mass effect

…dramatically underrepresented in games, and what representation does exist often falls into stereotypes and tokenism.

Back on Warren’s home turf on Kill Screen, contributor Will Partin provides a good companion piece for the above video, going into further detail regarding BioWare’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect series and their failure to engage with (human) race issues in a non-abstracted way.

Cutting to the heart of the issue, over on Kotaku Evan Narcisse hosts a roundtable with an all-star panel consisting of Austin Walker, Shawn Alexander Allen, TJ Thomas and Catt Small, discussing the shortcomings of black representation in…

…and her team’s game ‘Quest for Stick’.

Michael Abbott writes about Mass Effect 2 and what it says about the evolving nature of videogame genres. Abbott:

Bioware knows what we who write about games ought to know better. Genre classifications are essentially meaningless, and it’s time to drop them and move on.

It’s a sentiment echoed to some degree by Jim Rossignol in Rock Paper Shotgun’s latest podcast, episode 38, and it includes a great contextualised discussion of game genres throughout history.

Gus Mastrapa at Wired’s GameLife blog says ‘21st-Century Shooters Are No Country…

…Game Set Watch on ‘What Metal Gear Solid Has To Teach Us’, this time looking at Metal Gear Solid 3 and Baudrillard’s concept of Hyperreality. Also from Iovanovici is this piece at Gamasutra analysing ‘Humanism And The Virtues of Violence and Patricide in God of War’.

Jeffrey Jackson at Game Language comes out swinging with a pair of posts on ‘Cultural Hegemony within the world of Mass Effect’. Part one has this to say,

In the universe of Mass Effect, the organization called Cerberus is either a terrorist group or a pro-human organization. In cultural studies, however,

…

…in effusively praising Mass Effect‘s rich SF setting, which not only measures up to the likes of Star Trek and Star Wars but introduces players to a cosmicist philosophy:

Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision.

Seb Wuepper, writing for Gameranx, voices his dissenting opinion of the franchise, wondering aloud if we’ve all simply forgotten the “total thematic collapse of the…

…is the (sometimes overwhelming) potential for failure not unique to games, it is in fact integral to communication and media. And Roger Travis returns to the subject of player choice in Mass Effect, saying:

The very large differences in the ways players of Mass Effect have viewed the way choice works in the trilogy deserve attention from a practomimetic perspective first because they represent critical perspectives worth refining. Second, and more importantly, however, those differences demand attention because of their affective nature, in light of what I would call the fundamental relationship in practomime between form and affect.

…