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Playing Serial Imperialists: The Failed Promises of BioWare's Video Game Adventures

2018; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.12736

1540-5931

Michael Fuchs, Vanessa Erat, Stefan Rabitsch,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 51, Issue 6 p. 1476-1499 Special Issue ArticleOpen Access Playing Serial Imperialists: The Failed Promises of BioWare's Video Game Adventures Michael Fuchs, Michael Fuchs orcid.org/0000-0003-1147-065X Search for more papers by this authorVanessa Erat, Vanessa EratSearch for more papers by this authorStefan Rabitsch, Stefan RabitschSearch for more papers by this author Michael Fuchs, Michael Fuchs orcid.org/0000-0003-1147-065X Search for more papers by this authorVanessa Erat, Vanessa EratSearch for more papers by this authorStefan Rabitsch, Stefan RabitschSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 December 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12736Citations: 4AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat "Welcome to adventure." This is how BioWare, a Canadian video game developer who specializes in role-playing video games (RPGs), advertises their games to potential customers on their website. They add that "BioWare creates games focused on rich stories, unforgettable characters, and vast worlds." To be sure, this is the "stuff" adventures are made of, administering excitement and escapism as remedy for ennui since time immemorial. Adventures adhere to a storytelling formula often reminiscent of Joseph Campbell's monomyth where the narrative pattern underwriting the hero's journey is that of adventure. Individuals set out on exciting journeys, with or without a small party, that take them to faraway places and distant shores. Their adventures bring them into contact with diverse cultural communities (i.e., the Other), thereby engendering moments of acquisition (of knowledge, possessions, wealth, resources, and/or land). A series of quests, trials, and tribulations bring about a climactic resolution to the imperial conflicts that more often than not undergird the journey. Eventually, the adventurous heroes variously establish a new order or restore an old one, thus bringing balance, unity, and peace. This basic narrative formula "is one of the most important arts of the white world" (Green 37). More specifically, Western adventures are a premier form that perpetuates the history of "western civilization" and are, as such, inextricably entangled with discourses and practices of empire. Within the still dominant paradigm of Western techno-science, adventure tales assiduously tell and retell the story of the continuing telos of modernity and its attendant eschatology. Not only are historical processes reimagined and passed on in such narrative forms, but adventures have also fueled the collective fantastic imagination. In particular, when "terra incognita disappeared from European maps [at the end of the nineteenth century], writers of adventure stories retreated from realistic to fantastic, purely imaginary spaces" (Phillips 7). Off-world locales, magic-filled realms located in mythical times, and "lost" pasts, hidden in the cavernous body of the Earth, quickly became new and, arguably, inexhaustible imperial geographies. Adventure tales took imperial agents to these fantastic spaces, where they continued to engage with the Other. In the realm of fantasy, they could practice empire while the world moved into postmodernity. Neoliberal capitalism has since harnessed newer forms of global control, which include mass-marketed, globally dispersed adventure stories, which have carried the specter of serialized empire building well into the twenty-first century. Scholars such as Patrick Belk, John G. Cawelti, Martin Green, Krishan Kumar, and Brian Taves have discussed the latent imprint of empire on adventure stories. While video game adventures draw on this established narrative tradition, video games and their players are particularly susceptible to its potency and allure due to the medium's interactive and affective nature. The historical pursuit of imperial ventures shares an illusion of control with the immersive appeal of playing video games. While postcolonial criticism debunked the fallacious assumption of coherent imperial control in historical terms (Bhabha; Memmi; Said) and video game studies continue to probe the freedom of movement, choice, and decision in games as always already an illusion (Domsch; Fassone; Tulloch; Wysocki and Schandler), the allure of imagined control continues to hold sway. After all, the neoliberal heirs to the empires of the past control the means of production and dissemination of mass media, effectively making players of RPGs "serial imperialists." At the same time, scholars and players continue to ascribe a democratizing and transgressive potential to video games, as game studios appear to try to push the proverbial envelope. For example, Chris Patterson has argued that "when played consciously … and with an urge to explore less trodden routes" game series such as Mass Effect (BioWare 2007–12) offer means to look into the workings of imperialism (225). Similarly, Souvik Mukherjee has suggested that play provides "a way of constantly subverting the 'centres' that colonialism tries to construct" (21–22). As we will demonstrate in this article, the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare 2014) are significant in that they failed to deliver on their promises. The games purportedly challenge heteronormative thinking and feature ethnically diverse characters. However, colonial and imperial practices undercut their aspirations for inclusive game designs. Since "video games render social realities into playable form" (Galloway 17), players experience them on the microlevel of individual moments of gameplay, as well as the macrolevel of overarching narratives, which we will explore through the BioWare games. Mass Effect commences by offering players a world in which humans are only a second-rate power (at best), only to undergo mainstreaming that celebrates Anglo-American exceptionalism, empire building, and leadership. Similarly, Inquisition effectively offers inconsequential reprimands to players who disrespect the Other, perpetuating rather than disrupting the practice of looting indigenous land with impunity. These games are paradigmatic of the overriding power that the latent imperialism in the adventure formula brings to bear on RPGs, which, while making postcolonial critique possible, seems to restrict postcolonial play to the indie market. Indeed, while both the Mass Effect series and Inquisition show awareness of imperialist strategies and their effects, these games, in fact, force players to re-enact imperial fantasies, conceived in and for the capitalist mass market of Western techno-science. Thus, the instances, acts, and practices of empire in these two gameworlds located at the intersections of historical imperialism, adventure storytelling, and the fantastic show that these gameworlds are paradigmatic of socio-historical processes that have ossified into a distinct adventure formula since the fin de siècle. Indeed, Brian Taves has asserted that adventures' "fundamental tone is one of optimism" (13). Consequently, they tend to portray empire "as a form of service, protecting the native peoples, earning their affection and respect rather than fear," all the while "spreading the advantages of Western civilization, whether the suppression of disease, of torture, of slavery, or of suttee" (40). By tapping into these established ideas, these video game adventures reassure the "old order" that their imperial enterprise is still alive and well. Accordingly, Mass Effect and Inquisition legitimize and validate the imperial project despite their attempts to "do" adventure differently, "unable (or reluctant) to take the risk of imagining a new world to replace ours" (Carvalho 141). The Empire is Dead—Long Live the Empire: Adventures, Imperialism, and the Fantastic Western adventures and empires are inextricably wedded to each other. As an ancient storytelling form resurrected during the heyday of the European imperial enterprise, the fantastic adventure story is "a kind of palimpsest, bearing the persistent traces of a stubbornly visible colonial scenario beneath its fantastic script" (Rieder 15). Adventures catered to an ever-expanding hunger for all-things-empire that spread among the populace in the imperial cores of the European powers. While expeditions on land and seaborne voyages of discovery fed into travel literature, with its concomitant visual traditions, these forms simultaneously spawned narratives that took imperial subjects into realms beyond the boundaries of exploration and discovery. These protozoan impulses coalesced into the formation of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which are grouped together under the label of the fantastic (Fowkes 1–5). Crucially, despite "attempting to express what is, by definition, inexpressible as it is beyond the realms of the conceivable," the fantastic has a "necessary relationship to an ideal of the real" (Roas 2). In other words, fantastic worlds and the adventures set therein are simultaneously estranged from and cognizant of empirical reality. As the age of empires drew to a close, fantastic adventures served as swan songs to the impending decline and dissolution of European empires. These stories quickly morphed into narrative monuments to imperialism, ready to dispense discourses and symbols for mass media adaptation and consumption throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even though historians usually draw distinct lines between colonialism and imperialism, the discursive range of the latter is more inclusive, as colonial ventures feed into empire building. Colonialism comprises the localized acts and effects of imperial power at the periphery, which contributed to the imperial structure that was imagined to emanate from the core. Indeed, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that the geographical distribution of labor divides the world into core and peripheral (and semiperipheral) nations. In particular, labor in the peripheral nations operates to the benefit of the core states, while resources are transferred from the periphery to the core. The economic power of the core nations, on the other hand, allows them to dominate the periphery—a process which became particularly pertinent with the rise of capitalism in Western Europe, which coincided with the dawn of modern colonialism. While apparently simple in its premise, Wallerstein's world systems theory allows him not only to distill the common features of empires past and present but also to delineate the interrelations between colonial endeavors (e.g., the British incorporation of India) and imperialism (e.g., the building of the British Empire in response to French colonial enterprises). Drawing on Wallerstein, John Rieder has described the imperial outcomes of colonial ventures as the entire process by which European economy and culture penetrated and transformed the non-European world over the last five centuries, including exploration, extraction of resources, expropriation and settlement of the land, imperial administration and competition, and postcolonial renegotiation of the distribution of power and wealth among the former colonizers and colonized. (25) In short, empires are constituted as racialized, gendered, vertically integrated ecologies of dependencies. Imperial practices informed the emergence and growth of evolutionary theory and anthropology in the nineteenth century, which, in turn, legitimized, and simultaneously centered on, modernity's linear teleology of progress. At the margins, the non-European world, the Other, was forcibly ordered and re-constituted in ideologically charged formations. Geopolitical realities and a swell of imperial anxieties, however, made the unsustainability of large territorial empires palpable at the end of the nineteenth century. Racialized unease, miscegenation anxiety, classist angst, and ecological apprehension came increasingly to the fore in the imperial cores of Europe as the as-yet-unclaimed frontiers of the unknown began to dwindle. Yet, when the ostensible end of European imperial projects had arrived, adventure stories were in higher demand than ever, as they became indispensable vehicles for empires' "compensation reflex" (Rieder 4), projecting the "ideological beliefs and superstitions" undergirding the imperial project into fantastic realms (Žižek, Sublime Object 34). Lost races and civilizations in prehistoric realms deep underground, ancient and/or impenetrable forests, or isolated valleys on hidden islands and inaccessible plateaus—scientific and planetary romances became the ersatz frontiers for the reading citizens of empire. Leaning on Slavoj Žižek, Rieder has identified three key fantasies of empire that were transplanted into fantastic adventures. The "discoverer's fantasy" reconfigures the state-sponsored fiction of terra nullius used to claim and take possession of land. The "missionary fantasy" recreates the gospel of civilization and inevitable progress. As such, it glosses over the oppression of the Other as a benevolent duty of the white (wo)man. Lastly, the "anthropologist's fantasy" relegates the Other to the past of the West where "technology is the primary way of representing this confrontation of past and present or of projecting it into a confrontation of present and future" (31–32). As forms of mass media culture, these adventures have provided a tried and true, economically viable formula readymade for the nascent, serialized means of mass media production and consumption: pulps, radio drama, movie serials, and comics. Repetition, modulation, and transmedia pollination have ensured the formula's longevity and economic profitability. Indeed, by combining syntactic simplicity with semantic complexity, fantastic adventures have evolved into a sure-fire cash crop for the new audiences of the neo-liberalized mass media market in the age of convergence, which increasingly taps into the potential of video games. After all, video games enhance adventures' syntactic scaffold by supplying interactivity and immersion. They make the adventure formula playable. The Anatomy of Video Game Adventures: Empire in Fantastic Gameworlds From Neverwinter Nights (BioWare 2002) to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda 2011), all RPG video games arguably remediate (Bolter and Grusin) the fantasy tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (first published in 1974). The main features of D&D may be summed up as follows: Players choose a character whose species and attributes they define based on available parameters. Framed within the context of high fantasy, the characters go on an epic mission. Experience points are awarded for completing tasks and annihilating opponents. Players use these points to level up their characters in an attempt to prepare for more difficult tasks to come. Sooner or later, individual characters will form a party (e.g., when confronting an overpowering foe). Drawing on this formula, Western fantastic RPGs commence with the player character leaving their known environment to embark on a quest "of epic proportions where nothing short of the fate of the world hangs in the balance" (Hergenrader 13). Often a stationary habitat, the player character's home base usually serves as a node of imperial power (e.g., encampments, towns, ports, and space stations). When they take on fantastic dimensions, these narratives "of epic proportions" roughly map onto what Farah Mendlesohn has referred to as "quest fantasies," in which "the protagonist goes from a mundane life—in which the fantastic, if she is aware of it, is very distant and unknown (or at least unavailable to the protagonist)—into direct contact with the fantastic" (xix). The player character accordingly begins to enter unknown spaces, which become increasingly exotic as they progress on their journey. In order to make the unknown both known and knowable, the player character has to explore, appraise, and assess the environment, along with everything and everyone contained therein. As the player directs the imperial gaze (Kaplan) toward exploitable resources (e.g., searching or scanning), they engage in imperial acts of taking possession (e.g., mapping and naming), and/or establish (or help establish) new nodes of imperial control (e.g., camps, trading posts, and garrisons). Consequently, they help grow an imperial ecology for the exchange of knowledge, resources, material, and capital as well as physical and cultural bodies. Usually after beginning to colonize "open" land, they encounter the Other (in various organic and inorganic forms). These encounters occur in "contact zones," which Mary Louise Pratt has defined as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (7). Here, acts of empire are ludically (re-)enacted, primarily through physical (or, rather, virtual) violence. Significantly, video game adventures ludo-visually interconnect the exploration of unknown spaces with mapping (Figure 1). In this way, they remediate traditional adventure tales, which "describe journeys 'into the unknown'" (Phillips 1). As Richard Phillips has explained, "many adventures have begun … as outline maps … or terra incognita on larger maps." These maps "chart spaces in which anything seems possible and adventure seems inevitable" (3, emphasis original). As such, adventures are inextricably interrelated with imperialist practices, as cartography was key to empire building (Bassett 316). In video game adventures, players are generally instantaneously aware of the expanse of the world their player character moves in (or, at least, the part of the world the character is currently located in), as maps outline the shape of their locale. However, the details of the world are for the players and their characters to explore, uncover, and map. Figure 1Open in figure viewerPowerPoint As players progress, they unveil the map in Dragon Age: Inquisition. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] As early as 1993, Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins stressed that the "exploration of space" was a core element of video game play (8). Jenkins has since elaborated on the spatial component of gameplay in a piece cowritten with Mary Fuller, suggesting that virtual spaces open "new spaces for exploration, colonization, and exploitation, returning to a mythic time when there were worlds without limits and resources beyond imagining" (58). They conclude that one of the central incentives of playing video games "is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and making them your own playground" (62). However, "mastering" video game space is always already an illusion. "The game masters the players," Hans-Georg Gadamer has pointed out (160). Indeed, irrespective of the illusions of interactivity and agency that video games offer, they are based on rules and algorithms, which are fueled and controlled by capitalist desires. Consequently, any action players take in the virtual world is predetermined; they are made "to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations" (Manovich 61), thereby interpellating them into specific subject positions. Players do not act; the system allows them to act in the gameworld—or, maybe more to the point, makes them act, while the players imagine themselves being in control. This illusory character of agency reflects human life in postindustrial capitalism, in which freedom, as Nikolas Rose has argued, has become a burden, as neoliberal subjects need to make their lives meaningful through narratives of free choice and agency (55). However, the neoliberal market prepackages these choices and supplies illusions of agency as compensation. In this way, contemporary capitalism naturalizes and legitimates itself through production and consumption. Video games, and triple-A games in particular, are part and parcel of this system. Indeed, "video games are a paradigmatic media of Empire—planetary, militarized hypercapitalism" (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter loc. 161, emphasis original). As such, mainstream video games allow only so much subversive fervor. The Attempt at Doing Empire Differently in Mass Effect Mass Effect throws the player character into a world that at first appears different from the hackneyed space opera, as it resonates with a postcolonial timbre. The first game in the series promised to change, or at least amend, the syntax of the imperial adventure formula, as it introduced the player to a world that was not excessively anthropocentric. The game's success, however, fueled a market-driven serialization strategy in which the sequels and the gameworld quickly conformed to the anthropocentric, imperialist normativity that informs the adventure formula. In cinematic terms, which often invade video game discourse, Mass Effect is akin to a playable rough cut circumscribed by the allure of a vast, decentered gameworld of diversity and possibilities. The two sequels, however, were streamlined into a format reminiscent of theatrical cuts, catering to the more "traditional" expectations of the mass media market. In short, the Mass Effect trilogy had the potential to show that humans could do empire differently, but it ultimately fell short of doing so. While Mass Effect conforms to Cawelti's generic adventure in that it focuses on heroic characters on a moral mission who encounter obstacles on their way (39), it does not follow the conventions of the imperial adventure formula outlined above. The player enters a world that challenges preconceived notions of anthropocentrism while critiquing humanity's hawkish expansionist tendencies. It is also a largely known (i.e., mapped) world, which has been well-governed and regulated for centuries under the auspices of the Citadel Council. Perceived as aggressive and immature, humanity has entered the galactic stage as a second-rate power (at best). In the game's prologue and the first mission, the player learns that Shepard, the player character, is being assessed as a candidate for the Council's Spectre Program, an elite law enforcement unit "protecting the galaxy." Shepard is tasked with securing and transporting an ancient artifact, found at the aptly named human colony of Eden Prime, to the Citadel. The Spectre assessor makes explicit that Eden Prime serves as a showpiece of humanity's colonization efforts: "Serene. Tranquil. Safe. Eden Prime has become something of a symbol for your people, hasn't it? Proof that humanity can not only establish colonies across the galaxy, but also protect them. But how safe is it really? … Your people are still newcomers, Shepard." The colony is quickly plunged into turmoil when Saren, a rogue Spectre who has allied himself with a synthetic race, launches a devastating attack and extracts critical information from the artifact. While the rogue Spectre's treason is eventually exposed, the fallout of the first mission calls humanity's colonial ventures into question. The ruling powers in the galaxy frown upon humanity's aggressive colonialism, thereby highlighting that BioWare made it a point of embracing multiculturalism and sidestepping any forms of normativity. Indeed, humanity's colonial pursuits are frequently debated in the course of Shepard's hunt for Saren. These discussions bespeak the tensions humanity's aggressive colonialism causes with other minor powers vying for interstellar influence. Confrontations with other non-Council species are reminiscent of the scramble for Africa by smaller colonial powers such as Italy, Germany, and Belgium in the shadow of superpowers such as Britain and France. Human footholds on planets like Noveria and Feros become sites where neoliberal forms of corporate colonization are revealed, as corporations engage in dubious and exploitative activities far from the oversight of either the human Systems Alliance or the Citadel Council. As a rule, Shepard exposes and foils these activities. Despite all of Shepard's adventurous exploits, the truly unknown Other—the Reapers and their vanguard, the Collectors—are but mythical specters of cosmic destruction and death until the end of the game. With the sequel, the Mass Effect adventure begins in earnest, as it becomes clear that humanity is "destined" to unite the galaxy in an effort to stave off the Reapers. This transition toward normativity exposes a dark undercurrent in multiculturalism like the kind Žižek has identified. "Multiculturalists," he has pointed out, treat "each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as 'natives'" ("Multiculturalism" 192, emphasis original). Mass Effect 2 begins with the literal death of the protagonist, as an overpowering spaceship of unknown origin destroys Shepard's ship. Resurrected as a cyborg being, Shepard goes on to recruit a multispecies team of brothers and sisters in arms from across the galaxy in an attempt to stop Collector attacks on human colonies. While investigating the attacks, Shepard discovers that the Collectors are, in fact, little more than brainwashed laborers "harvesting" humans for the Reapers, who use organic material to evolve. Although in the first game, the collecting of resources is largely limited to more powerful and versatile weapons and equipment for the player character and the squad, in the sequel, the extraction of resources from planets across the galaxy takes a more prominent role (Figure 2), as these resources are key to succeeding in the final confrontation with the Collectors. Figure 2Open in figure viewerPowerPoint The imperial gaze scans for resources in Mass Effect 2. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] Crucially, the second game in the series radically alters the gameworld: Shepard works for Cerberus, a human group introduced as little more than a nuisance with terrorist aspirations in the first game. By the third game (set three years after the first) the group has become a power that attempts a coup d'état. As Cerberus's appointed spearhead for the human cause, Shepard begins to play the role of the Chosen One. Miranda Lawson, the woman in charge of Shepard's revival, highlights this aspect early in the second game, saying, "The only one worth saving is [Shepard]. Everyone else is expendable." As part of the opening of Mass Effect 3, an insert makes this point even more explicit, stressing that "the fate of the galaxy depends on" Shepard. Accordingly, Cerberus chooses Shepard to lead humanity, which, in Cerberus's vision, should lead all other advanced species. For Cerberus, Shepard is an investment that is key to its imperial project—so is the gathering of resources, to which the game forces the player to devote more time. These capitalist overtones do not end with Shepard's new role, however. The Collectors' telling name makes their role explicit: they embody capitalism's logic of endless accumulation. Even so, these zombie-like drones of destruction are merely the spawn of a much more powerful force, the Reapers. Tellingly, Justin McBrien has concluded that capitalist "accumulation is … necrotic" (116). Necrosis, of course, implies the self-destruction of cells. Capitalism, McBrien thus suggests, feeds not only on destruction generally but its own death, in particular. The Reapers do not necessarily reap profits, but they harvest genetic information, turning the eradication of species across the galaxy into a resource for development. Similar to capitalism's reliance on constant innovation and variation through elimination and planned obsolescence, the Reapers are a cosmic force that wipes out all advanced life-forms every fifty thousand years. This continual renewal, which interconnects the past with the present and the future, implies that "the deep time of past cataclysm becomes the deep time of future catastrophe" (McBrien 116). As the Reapers destroy the old in order to make room for the new, they epitomize the never-ending cycle of creative destruction paradigmatic of empire and capitalism. In response to the Reaper threat, Shepard unites species across the galaxy under the banner of humanity in the third game. While the narrative never casts a shadow of doubt over Shepard's good intentions, the primary goal in the third game is to accumulate resources from across the galaxy (i.e., the imperial center sucks dry the satellites) to build a weapon of mass destruction and war assets that help stall the Reaper invasion by drawing their attention away from the imperial center. While the evolutionarily driven, empire-consuming Reapers clearly represent capitalism in its final, necrotic stage, humanity's efforts to unite the galaxy by similar means are portrayed not only as necessary but, in fact, benevolent, since they enable the anthropomorphized species' survival. Mass Effect 3 thus represents purportedly benevolent human leadership as the lesser of two imperial evils. By completely retuning (if not to say "retconning") the anti-imperial timbre of the original game, the end of the series espouses a benign anthropocentrism with humanity serving the galaxy as a benevolent empire of good intentions. What is more, each of the game's multiple endings adds further meanings. Intratextually marked as the game series' preferred ending, synthesis sees all organic and synthetic life-forms, including the Reapers, merge. While Mass Effect 3 purportedly ends the cy