As announced in a post “Mass Effect: Command and Shepard, Part 1/4“, Story Structure will take a closer look at how the game series handles its theme of leadership. We will look at what tools are used to discuss the theme, how well the different tools work and to what effect they are deployed. This article here analyses Mass Effect 1. The first installment is preoccupied with worldbuilding, as well as introducing villains, characters and Shepard themselves, all while struggling with some financial constraints. Let’s try to keep that in mind, while we study Mass Effect’s development of the theme.
Saren, Sovereign and the Geth
The first enemies we fight are the Geth. Synthetic beings that once revolted against their creators, the Quarians. Since then, they live on the Quarians’ home planet, while their former masters are forced to live in the diaspora. The Geth are organized through a networked consciousness, which , as we only learn later in the series, functions democratically. Whenever they make a decision, each unit computes the best possible outcome and when there are divergent results, they hold a discourse until they reach a consensus. The Geth we meet in this first instalment, are later retconned to be a cult, that split from the main Geth Legion, since they were corrupted, and they couldn’t reach consensus with the others any longer.
This cult, we soon learn, follows Saren. Saren is a biological lifeform who belongs to the turians. However, his design shows that he has some cybernetic enhancements, even though they are never rexplained. Saren is supposed to be a “Spectre” – an agent loyal to the interracial council that presides over the peaceful sector of the universe, where the game mostly takes place. Yet he seems to have gone rogue, as he uses the Geth to attain his own ominous goals. Besides the Geth he has made some other alliances. On one planet we find laboratories where Saren is experimenting on mind control and the artificial creation of Krogan Warriors – a biological race on the brink of extinction. On another planet he’s interested in finding an ancient plant lifeform, whose spores make creatures in its vicinity to serve and protect it. The settlement around it reflects an idyllic community where everyone volountarily works and sacrifices themselves for the greater good. Which happens to be the plant’s survival.
Lastly there is a Matriarch from the Asari – another council race – fighting under Saren’s command. From her we eventually learn that his ship – Sovereign – seems to make one subservient to Saren, when one is on it for too long.
In a twist later in the story we learn that Sovereign is not simply a ship, but an ancient synthetic lifeform called Reaper. Here the game dabbles in cosmic horror. Shepard learns that every few eons a fleet of Reapers emerges from the depths of the unknown universe and eradicates all living beings to restart a cycle of evolution. Sovereign is supposed to act as a harebringer and is now working on a plan to bring back his comrades. Sovereign was the one that corrupted the Geth, as they see in him the perfect synthetic being and aspire to become like him. He also corrupted the minds of the biological beings in its vicinity and uses them for its own purposes. Saren is no exception.
As it turns out, all of Saren’s interest in mind control came from his fear that Sovereign was controlling his own mind and he sought for a way to protect himself, maybe even control Sovereign in turn. He didn’t succeed and eventually succumbed to Sovereign’s control, even though he’s living in denial of it. Only in the end Shepard gets the option to encourage Saren to choose suicide over becoming a mindless drone to the reaper.
To summarize, what makes the villains of ME1 evil is their use of mind control and the cycle of using and being used, caused by their selfish attitude of seeing others as nothing more than tools to reach their goals. The form of leadership chosen by the villains is to stop thinking for oneself and to surrender oneself to the control of another.
What does Shepard, his crew and his allies do to battle these evil misconceptions of leadership?
The forces of good?
Opposed to the mechanical threat of death and destruction, life is beaming in all its facettes and diversity in the council sector of space. Different alien races live side by side more or less peacefully. The Council can be compared to an international organisation, not unlike the UN. It brings its own power structure and inequality and injustice with it. The Council is supposed to be democratically organized. But democracy is portrayed as dysfunctional and slow. It does not get the job done due to politicians that live in denial or try to use threats as opportunities to climb up the ladder.
The various races living together are also represented in the game by the crew that’s gathering around Shepard. ME1 mainly makes use of the side character for worldbuilding purposes, as each of them serves as an introduction to their respective peoples. Therefore, there is not much actual character behind them and thus they don’t add too much to the theme of leadership. However, if one looks closer one can see the ideas behind the characters and discover some traces of the theme in them.
The one that adds most to the discussion of leadership is Garrus. A Turian, that used to work in the police force before joining Shepard. He got upset with the bureaucracy and rules that hindered him to do some actual good and rid the streets of villainous scum.
Wrex is a Krogan mercenary, who is disillusioned with the clan leaders of his people, since they are too busy fighting each other for power, rather than solving their species from the brink of extinction.
Tali is a Quarian, who is on a pilgrimage that serves as a coming-of-age ritual. Each adolescent Quarian cannot return to their fleet without bringing anything back that enriches the common good of the Quarian diaspora. They are forced to serve their community, ever since they had been displaced by the Geth and face the hardship of nomadic life.
The other three characters – Liara, an Asari scientist, Ashley and Kaiden, both human soldiers – do not add anything at all to the discussion of leadership.
Commanding Shepard
Now we’re getting to the real question: How does Mass Effect 1 represent its theme of leadership through game mechanics? In other words, what does our hero, what do we the player do, to show the bad guys that their way of doing things is wrong.
Strategical leadership
Shepard starts in a comfortable position of a leader already. He is a military man first and foremost, so one of the main ways players interact with the game is through third person shooting. Before every mission we can choose two squad members to join and support us. They each have slightly different stats, but I never got the feeling that squad members affect my strategies highly. Between the mission we can also equip each member with weaponry, armour and special ammunition. It makes sense that the commander of a spaceship gets to reign over their crew’s equipment. The thought was certainly there, although the lack of differences between different options turned the strategical aspect of the leadership theme hollow.
Emotional leadership
A chat with Garrus caught my attention, when he is ranting to Shepard how he was buried by rules when he worked for the police you can either agree with him or remind him that the rules are there for a reason. Throughout the interactions with Garrus, there are multiple such occasions where Shepard can weigh in on Garrus’ opinion doing things the quick way. I found this a very intriguing concept, if it would have meant that Shepard could actually shape the crew members perception on different variations of the theme of freedom and order. Sadly, Garrus is one of the few squad members that has an actual opinion on such things, aside from maybe Wrex, and even more unfortunate, Shepard’s answers have no real impact on their mates. Garrus becomes a vigilante in Mass Effect 2 no matter how much my Shepard told him that bureaucracy is a necessary evil for a well functioning democracy.
In fact, the way Shepard leads, barely has any consequences ever. Sure, you can choose between being a hard boiled no-nonsense military commander, that is (quite often unnecessarily) rude to everyone or a servant to the people in white armour, a saviour. But all squad mates follow Shepard, no matter which one they are. I think rather than a system where you either can become a Renegade or a Paragon, I would prefer when different characters react differently to Shepard’s choices of speech and action. For example characters like Wrex and Garrus would react positively to a rough Shepard, whereas Liara or Kaiden would be more inspired by a kind and helpful commander. A leader has to know their audience and how to motivate them. I think it would have been a more meaningful and more interesting gameplay if one had to find out how to speak to certain characters to gain their loyalty, and how to balance, when speaking to two different characters at the same time.
The lack of impact of Shepard’s behaviour also begs the question, why do these people even put their trust in him? Sovereign’s pawns follow his lead, because he is manipulating them. What is the antithesis to this, that our great leader Shepard provides? The closest the game comes to answer this is that they are a person of action. They are the only ones acting against a threat against all life, but it doesn’t matter how they act, the game seems to imply that they are a great leader because they get it done.
Moral leadership
Choices are what defines a person. There are a few choices Shepard has to make along their journey in Mass Effect 1. Let’s have a look at those and try to figure out what choices the game suggests are the responsibility of a great leader, and what kind of person that makes Shepard.
There are a couple of choices that are about the way how to achieve a goal. On the planet Feros, Shepard see themselves confronted with a colony of humans that are mind controlled by the plant-based lifeform, the Thorian. Shepard needs to destroy that creature, but it uses the humans to defend itself. We as players can now choose if we want to kill everyone in our way or make it more difficult and use a non-lethal way to defeat them. Similarly at the end of the game, when we defend ourselves against sovereign, we have to decide if we deploy all our forces in an attack against him or leave some behind to protect the council. Protecting the council bears the risk of losing the fight against sovereign, so it might be a plausible decision for a military leader to make. While the decision in the fight against the Thorian is more or less based on goodwill, in this larger scale fight a leader also has to consider wide ranging and long-term consequences. When the council dies, the peace in the known sector of space might be at risk, because there might be chaos in the aftermath. But what good is peace, if we all die against Sovereign anyways?
I think those are good examples of decisions the game throws at us players, for us to contemplate what it means to be a leader and how we imagine an ideal leader to act in such scenarios.
There is a bad example as well though. At one point on a mission, you have to choose between two teammates, knowing that one of them is going to die. For sure, this is a situation a squad leader might find themselves in very plausibly. But what I dislike in this decision is that it is solely based on preference. No matter which one you choose, the consequence will be exactly the same, just with another character. There is no strategical aspect to consider, no moral dilemma.
Lastly there is a type of decision the game lets you make, that do say something about leadership, but what it says, I personally find questionable.
There is once a random couple you overhear on the streets discussing a very intimate topic. The woman is pregnant. Her brother urges her to apply gene therapy to the foetus to avoid heard diseases, but she’s unsure about the side effects. Now Shepard could intervene and decide for them what to do. But why? It’s definitely not his place. Shepard has no authority on medical questions, why should they listen to us? Why should we feel compelled to intervene in the first place?
Something similar happens on a much larger scale, when we meet the Rachni Queen. The Rachni are known as the enemy of a major war in recent history. She’s the last of her kind, although she could reproduce on her own, and imprisoned. Shepard then gets to make the decision if we want to break it free or kill it. To reframe this question: Shepard, and Shepard alone gets to decide about the extinction of an entire species. In fact, its similar with the afore mentioned Thorian.
So, to recap, Mass Effect 1 introduces villains that work through mind control. Democratic and bureaucratic actors are helpless and useless in their defence against the villains. What they need is a leader free from restraints and ready to do what is necessary to stop the threat to all life. The game suggests this in a narrative way by discussing the theme with various characters and side-stories but also makes use of the game mechanics. The moral questions posed are not necessarily inviting to think about the differences in of democracy and autocracy, but more about what kind of autocratic leader one would be. A benevolent one or a pragmatic one.