Recently I picked up a copy of Mass Effect from Bioware. It's a "space epic" that lets you play as Commander Shepherd and pick how you save the galaxy. So far it's been a good game. It's got its flaws, but I might get into that at a later time. There is one thing that I've noticed, and it intrigues me.
Aliens are really xenophobic jerks aren't they?
A big idea so far in Mass Effect, is that many of the aliens don't think that humans are worth anything. They think that, for some reason or another, humans are lowly, under-evolved wastes of space. Of course, the whole thing about your character being human is to work with all your little alien buddies to save the galaxy and prove how worthwhile your species is.
Hooray for noble quests and the heroes journey and all that. I take a bit of an issue with all the racial hate flying around like jumping beans in a tumble dryer. There really seems to be no bounds for any of the accusations flying from either side. All the races seem pretty similar in most respects. Your party has one member from about four races, and despite some different focus areas, they all seem pretty much alike. Given, they all have different back stories and such, but in combat, they all get the job done. If Bioware was going to focus so much on the differences of race, they should have done some drastic things among the characters that you deal with.
As far as conflicts go, I prefer the one in Bioware's other epic, Dragon Age. There, despite all the internal conflicts, racism, and all that, there is still an overarching enemy threat that everyone has to deal with. I like the dark spawn because their motives aren't based on some poor excuse for superiority. They're evil, they want everyone dead, not too hard to understand. The antagonist of Mass Effect has that kind of ego problem, viewing the humans as so slowly. To me, it is hard to really want him dead based on his motives. Dragon Age has a demon that wants to wipe out humanity for its own evil reasons, cool, I can deal with that. But Mass Effect's villian is just kind of a tosser.
In a lot of the science fiction I've seen, this seems to be a real problem. There's always some kind of race superiority going on, whether it is by the humans, or the aliens. Either way, I feel that this is a really flimsy conflict to try and resolve. I like the idea of some kind of evil that is easy to identify, an evil overlord, demonic dragon, mutant broccoli, something. To just say that all members of race X are weak and deserve death isn't really a strong plot. All in all, I guess you could take this as a overarching complaint against all racism.
Interesting end note, the main cannon fodder for the game are robots. They're fine with all the hate speech, but they won't let you shoot the aliens? Odd.
Just something to chew on.
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