Explain to me why the audience was allowed to bring glasses of champagne into the auditorium during the performance for the Beach Boys concert last week, but at the Mozart performance tonight at the same location, everyone had to gulp them down in the foyer during intermission?

So, there’s a new interview up at IGN with BioWare’s CEO, where he explains that there’s never going to be a gay male relationship option in the Mass Effect series, claiming that ‘you have a pre-defined character who is who he is’.

Can I just say, as a hetrosexual male gamer who would probably never pursue the gay male option* – that’s just so much bullshit. For starters, Commander Shepard isn’t a ‘pre-defined character’ – you chose Shepard’s appearance, gender, background, skills, and then throughout the game you choose their moral position on various issues. A female engineer Shepard who saw her entire platoon die on Akuze and firmly believes that the ends never justify the means is not easily confused with a male soldier Shepard who sacrificed his own troops to stop Batarian slavers and would do it again to ensure human supremacy – unless, of course, you define characters purely by ‘are they a gay man or not?’.

(To be fair, this is a slightly better explanation than a while back when some BioWare spokesperson was trying to claim there was some sort of technical limitation or additional expense involved in opening up the existing romances to characters of any gender. Shepard does to some degree have a fairly consistent personality no matter how you play – though I think that’s really got more do to with the quality of the voice acting than anything else.)

The annoying thing is that BioWare’s one of the few major gaming companies that does make an effort to include LGBT content in their games** so it’s a real disappointment that they’re apparently so determined not to include any icky gay content into the Mass Effect series.

And from a purely commercial point of view, I think BioWare’s marketing department is taking the wrong approach entirely in trying to portray Commander Shepard as purely a macho manly red-blooded space marine. Let’s face it – the Mass Effect games aren’t great shooters – their main strength is in their story and characterisation. The marketing actively turns away RPG fans – I know a couple of people who initially ignored the game assuming it was just a generic shooter based on the game art and advertising. And RPG fans are – as BioWare presumably knows well based on their approach in Dragon Age – not going to be automatically turned off by a gay or female protagonist. Reducing your game to thing that won’t offend the lowest common denominator is just weakening your strengths in pursuit of an audience that’s probably not interested in what you’re selling anyway.

(And the fact that IGN actually raised the issue in an interview illustrates, I think, that the gaming community isn’t anywhere near as conservative as BioWare seems to be assuming.)

* Because I never play as a male Commander Shepard...

**Oddly, the only other one that springs to mind is Rockstar Games – not generally who you’d think of when you’re looking for progressive content in gaming…

Haven't written any fic for a while, but I felt a part of the game’s story needed a bit more development, so I threw this fic together.



Title: Lost Time
Fandom: Mass Effect
Categories: G, fShepard/Liara
Disclaimer: Mass Effect and all characters, locations, ect. remain the property of BioWare. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Commander Shepard reflects on meeting Liara again. Minor spoilers for Mass Effect 2.



( Shepard glanced again at the hologram on her desk... )

Realised I might have been a wee bit negative in my review of Mass Effect 2, so I thought I’d balance it out with some nicer comments. I'm liking it a bit more now I've had time to reflect on it - it's not as good as the first game, but it is a solid sequel.

Mainly, I think my dislike comes down to a rather visceral hatred of Section 31 style plots that tend to hinge on the idea that governments and open societies don’t work to solve problems, you need Hard Men to make the Hard Decisions who are unaccountable to anyone. The Spectres in Mass Effect 1 had a little of that, but Cerberus is nothing but that. On the other hand, if you stick to your guns and follow the Paragon path, you can rather satisfyingly tell the Illusive Man to shove it, and that his secret group can’t be trusted with humanity’s future. I’m wondering if, to a degree, the game intentionally made it impossible to talk back to Cerberus too much so that the ending would be just that much more satisfying.

(Oddly, if you read the entry on Cerberus in the in-game codex, they are described purely as a terrorist organization, and it's emphasized that they target humans as much as anyone else. I'm thinking maybe BioWare came up with a cool plot ("You're forced to work with the bad guys!"), then realised they'd have to tone down Cerberus extensively to make it at all plausible...)

What I liked – characters are more detailed (Tali and Liara in Mass Effect 1 didn’t have much to say that wasn’t in the codex entry for their species.), and there’s a lot of extra dialogue and little hidden things. The game kept up Mass Effect 1’s style of giving even the non-companion crewmembers a fair amount of personality; Joker has something to say after almost every mission, and Dr. Chakwas and your yeoman have a fair amount of dialogue too.

The missions aren’t quite as memorable as in the first game, but that’s mainly because they’re shorter – and there’s a couple that can be resolved through means other than ‘shoot everyone’, which is a nice change of pace. I particularly liked the Asari Justicar’s mission, where you have to serve as the decoy to lure a murderer into a trap.

Having shorter missions actually made the game harder to put down – they’re like popcorn, you keep thinking “Well, they’re not too long, I’ll just do one more loyalty mission before I stop…”

Forgot to mention the new 'conversation interupt' system - having a high Paragon or Renegade score gives you extra persuade/intimidate options in dialogue, but also every now and then lets you interupt a cutscene and take a special action - Renegade actions tend to be things like shooting bad guys at point blank range while they're in the middle of an evil rant, while Paragon actions tend to be things like grabbing guns off people before they do something they'll regret, pushing people out the way of bullets, and in one particularly heart-warming example, giving a companion a hug!

Oh, and getting emails from various characters from the first game was a cute way of filling you in on what’s going on since then. And sometimes you get spam – amusingly, because in RPGs one’s so used to receiving random requests for aid from random people, I initially didn’t realise the 419 style scam was a joke, not the beginning of a new quest...

Just finishing off, a couple of screenshots I took of my Commander Shepard:


Shepard and Garrus, with cute matching eyepieces. Didn’t use any other helmets, since they obscure Shepard’s face too much, but even if they didn’t, I’d have probably used the visor anyway.


And a rather nice shot of Shepard in civilian dress I took by mistake while trying to get a shot of something completely different. Shame there weren’t more unarmoured choices, but I did like this outfit as relaxed wear.

So, spoiler laden Mass Effect 2 comments:

( Seriously, lots o' spoilers... )

- Minor packaging thing: Anyone else dislike how much default Male Shepard dominates the artwork and advertising? Even assuming you’re mad enough not to prefer Jennifer Hale’s Shepard to Mark Meer, does anyone really play with the default bald space marine face?

And it’s kind of disconcerting, since I’ve played so much with the same character, I just instinctively think of Shepard as being the dark-haired black woman I play her as.

Went to see the Beach Boys last night. Someone explain to me why concerts only seem to put up posters just before the event, when the tickets have generally sold out months before?

Some... curious choices of songs. They did all the stuff you expect - California Girls, Good Vibrations, Wouldn't It Be Nice, Fun Fun Fun - but also a buch of pretty obscure stuff, including Be True to Your School - which was actually kind of funny, since that song's been something of a private joke for me and my friends, mainly because it's so not very good...

The weird thing is just how much they sound like themselves. I mean, sure, who else would they sound like - but they sound *exactly* like themselves from forty, fifty years ago. It's incredible.

Gotta say… I’m a little disappointed. Going to have a second post up with heavy spoilers, this is just general opinions.

( Mass Effect’s one of my favourite RPGs, so I grabbed this one as soon as it was on shelves... )

So, it’s Australia Day again, and that means it’s time for the annual national debate on “Just how crap is our national flag and anthem?”

The flag, of course, has the problem of looking like a colonial ensign and being easily confused with that of New Zealand or a number of British overseas territories. The dominant element is the Union Jack, which is itself an amalgamation of multiple flags, so the symbolism ends up being several steps removed from Australia. All round, it’s not a very good flag.

Of course, it looks brilliant compared to our national anthem, which features bizarre word choices, barely coherent sentences, and a curiously recursive ending as the anthem encourages us to “let us sing Advance Australia Fair”. Now, obviously, Australia was never going to have a very good national anthem – our history doesn’t lend itself to the sort of calls for national liberation, unity or revolution that make for a good national anthem. Still, Advance Australia Fair is really scraping the bottom of the barrel – and it’s truly odd that of all countries, Australia is one of the few whose anthem did *not* start life as a drinking song… not that that would necessarily improve it, but it might at least have ensured people would stop trying to sing it in faux-operatic tones.

selenak has a great post pointing out that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s plot of Sisko being the Emissary of the Bajorans is, essentialy, the same ‘white messiah’ storyline that Avatar’s been criticized for. What I think’s interesting is that I’d never noticed that before, and never seen anyone else make that comment anywhere – and of course, a big factor in obscuring that is that Sisko’s black while the majority of the Bajorans – and certainly every major Bajoran character – is white, and more importantly they’re not portrayed as having any sort of stereotypical faux-American Indian or other ’native’ culture.

(The Bajoran storylines also don’t just revolve around Sisko being their religious figure, nor are all their problems resolved by his arrival, which also obscures things.)

And, of course, this could easily have proven very dubious indeed if it had been, say, Picard being recognised as the prophesied spiritual leader of the Klingons*, for example.

The point? Well, mainly that you can get away with using old tropes that have a dubious racial subtext – as long as you’re aware of what the core of the trope is and what’s the dubious dross that can be done away with. And, of course, ensuring you’ve cast a few non-white actors among your prophesied heroes will also do a lot to remove the issues. Avatar – and, full disclosure, I haven’t actually seen it – doesn’t seem to have bothered putting any thought to these things, and has just repeated the cliches completely intact.

I mean, I'm not saying if you do this plot you have to have a black guy as the hero and the 'natives' as white - but if you are going to have a literal white messiah, at least be aware you're doing it, and have made the conscious decision to do so, while recognising the potential issues there. Don't just unthinkingly do it because 'that's the way that story works.' It's lazy, if nothing else.


* As people over at Selenak’s post have pointed out, the Klingons aren’t all black – most of the major Klingons are played by white actors. Not sure if that’s an improvement, though, that so many of the extras are black or brown while the speaking parts are all white actors. I love Star Trek, but it does have some racial issues here and there.

A random thought – it occurs to me one of the reasons I’m less than engrossed by “The West Wing” is that real American politics is far more entertaining and has much more exciting storylines… Certainly more interesting than Australian politics, where the opposition has decided to show off its new found environmental concerns by announcing a bold plan to deal with climate change… namely, eliminating Australia’s feral camel population.

The Massachusetts election is interesting – in terms of voter mood, I’m not sure there’s anything there that can be projected nation-wide, and as far as its effects, it doesn’t mean that much. The Democrats never really had sixty senate seats – delays in seating new senators, the death of Kennedy, and Lieberman’s unreliability means not that much has really been lost. On the other hand, losing a traditionally safe Democratic seat on the anniversary of Obama’s inauguration will have serious symbolic power, and it will be interesting to see the reaction.

Theoretically, this might actually help the Democratic party in the long run – rather than chasing after the impossible goal of sixty senate votes, they might remember they actually do still have a majority and can still do stuff with that – giving them a little flexibility when it comes to recalcitrant members of their own party. It might also serve as a wake-up call to Obama and his advisors that the honeymoon is well and truly over and they need to at least look like they’re fighting for their goals, even if they’re not achieving anything yet.

Of course, if history is any guide, that won’t happen, and the Democratic party will instead panic and begin shifting even further to the right in another futile effort to win over independent voters. The sad thing is that in 2008 the Democratic party really had an opportunity to take advantage of populist anger and finally shed their reputation as being ineffectual and out-of-touch. Instead, they cozied up to business interests again, and Obama’s popular appeal has melted away to be replaced with the reactionary demagoguery of the tea baggers…

And we’re back to mediocre. At this point, I think I’m more watching these so I have something to put on my livejournal on a regular basis. But, damnit, I've got all the DVDs sitting here, it feels stupid to quit this early on!

Problems: This is the kind of episode, the sort of quiet character piece, that you can get away with once in a while, a few seasons into the show, when you’ve established your characters well enough that you can get away with just showing them going about their normal routine for an hour instead of dealing with the crisis of the week. Five episodes in, when I’m still struggling to work out which white guy in a suit is which… no, it doesn’t work for me. It all feels kind of smarmy, and at this point I don’t like the characters enough to really tolerate an episode that seems largely devoted to each of them reassuring each other how awesome they all are. I haven’t seen enough of either Josh or Toby to care about their feelings of insecurity, and the episode doesn’t have any other real content.

And the bit at the end about “These women” – I don’t know, it felt… not exactly patronising, but at the very least a bad case of ‘tell, don’t show’ to have the main characters muse on how important the female characters are to their work while at the same time the show itself so far has been so totally dominated by white men. Mandy seems to be the only woman so far who’s had a chance to be anything other than a bystander in male character’s stories, and she’s neither driving the narrative nor at all likeable, and I understand she vanishes fairly soon…
Minor notes:

- It felt a little dishonest to me to raise the issue of smallpox outbreaks without mentioning that the US is one of only two countries that still maintains samples of the virus – and was, at the time of this episode, acting against WHO recommendations that the samples be destroyed.

- Can we kill the “Hero reels off a list of figures, impresses everyone with his in-depth knowledge, later admits he was just making them up” joke? Granted, it was possibly a little fresher in ’99 – but at this point, I assume that’s where a scene’s going whenever someone in a movie reels of specific details.

- Funny, I was just thinking during the pan-over of Washington DC how weird it looks to see it intact, then we go into a scene discussing nuclear evacuation procedure. Yeah, I play too much Fallout…

A very wide swing in quality here – episode three I thought was the weakest episode I’ve seen, while four was the best. Taking them one at a time:

Proportional Response dragged for most of its runtime, dealing with an absurd dilemma – how many foreign lives is an American worth? Fortunately the episode ends up ruling that, no, the President would not be justified in killing everyone else on Earth. On the other hand, the position it actually takes feels like just as much of a straw man – surely Syria launching an unprovoked attack on an American plane should justify slightly stronger reactions than we see here? Bartlett manages to come across as both obsessively vengeful and ineffectual, something I would not have thought possible.

Meanwhile, the Sam and the callgirl plot continues to drag on, with no actual progress being made whatsoever, other than increasing my dislike of Sam. On the plus side, I am starting to like CJ a lot.

The introduction of Charlie – eh. The main issue I had was that the dialogue about ‘what it looks like’ felt to me less like something the characters would think of so much as something the show’s writers would think of. I mean, ‘aide to the President’ isn’t a particularly public role, and presumably the Bartlett administration has at least one high-ranking African-American? It only makes sense in terms of “This is the only Black character in the regular cast” – and, if anything, calling attention to the problem just makes it even more noticeable that the only black fact in the first two episodes was the doomed Morris. And then, having raised the issue, the show dismisses any concerns with a black General saying he “doesn’t have much time for cosmetic issues”. So yeah.

And if you must have your only black character be in the most junior role, at the very least does he need to be so needlessly humble? Can’t he be an ambitious energetic go-getter like everyone else, not the guy who didn’t want the job in the first place and applied for a lower position?

So, I wasn’t in a very positive mood going into ‘Five Votes Down’. Fortunately, this one proved the first episode I unreservedly enjoyed, and if the show continues like this, maybe I’ll make it to the end of season one after all. On the down side, since I’m not tearing it apart, there’s not much to say about it.

What I liked is that for once there was a clear dilemma to resolve, and the stakes and issues were made clear. This was what I was expecting from a show about the White House, not drawn out personal problems of characters I don’t like or vaguely described military actions. The strategy of politics gets a chance to dominate, and it’s not a clear victory in the end – even ignoring the vice-president’s manoeuvrings, it’s made clear that the bill was a compromise measure in the first place.

And while some of the dissenting congressmen are little more than caricatures – the ‘dude’ that won’t support the bill unless he gets a presidential photo-op, for example – the black congressman is portrayed as having honest objections to the bill, and gets the last word in his conversation with Leo. It’s interesting in light of recent political debates in the US over health care, and the strategic debate over whether to compromise and risk diluting one’s goals to uselessness or stick to one’s principles and risk getting nothing. Personally, I’m in the stick to your guns camp, but that’s why I’m not in politics.

I’m finding the vice-president a consistently entertaining character; it’s nice to see someone who can actually play the political game, and play it well. Everyone else seems a little naïve at times. And his scene with Leo shows he’s not a pure villain, either, just… ambitious.

So, looks like I’m going to be tackling another disk after all.

Certainly an improvement over the pilot. I’ve got more of a sense of the characters, and a lot more seemed to be going on.

On the downside, while I’m more interested in the characters, right now I don’t actually like any of them very much. There seems to be far too much focusing on establishing authority over each other – everyone seems to deal with everyone else with a rather stiff formality. Now part of that’s just a cultural difference between Australia and the United States, but it is turning me off the characters a little.

Sam’s quickly going into my ‘actively dislike’ column – I’m interested to see where his story with the callgirl is going. So far, Sam seems to be coming across as pretty damn passive-aggressive in his dealings with the woman, and his combination of veiled threats and effective demanding that she be friends with him pretty much destroy what sympathy his goofy incompetence and bad luck in the pilot might have earned him. As I said, I’m interested to see where this is going – as it is, it seems to me like he’s less interested in ‘reform’ and more in demonstrating his power over the woman, and I’m hoping the show will acknowledge that soon.

Mandy’s also pretty unlikable, and seems to have been saddled with some of the least-natural dialogue in the episode to boot – long angry or upset rants that are thinly disguised excuses for her to reel off her background.

The President, I’m still not sure about. On the one hand, he’s the most personable character so far – though that may just be because he’s one of the few I can keep track of. Everyone else’s job’s I’m kinda vague about, but ‘President of the US’ is pretty easy to keep straight. On the other hand, this is the second episode out of two where his power is equated with God, and yet I think the show is meant to take this as sincere, not as a symptom of overwhelming hubris. Cultural differences again, I’m sure. More to the point, in the scene where he explains the episode’s title, he comes across as insufferably pretentious – Frasier Crane without the charm. It doesn’t help that by the time he’s dropped the phrase, challenged everyone to explain it, then translated it himself, I’d quite lost track of what his point was in the first place (That it’s a fallacy to assume he did poorly in Texas because of his jokes, rather than because, say, he’s a Democratic candidate hailing from New Hampshire…)

Minor notes:

- I assume the vice-president’s going to be something of a recurring adversary? I think it’s interesting just how weak President Bartlett’s position apparently is here – his veep sees him as a rival (and apparently isn’t talking to him directly), his general popularity’s low, and there’s a rift between him and the military. And the Republicans still haven’t made an appearance…

- Come on. The only black character to appear so far spends the whole episode showing everyone the photo of his newborn daughter and wife, and then gets killed? What, him being two days from retirement too subtle a cliché?

- Huh. West Wing apparently displays its episode titles on screen. I’ve only seen that before in Star Trek (and spin-offs) and Babylon 5. Personally, I like it, but you don’t see it too often…

There’s something kind of intimidating about TV shows on DVD, isn’t there? I’ve got a lot of seasons of things lying around that I haven’t watched yet – it feels like starting them would be more of a commitment than watching a movie or finding an episode of something being broadcast.

Anyway I’ve been lent the complete run of The West Wing, and with temperatures too hot to even consider leaving the house, I thought I’d start watching them. Initial thoughts: Ehh. I’m going to give the show a chance – plenty of decent shows have shaky pilots, but there’s not a lot here that’s really drawing me in. To a degree, it feels like some sort of hybrid of Boston Legal and The Hollowmen*, but played deathly straight.

And the characters strike me as a bit… cold. What do they stand for? Admittedly, I get the impression that the pilot is meant to be a bit directionless, with the ending of the President announcing “Break’s over” – but then, that’s sort of an odd direction for the pilot of a new show, yes? It’s an odd episode in general – not much happens, but I didn’t feel I got much of a grip on the characters either.

As I said, I will watch at least the first disc of episodes to see if anything starts to stand out, but first impressions haven’t been great.

Minor notes:

- The president so far feels to me like an AU-Jimmy Carter, with the links to conservative Christianity and the crashing a bike thing calls to mind to me the ‘killer rabbit’ incident. Was there a Carter in the series’ reality? I’m assuming there wasn’t a Clinton, but how far back is the point of divergence?

 - Kind of amusing in a meta-way to have a right-wing Christian leader complain about how they're portrayed with contempt in the context of a scene that seems to go out of its way to portray right-wing Christan groups with... well, contempt. Come on - even I know what the First Commandment is - you think a religious leader is going to make a mistake that stupid?

* Australian comedy series about the Prime Minister’s policy advisers. Well worth watching, and very funny, if possibly a little inaccessible for non-Australians.

...but how long do you think it will be before someone detonates a bomb in a crowd of people waiting to go through security scanners at a major airport? Seems to me to be the easiest way to overcome increased security...

Anyone remember Stephen King announcing he was retiring from writing a few years back? Because he’s apparently forgotten; if anything, his output seems to have increased recently.

( Rather negative review inside... )

I guess the Dark Lord of the Sith is a step up in the ethics department for Wall Street.

- The Victorian state election will be a rather quiet affair, with both parties trying very hard not to publicise their own existence, due largely to both of them being utterly incompetent. Don't want to place any wagers on the outcome, I suspect it will be very close.

- The Federal ALP will continue holding the threat of a double-dissolution election over the opposition's head for most of the year, but will end up going for just a regular senate election in the end, probably around late September. Despite Tony Abbot's vaunted 'people skills' and charisma, the Liberals will fail to make any real inroads against Labor's popularity, due to a combination of infighting, lack of any real policy, and the fact that everyone hates him.

- The British general election will prove slightly less of a total disaster for Labor than expected, but will still be a landslide win for the Conservatives. Various political commentators will take this as proof of their own pet theories, ignoring the fact that Labor's collapse had been obvious for years.

- The Republicans will pick up a handful of senate seats in the US congressional elections; various people who should know better will take this as proof that the American public is inherently right-wing, having failed to notice the results owe less to a swing to the right as much as the result of a diminished turnout among left-leaning voters, due to voter apathy towards a seemingly ineffectual Democratic government.

- Justifications for the Afghanistan war will become increasingly unclear, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the Karzai government is both utterly corrupt and lacks any real local support. No real progress will be made by coalition forces, owing to it being unclear as to what would qualify as 'progress'. So, same as usual.

- At least one of these predictions will prove utterly and embarrassingly wrong.

So, how long do you think we're going to struggle along with half-assed neologisms like "The Noughties" before we finally do what we did last century, and refer to the first decade as "The Turn of the Century"?