Character Checklist

I'd like to talk about how to write characters, especially for sci fi. There will be very mild spoilers for Mass Effect: Andromeda's first hours.

It's clear that the Mass Effect team wanted to up the representation in this game. The characters are more diverse, both major and minor. For starters, there are a number of alien lizard women that don't have breasts, pretty much a first in the genre.

Care was taken to try and slot people into "nonstereotypical" roles. For example, the religious zealot is your scientist. The butch lady is straight. It's clear they were really trying to make this feel inclusive while avoiding stereotypes.

Unnnnfortunately, they're not very good at it.

In science fiction, we're currently walking a new path. The concept of representation in sci fi is thorny, because sci fi was built around representing other cultures and ideals with aliens. When sci fi is aimed at a single group of people, that works well enough - your target demographic is the baseline, and everyone else is an alien.

This may sound reductive, but that's how it's generally been. This allows sci fi to take how the target audience treats those people, those ideas, those policies... and show it separate from the complex intertangling of the real world.

Even Star Trek, a sterling example of inclusion, did this. Although the crew had minority crewmembers, they did not represent the struggle of minorities: Star Trek was portrayed as being past that. They were representations without the real-world baggage.

Rather than include any racial tensions on the starship, the writers would put the racial tensions into a representative race. For example, making a species that is half white and half black get into racial wars over whether they where white on the left, black on the right... or visa-versa.

This works reasonably well when sci fi stories are aimed at a specific audience. But once the audience expands, it becomes clear that being represented in that way doesn't work so well. The tribulations of the Mass Effect devs have made it clear that people want to see themselves properly represented. Not as a weird alien or a paint job on a default character, but as someone with similar concerns and goals.

Basically, everyone wants a power fantasy about them.

Nobody is monolithic. Each person cares about a lot of things. This is why Mass Effect found itself with fans that weren't really represented. It has anemic racial commentary and somewhat regressive gender representation, but those people also found things they liked. Space ships, cool adventures, an epic battle, hot folks you could date...

Mass Effect clearly decided those people deserved better representation, and struggled to work in a more diverse cast. This seems to have backfired with Andromeda, whose representations are painful tokens that mostly highlight a clumsy writer rather than making people feel welcome.

To me, the problem is clear:

Representation is not one thing.

In sci fi, representation can mean "oh, we're past all the problems you're struggling with", or it can mean "oh, let's explore that concept, free from the complexities of the real world", or it can mean "oh, let's explore that with all the complexities of the real world in a new context".

Moreover, in a video game, does an NPC even count as representation? Can we say that we are represented if we are not allowed to control ourselves? Does a background character going through a personal crisis represent us if we also went through that personal crisis?

Or does it only count if we actually have control?

Whatever you think the answer is, I think it can be argued that we should try to "centralize" representation. It should be part of the player's experience, not just part of the background noise.

The obvious problem with this is that there are more experiences we want to represent than we can cram into one timeline, and many of them are contradictory. Our hero can't be everyone. They will always be an outsider to some group just by their inclusion in another group.

... none of this is new.

Sci fi has always been about including a lot of different experiences via abstraction. Normally, the experiences we want to include are coherent. They cohere around a core idea.

Our universe might revolve around the idea of right and wrong, like Star Wars. Experiences revolving around that concept naturally pop into the writer's heads and flow smoothly through the player's adventures.

For example, in the Knights of the Old Republic series, we can easily have an evil android, a 'gray' Jedi, adventures in balancing the needs of the many and the rights of the few, of balancing law and morality. These are issues which naturally arise from Star Wars' obsession with good and evil. They all integrate with the player's own story to some extent, usually through party members.

But it is more difficult to include things like race, religion, or gender. Since they are not hooked directly into good and evil, you have to force them to fit. Sure, it's evil to massacre people because of their race or religion, but there's not much to explore. It's just evil being evil because you need to send a message.

Thus the endless stream of bandits in so many games. Just evil for evil's sake. Can't think of any way to make them more interesting, because we didn't set up our universe right.

If we want to be more inclusive, we have to orient our universe around inclusive concepts. For example, the Federation is about all people coming together for a better future. Not just humans, but all sorts of aliens living their weird, extreme, exaggerated alien lifestyles.

That's not a very viable theme in this case, because there's not a lot of discussion. Race, religion, and gender in this kind of universe are just accepted. We're past the conflicts that arise from them: the answer is always "yeah, as you like, now let's go space exploring!" Or, alternately, "let's show the oppressor why he's wrong!"

This is not a situation I have answers for, but if I were writing a sci fi setting these days, I might base it around the idea of acceptance vs rebellion. Accepting people or things or situations - or fighting them. When do you side with who, and how much will you sacrifice to help people you'll never meet again and who aren't magical paragons?

When we want to add in representation here, it should flow relatively fluidly. There are endless nuances and complexities to explore - not just things like "evil people hate minorities", but things like systemic injustice, unstable societies, and the difference between accepting someone and fetishizing them.

We would be free to either lift situations wholly from our reality, or create abstracted situations that leave out the entanglements of the real world. Both would play well in this environment.

These situations would flow easily and naturally, and we would be able to write them without feeling forced or feeling like we have a checklist. I think you'd be surprised how often you would naturally write something that resonates with people Mass Effect has been struggling for years to even acknowledge.

Conversely, we would have a hard time talking about good vs evil. It'd feel very forced.

Even with this theoretical franchise, we are left with some complex questions. Can facets of humanity be represented by aliens? Do technological handwaves diminish the validity of real-world struggles? How much of our writing needs to be vetted and rearranged by people going through the real-world versions of our abstracted situations?

But I think it'd be a pretty good approach. Just need to figure out a reason why acceptance vs rebellion would be the founding principle of the universe: Star Wars has the Force, Star Trek has the Federation, dunno what I'd use.

Anyway, let me know what you think.