Last week, I blogged about playing the Mass Effect series on the Xbox 360. I said that it's a game about choice and that your decisions have a lot of repercussions. As a result of that, by the time you reach the end of the series your story can be drastically different from someone else's. I knew this going in, so I decided that I would play through the games a few times to experience everything the trilogy has to offer.
The first time I played through, I rolled Paragon. Most actions in the game are classified as Paragon (which is good) and Renegade (which is evil). These choices can be in conversation, where you can intimidate or threaten people to achieve your ends (if you want to be Renegade), or you can be nice and appeal to their better nature, convincing them to do the right thing. These choices can also occur through your actions. You can, for example, push an enemy out of a skyscraper window to kill him in the second game. many of these choices don't make a huge difference in the way the game turns out, but it affects your character and the way other people interact with you.
During my second run through the games, I decided to be Renegade. That means that I choose the evil options whenever possible. I threaten, lie, cheat, and kill whenever I feel like it, especially when I feel as though someone doesn't deserve it (the more good the person is, the more Renegade your actions will be if you choose them). I thought that it would be easy.
Turns out, being evil is incredibly difficult. Even in a video game, which is obviously not real, I felt genuinely bad whenever I would be mean to one of my squadmates. Their reactions to my hurtful words or actions really put a bad taste in my mouth. I don;t know what is is about this series, but I couldn't separate it enough from reality to the point that I could be a terrible person in the game and not feel bad about it in real life.
For example, in the beginning of the first game you run into a character named Ashley Williams. She is an Alliance soldier like you who has been recently besieged by the enemy. When you meet her, she is the last of her squad, the rest of which had been wiped out. When she apologized to me, I told her that it was her fault and that she was a bad soldier. She was devastated by my words.
I can't describe how bad I felt after I said that. It was like a slap in the face. For some reason, being mean to a virtual character, one that I never really cared for in the first place, made me feel rotten. The worst part was, that was the very beginning of the first game. I had promised myself that I would roll evil for the entirety of the series, but I was second-guessing my decision from the moment I started playing. I eventually gave up, realizing that I couldn't possibly enjoy playing the game in such a way that my virtual counterparts would despise me for my actions.
Long story short, I am not evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment