What Plot Would You Write?

I'm playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I've been slightly disappointed by the writing. Putting aside the dialog, I'd like to talk about the wider elements.

Spoilers, but only vague ones.

The game is about a large group of colonists leaping from the Milky Way to Andromeda in vast arks, targeting a few specific worlds that seem inhabitable. They cryosleep for 600 years, and awake when they arrive.

There are some holes here that need some Unobtainium patching, but it's not a bad idea. It sets up a massive project, seals the path backwards, and isolates us from the extensive (and problematic) pre-existing lore.

However, that's not the full setup. There's a million things going on, and they all need to be explained before the story can even get started. That's not a great idea: any one of the setup elements could easily have supported the whole game without making it super-complex, and that would have made the writing easier.

Talking about how writing can be "made easier" might seem a little odd, but the simple truth is that if the scenario is set up well, writing flows well and needs less forcing. This is especially true of characters.

In a game where the player can do a huge number of different sub-plots in a variety of orders, it's critical that they feel some connection to the places and things going on. The easiest way to do this is to have the party members have some connection to nearly every subplot.

If they care, we'll care.

This is a pretty typical approach. In fact, it's the classic Mass Effect approach: in ME1 and ME2, that's how it was done. The characters resonated with nearly every scenario.

For example, Garrus was all about the nature of vigilantism. Well, so was the plot of Mass Effect! The subplots naturally had the concept come up all the time, and therefore Garrus always had something to do or say. Naturally this culminated in him trying to clean up that hellhole asteroid as Archangel, a microcosm of your whole adventure.

Wrex was the same, but about war instead of vigilantism. War was a core theme, and kept coming up. When was it good? Bad? Necessary? Out of control? Tired? Heroic? Desperate? What are we willing to fight for - no, not just fight, but go to war for? And when do we stop?

Both war and vigilantism were threaded into nearly every scenario in the game because the game was built on a single foundation, a simple setup that allowed the writers to easily explore those concepts in a lot of different ways. Although simpler, the setup for the earlier Mass Effect games was not smaller. It could support just as much play, story, and depth... just focused on deeply exploring a few themes instead of shallowly exploring a lot of them.

To put it another way: it's impossible to tell where Garrus ends and the story begins.

A good character flows everywhere they need to be, naturally, unforced.

A bad character stands to the side and watched the story go by. Even if they have good writing or voice acting or are compelling, if they just stand there, they're bad.

This is a big failure in Mass Effect: Andromeda's writing.

For example, Cora. She's a human psychic that worked as an Asari commando. This is a really interesting idea that has really powerful themes.

The actual in-game writing of Cora is clearly "Asari ark contact + conflicts with Peebee". She doesn't flow into the wider story - she's simply wedged into "her place" as a representative of a specific story element. This is probably because there's a lot of specific story elements and they don't have much thematic connection.

Cora's history working with a group of weird alien commandos and desperately trying to earn their trust? Well, that's literally what you do with the Angara. You literally work with Angaran commandos and try to earn their trust. But Cora has nothing to say about it. She's not involved.

The fact that Cora cannot live long enough to complete Asari commando training? That's fascinating, and could easily connect to things like our 600 year cryosleep, or to the Angaran elders that cannot seem to find any fresh new students. Again, Cora has no comment.

This is easily explained: the Angaran stuff is Jaal's place. Jaal does that stuff. Cora isn't involved, except for some minor flavor commentary.

This goes for every character. Jaal's thing is imposter syndrome, but he has no connection to Nexus and its leaders? Even though the thematic connection is clear? Jaal doesn't even have any connection to an Angaran port world conquered by pirates!

The lines drawn around what each character is involved in are sharp and clear.

Unfortunately, that means that for 99% of the story, Cora and Jaal just stand there. They aren't involved.

This is true of all the characters in ME:A, and I think it's why we just don't feel as much connection to them as we did to ME1 and ME2 characters. Those characters went through an adventure with us. These characters just stand nearby while we go through an adventure.

It also makes it difficult for us to care about our adventure!

In ME2, visiting the hellhole asteroid was interesting because two of our characters were deeply involved in trying to fix the place in their own way.

But in ME:A, visiting a similar hellhole is dull. There's no major characters with any significant ties to the world. They don't even get involved in local affairs - just some flavor text. Instead, your contact is some boring smuggler and a woman with a dirty face, neither of whom anyone cares about.

Even characters that should have a history with either the smuggler or the pirate queen... don't. Vetra apparently has no comment on this smuggler, despite using smugglers extensively. Peebee has no particular comment on the pirate queen, despite them both living through the same civil war on the same tiny space station!

This is because Vetra's story is Vetra's story and doesn't interact with the rest of the world. And so neither does Vetra. Peebee, too: lock her up in her own little room, no contact with the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, this means that I don't care about the pirate base. Moreover, the writers missed a chance to make me care more about the crewmembers. If Vetra was the smuggler trying to fix up the pirate world, Vetra would have a chance to impress me and spend meaningful time with me, as well as giving me a reason to care about the pirate world. But... nope. Some boring Han Solo wannabee that is also nicely cordoned off into his own little room.

Writing characters that thread through the game is not terribly hard. The fact that the ME:A characters don't even try makes me think that the writers came up with a plan to partition these elements specifically to reduce complexity - otherwise, they would have written some involvement on accident, I would think.

Whether on purpose or on accident, ME:A's partitioned storylines are a huge disservice to the world and the characters. It starves our critical crewmembers of screentime, and leaves each world feeling uninteresting and pointless.

On a writing level, there are some techniques you can use to make it easier to make the characters flow through your scenarios. A key factor is choosing a simple foundation so you have more repeating themes. IE, vigilantism explored in a hundred variations means a hundred chances for Garrus to have something to do/say.

If ME:A didn't have such a complex setup, a lot of these things would have flowed naturally as the writers searched for interesting ideas in the simpler story space.

But... the fact that they didn't do it at all, not even on accident, implies they wrote it like this on purpose. In which case simplifying the setup would not have helped.

At least, that's my theory. What's yours?

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.

Soft Sci Fi is Hard

This is about Mass Effect.

There's a lot of ways to portray science fiction. In most people's minds, you can split it into two categories - "hard" sci fi and "soft" sci fi. And they theoretically judge this based on whether the science in the fiction is sciencey enough.

In practice, the situation is not about how sciencey the science is, but about how much it overshadows the people.

"Hard" sci fi is usually about lives buried beneath machinery. The technology is typically shown to be big and clunky - obvious mechanical arms, giant ventilation systems, big explosions, death any time a machine hiccups. It's easy to be "sciencey" when the machines are so clunky, because you can dedicate so much of your story to them.

On the other hand, "soft" sci fi is usually about lives lifted up by machinery. The technology is typically almost invisible, appearing or disappearing at need. The stories that get told tend to be about how people live when they are allowed to be who they are.

Neither of these approaches is inherently more or less valid, more or less sciencey. And there are a lot of other variations that can be analyzed in this way, like the ever-more-popular military sci fi. It's not particularly realistic, but it does talk about people living lives buried beneath machinery.

Because of this, rather than "hard" and "soft", I might prefer "heavy" and "light".

Clearly, oldschool Star Trek is king of "light" sci fi. You need healing? Here's a smartphone and an injector the size of your thumb, all better. Need to go from A to B? Here's a patch of floor to send you wherever. Need an epic space battle? Turns out your house is armed with lasers and shakes delightfully when struck. While there are massive pieces of science, their impact on daily life is either invisible or entirely supportive: the cool space station lets people do super-cool science, but is otherwise basically an office building.

Mass Effect is a prince of "light" sci fi.

Well, no surprise. Mass Effect was an attempt to modernize 60s pulp, and it largely succeeded. Computers literally appear and disappear out of thin air. Space stations and ships all have artificial gravity and huge windows. Healing is even faster and easier than in Star Trek, and guns fire magic bullets.

The clean curves and crisp edges of the designs highlight this. While there is a lot of detailing, there's no clutter. This is true of interiors, exteriors, clothes, armor, even guns.

The stories are about people living lives enabled by technology. Sure, there are still desperate people, dangers and evils. The technology is used to highlight and isolate those stories so they can be told crisply and cleanly, unburdened by the expectations of the real world or the forced clutter of heavy science fiction.

Those things can be introduced. Whenever it'd be useful. But we can use the freedom of soft science fiction to tell the stories exactly as we want to.

Moreover, this affects the ambiance of the civilizations we find. Things like armor or even jackets are likely to be rare, and we're likely to meet a lot of people delving into their own interests instead of being desperate to make enough money to survive. There are still likely to be poor and desperate people, but those elements tend to be downplayed. In ME, even the destitute colonists are portrayed as hopefuls building a new life.

People usually live a rather minimalist lifestyle in soft sci fi. They don't need clutter, not unless the story demands it. They don't need pockets, not unless the story demands it. They don't need medical conditions, not unless the story demands it.

Whichever angle the devs choose, it's supported by the soft technologies. If we need the colonists to be worried about the power supply, here's a box they are fussing with, and here's the side quest where you help them in some arbitrary way. If there's monsters attacking, here's as many or as few automated defenses as the story needs. If someone is corrupt, here's a technology that highlights and enables that. If someone's sick, here's an arbitrarily convoluted technology for treating them.

And... this is something authors simply don't understand.

They inherit a great story, and they want to tell more stories in that universe. They want to punch it up a notch, even. So they take the supporting elements that people will remember, and they make them permanent. They begin to clutter up the stories even when they aren't needed. The whole series trends towards "harder" sci fi, more and more clutter, and the genre changes.

I call this "calcification". Turning "soft" sci fi into "hard" sci fi - or light into heavy, if you prefer.

This happens all the time. It happened in Star Trek, which gradually became military sci fi. Hell, it even happened with Batman and Superman.

It's happening right now with Mass Effect.

I think this is why science fiction IPs tend to become grimmer and grittier. Not because everyone thinks grimmer and grittier sells better, but because if you let your stories build up clutter, you have to start telling stories about people being crushed by that clutter.

Don't fall for it. You can keep your stories uncluttered. You can even tell grim and gritty stories.

Keeping soft sci fi light and flexible is difficult, but it's key. When your science fiction can't touch its own toes any more, you've calcified and need to limber up again.