the races.”

In Mass Effect, the multiculturalist and “neutral umpire” both seem present in the position of the player (as Shepard) who role-plays the position of the multiculturalist umpire over his squad mates. This position erases any ethnicized identity of the player himself, or the human, who, as a Jack-of-all-trades, becomes a symbol of nonethnicity. We see this clearly in the advertisements for Mass Effect, which depict a White male around 30 years old with a buzz cut. This neutral position also represents a higher mode of civilization or development, as Jørgensen (2010, p. 318) points out, since the goal of the player is not simply to empathize and earn the loyalty of their companions but to “develop” them to their true potential. In the life or death conversation with Wrex concerning the genophage, the ethical dilemmas proposed by the game’s dialogue wheel are offered to the player in the form of paraphrases catered to the player’s feelings (p. 316). When Wrex first seeks Shepard’s understanding, the player can select “not my problem,” which will actually cause Shepard to say, “This has to be done. Saren’s the enemy, not me.” The player’s most self-serving option, “not my problem,” becomes interpreted as if it were a universalist position, “this has to be done.” In the second wheel, the player can choose “I don’t have time for this,” another self-serving position, which the paraphrase system reinterprets as “I don’t care what your personal feelings are. This base gets destroyed!” The self-interested prompts (“I don’t have time for this”) are continually interpreted so that the player speaks from a universal position and to establish the other, Wrex, as someone overburdened by his “personal feelings.” Despite the player’s intention’s in these dialogue wheels, the script continues to place Wrex as plagued by his own ethnic interests, a brute whose violent passions must be kept in line (or on the battlefield) by a multiculturalist umpire.

The opposition between multiculturalist umpire and monocultural nationalism is a theme throughout the Mass Effect narrative, where the values of a dominant imperial power (the Citadel) mirror post-9/11 era power relations. In Mass Effect 1 and 2, the player (as Shepard) must manage his multicultural team in order to defeat the Geth and the Collectors, two species who prefer the isolation of deep space, who are die-hard militarists and who are adamant to preserve their pure racial identities. Because these two monocultures have kept so conservatively to their own traditions, they are easily influenced by a deific ancient species called the Reapers, who seek to consume all advanced sentient life in the galaxy. In Mass Effect 3, the Reapers themselves attack, and in order to create a multiracial military alliance against them, the player must right the wrongs of postcolonial injustices throughout the galaxy by brokering peace between former colonizers and colonized, ending centuries long imperial effects such as territorial disputes and the biochemical disease, the genophage.

To expand on this notion of multiculturalist umpire, I take seriously Galloway's (2006, p. 17) claim that “video games render social realities into playable form” and examine Mass Effect 3’s (2012) direct take on the challenge of sovereignty in the postcolonial world, as it pushes the player to solve postcolonial ordeals in order to give rise to a multiculturalist federation. Although Mass Effect’s story seems to merely reinforce the notion of U.S. multiculturalism as the only viable form of antiracism, and thus to validate American imperial logics in the post-9/11 globe, playing the game closely can reveal how this validation is flexible and depends greatly on the player’s given choices, specifically the gender they choose to play as. Close playing, according to game studies scholar Chang (2008, p. 6), is similar to close reading in that it analyzes the way narrative (diegetic spaces) and form (nondiegetic spaces) interact, comparing this analysis to “the logics, narratives and histories of the real world.” Here I close play Mass Effect 3 to consider how choosing a female avatar rather than a male can work to upset the imperial and racial logic embedded in the game’s narrative.

Mass Effect’s main narrative revolves around the Reapers, synthetic beings with true artificial intelligence who resemble 2-km long starships. Created by an ancient race nearly a billion years prior to the events in Mass Effect, the Reapers came to believe that technology would always come to destroy organic life and that the only way to truly preserve life was to commit mass genocide on all advanced (starship-capable) races in the galaxy, preserving their memories and cultures within the Reaper’s artificial bodies. Because the Reapers spare the less advanced races, they must return every 50,000 years, after the less advanced races have evolved into new galactic civilizations, to purge the galaxy anew. The process of mass genocide at the end of each cycle, called “the harvest,” lasts for centuries, and each harvest ends with the birth of a new Reaper made from the billions of uploaded organic minds. Thus, the cycles of mass genocide, for the Reapers, are the only way to preserve the cultures of the past before they annihilate themselves out of existence.

To help facilitate these cycles of extinction, the Reapers leave behind galactic infrastructure (Mass Relays) to help advanced societies discover each other as well as institutional apparatuses like the Citadel to help those societies organize an intergalactic council. The challenge of the postcolonial project proposed by this universe is clear: How does a new society, using the infrastructure and institutions left behind by their masters, succeed in creating a society free of violence, colonization, and exploitation of the past? In this postcolonial analogy, the Reapers resemble the colonizer’s logic of “preserving” past cultures before their own self-annihilation at the hands of postcolonial warfare. Preserving them at the height of their civilization, the Reapers believe, is better than allowing them to die at the hands of an unstable society. The Reapers thus play a pragmatic ethical role of preserving the galaxy’s genetic makeup and collective knowledge while allowing less advanced races to develop. Every galactic civilization has fallen victim to the Reapers because the advanced races were unable to form a united front against them. In every cycle, one race dominated the rest, and thus the galaxy was left vulnerable to division once the Reapers attacked.

Mass Effect 3’s narrative focus on imperial hegemony as perpetual cycles of destruction is often reinforced through the gameplay, which brings the theme of creating racial harmony among squad mates from prior Mass Effect games to its logical conclusion: The player is tasked with bringing together a racial alliance for an intergalactic summit, where every advanced race must come together to ally against the Reapers. In Mass Effect 3, the “team” that the player must put in racial harmony is the galaxy itself. Indeed, the player rarely fights Reapers, as nearly all of the game is spent in earning the loyalty of other races. This gameplay format is introduced through the feature of the “war room,” where the player can view the “war assets,” such as armies, fleets, and scientists, which they have gained through solving age-old colonial disputes. Helping the Krogan find a cure to the genophage grants the player higher War Assets as does helping the robotic Geth defend themselves against their creators, the Quarians, who deny their right to self-rule. Complementing the war room mechanic is the paragon/renegade mechanic, as the paragon’s choices continually side with the races harmed by colonial violence and exploitation. For example, when choosing to side with the robotic Geth or their colonial oppressors (and creators), the Quarians, it becomes clear that choosing one race will result in the complete genocide of the other race. Yet because the Quarians are the aggressors, and the Geth are the historically colonized victims, choosing to help the Geth earns paragon points while choosing to help the Quarians earns renegade status. Similarly, in most diplomatic missions, the player is meant to right the wrongs of the imperial powers before them, making humanity (and thus the player) the exceptional multicultural “umpire” to manage the galaxy. Only when the galaxy is sufficiently aligned against the Reapers in an alliance with no clear hegemonic race can the player choose to fight the Reapers and end their cycles of extinction.

Embedded in both Mass Effect 3’s war room gameplay and its narrative of diplomacy is the assumption that both nationalist and imperial governance are failed systems, part of exploitative cycles of violence. In contrast, the system of the multiculturalist umpire exists outside of history, and it overcomes the imperial violence and capitalist exploitation that defined all of history before it. In the game, the humans—analogous to western civilization—are best suited for this task. The greatest threat in the game then is not so much the Reapers, but the xenophobic prohuman faction called Cerberus who seek to use Reaper technology to impose human dominance over the galaxy. The explicitly racist undertones of Cereberus’ spokesman, the Illusive Man (voiced by Martin Sheen), contrasts Shepard’s multiculturalist project. When Shepard destroys a base of Reaper technology, the Illusive Man complains, “the technology from that base could have secured human dominance in the galaxy,” to which Shepard responds, “I’m going to stop the Reapers. But I won’t sacrifice the soul of our species to do it” (Creator01, 2010, 1:13). Cerberus’ attempt at military dominance threatens to splinter the intergalactic alliance and thus to repeat the Reapers’ cycle of extinction. By defeating Cerebrus, the player mirrors the multicultural values that allow U.S. military action to be seen as exceptional to the violence of older imperial forms. In this representation of post-9/11 power, the Reapers act as the final litmus test for tolerance and pluralism that makes American military violence exceptional. Their defeat also signals the end of postcolonial history. Rather than the nation-state representing the pinnacle of development, or the end of history, Mass Effect posits the multicultural federation as the new end of history in our globalized era.

As Mass Effect 3’s dynamical meaning, the multiculturalist umpire is not totalizing to the player’s experience. Rather, this meaning is made complex through various aspects of the game’s gameplay. One might assume this complexity arises through the paragon/renegade moral system or the player’s dialogue choices, yet these mechanics are often so far embedded into BioWare’s writing process of collaboration and peer review that they give merely an illusion of narrative control. There are other, less explicit choices that affect how the game is played, which can work to elide or even undermine the game’s multiculturalist meanings. The player can opt to ignore the story altogether and play only the battle scenes, or they can participate in the online multiplayer experience, which allows the player to take the form of any of the galaxy’s 10 advanced races. Foremost among these strategies of dynamic control, I claim, is the player’s gender choice at the game’s beginning, as it greatly adjusts the tone and attitude of the role-play experience. By choosing the female Shepard (or FemShep) rather than the male (or BroShep), the player shifts the game’s attitude from one of multiculturalist umpire toward one of multiracial coalition by focusing on remaining structures of patriarchal power and reproductive control.

In BioWare’s marketing of the first and second Mass Effect, FemShep went completely unacknowledged, and 82% of players ended up choosing the buzz-cut White male protagonist (Tan, 2008). Only in Mass Effect 3 was FemShep advertised on the game’s cover through the optional “reversible cover” that allowed FemShep players to see their avatars (although all in-game shots were still with BroShep). Yet as BioWare gamers have been claiming since the first Mass Effect, playing as FemShep is vital to the Mass Effect experience, as the character’s voice actor, Jennifer Hale, plays the role with a much more flexible, ambiguous and empathetic style. In an article in the New Yorker, journalist Bissell (2011) dubbed Hale the “Queen of Video Game Acting” and the “Meryl Streep of the Form,” praising Hale’s ability to take on different personas in over 120 video games. As Michael Abbott, a professor of theatre at Wabash College and the writer of a gaming blog told Bissell, “You’d expect players to be tired of hearing Jennifer Hale’s voice after dozens of games, but she’s made herself untraceable. She’s played everything from a love-struck English schoolgirl to a stoic, battle-tested soldier. She’s a chameleon. It helps that she has a knack for making exposition and technical language sound like dinner conversation” (quoted in Bissell, 2011, p. 48). Part of Hale’s ability to transition from one character to another, Bissell speculates, is Hale’s own upbringing:

Hale’s mother told young Jennifer that she was half Native American; that she was born so premature that she nearly died; that she was descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth. None of this was true, but it may have helped prepare Hale for a lifetime of pretending to be other people. (p. 48)

Rather than occupy a universalist or neutral position managing a multiracial squad, FemShep appears engaged, taking a position that is better able to inhabit and empathize with other cultural practices and attitudes, making the ethnic cultural struggle a shared struggle.

The switch in the player’s experience of the game through gender choice at first seems unconvincing, since besides Hale’s voice, little else is different between BroShep and FemShep, except that the voice of multicultural umpire is gendered feminine (not a slight difference indeed). Although the body language and model movements are the same, the difference in lines like “we have to stand together” in Mass Effect 3’s opening conditions the player’s experience, BroShep states the line to the Alliance Defense Counsel like a universal fact, in the monotone but strong voice of a devoted soldier (Tetraninja, 2012, 10:02); FemShep struggles through the line, putting emphasis on “have” and “stand,” pronouncing “together” in a pleading tone, making the statement less of a universal fact and more of a challenging ethical position (Christopher, 2012, 8:39). For Drew Karpyshyn, the creative director of Mass Effects 1 and 2 and the author of three novels based on the series, Hale’s voice can subtly shift the player’s experience because “it still allows you to feel like you are the character. It doesn’t distance you, and that’s very hard to do” (quoted in Bissell, 2010, p. 115). Players have made similar comments, as stated in BioWare’s online forums. According to one fan, the voice of BroShep, Mark Meer, “pull[s] off the soldier voice perfectly. Problem is that, he’s ALWAYS a soldier” (“Comments for ‘Mass Effect Voice Acting Male and Female Shepard’,” 2009). Even the name “BroShep,” given by fans, casts Meer’s voice as that of a “bro,” a derogatory term for a White, heterosexual “alpha male idiot”—a figure fitting for a nonethnic multiculturalist umpire (Will, 2005). In contrast, players have shared the opinion that “[Hale’s] voice range is so varied that she can pass as Asian, white, or black when you decide your character settings, whereas male Shepard just sounds like a static white guy” (“Comments for ‘Mass Effect Voice Acting Male and Female Shepard’,” 2009). This shift in the player’s experience also occurs in the narrative, for in the first two Mass Effect games, BroShep can only be played as heterosexual, while FemShep can be bisexual, homosexual, or heterosexual. Although this undoubtedly pleases the male gaze, it also allows the player to diverge from the heterosexual norm through a more empathetic voice actor. Hale’s portrait of FemShep thus allows the player to occupy a space of interethnic coalition, one that allows him or her to undermine the utopian appeal of the multicultural umpire towards one of continuous struggle, where righting the wrongs of historical injustice appear as a shared effort, rather than as a means to uplift or incorporate an ethnic subject.

Of the over 7,000 dialogue lines that FemShep has in Mass Effect 3, besides those intended for romance, only 2 deviate from the lines of BroShep. These lines occur after FemShep has rescued the only living fertile Krogan female, nicknamed Eve, whose blood contains the cure to the genophage (the biological weapon unleashed on the Krogan to keep their women infertile). Eve reveals that the violent behavior of the Krogan is characteristics only of the men, who, since the genophage, have become “wandering killers, seeking targets to justify their existence, excuses to earn them ‘honor’” (Padawanmage71, 2012, 10:35). As BroShep, Shepard simply wishes Eve luck and thanks her for the conversation. This abrupt end to Eve’s conversation labels Eve as a cultural insider who has given strategic knowledge to the multiculturalist umpire. As FemShep, however, the conversation ends with an affirmation of inter-racial female solidarity:

This moment, known to some fans as the “girl power” moment, suggests a continuous history of patriarchal domination, despite the racial alliances that legitimate violence and also disrupts the performed masculinity of BroShep who, since the first Mass Effect, has served as the game’s heroic symbol of justice. To hear these lines only from FemShep suggests that the male heroism of BroShep has a limited sense of justice, leaving his military action questionable rather than legitimate. The four lines of dialogue also reject humans as the exceptional “multiculturalist umpire,” since when Eve suggests that humans might be unique by “plac[ing] a lot of responsibility” on Shepard, Shepard responds by negating the exceptional position, affirming that she has “no more [responsibility] than your people have put on you.” Since the new Krogan leader, Urdnot Wreav, seeks to control Eve by forcing her to have his offspring, FemShep here shares moments of empathy and coalition with Eve that suggest violence (and thus history) will continue despite the utopian narrative of racial harmony. FemShep, also performing as female, considers interracial alliances as bound to reproductive rights and control over the female body. According to BroShep, this narrative is less visible or even completely evaded. FemShep enables the player to account for the continuous struggle of multiethnic solidarity against ongoing structures of domination, as the implicit war between females and males in the Krogan’s future locates reproductive rights as a main tension in the ongoing history of the galaxy.

By their self-characterization as story-driven games, RPGs are often studied and admired for their in-depth content and have been heralded as proof that video games are a true art form. Yet the game mechanics seen throughout BioWare RPGs, as I’ve shown in this article, invoke values and influence that too often go unnoticed, especially as they are so often tinged with dynamical meanings that may be political or even imperial. Although much critical work has been done on the political elements of games that carry their ideological positions on their sleeves, like games produced through the U.S. military or other entities, games like Mass Effect are more often heralded as artistic and educational texts rather than as ideological ones. Indeed, little investigation has been done to consider how complicity for imperial violence is elicited from games that are both popular and artistic, as the celebratory narrative of gaming often codes such games as neutral or too morally ambiguous. What has gone understudied is the extent to which games that seem to criticize some instances of military violence also legitimize imperial dominance by invoking American multiculturalist values as exceptional.

What makes RPGs especially unique is that the political and social meanings of games like Mass Effect are dynamic, and as such they are weighed through the gamer’s own critical assessment of the game, the genre conventions it uses, the marketing strategies, and the fandom associated with it. In order to show how video games hide ideological codes to bolster military recruitment, scholars too often reduce the image of the gamer to a person who is inculcated or “recruited” by the game, insisting that “the game trains you to desire its rewards, to move up its levels, to find its treasures” and into “a bondage that feels like freedom” (Halter, 2006, p. 161). Likewise, by focusing critical attention on the very few games that are developed by the U.S. military or that have clear political alignments, scholars tend to assume that all video games featuring military themes are simplistic and crude, and that “Games don’t do much in the way of conveying the interior experiences of one’s comrades or opponents: these forces appear as merely puppet bodies that give aid or deal ill” (Halter, 2006, pp. 290–291). Although games may still be new on the stage of cultural texts, games like the Mass Effect series offer a variety of meanings to the millions of gamers who have played it. Although its dynamic meaning may express multiculturalist exceptionalism and consent for U.S. imperial projects, they also enable the game to be critically examined and indeed resisted by taking control of the various formal attributes often gone unseen by the casual player. When played consciously, closely, and with an urge to explore less trodden routes (as FemShep), the series can indeed help formulate complex questions about how imperialism and tolerance are intertwined.