Mess O' Effect

    The focus of first (and third) person shooters is generally, the way the gun ‘feels’ in the players hands.  It has to sound right when the muzzle initially flashes and fills someone across the room from you with holes, punching through their meaty torso as if they were cow hanging in a freezer somewhere. The way the slide kicks back and ejects the bullet casing, the player characters’ arms tense and  push back ever so slightly.
   Even DOOM did it, with the crunchy digitized sound effects and stiff reloading animations, it gave weight to an otherwise weightless experience and for a brief second you might feel like you actually have a piece of heavy metal in your hands.
   It is the same thing a game like Spartan: Total Warrior tried to replicate with a spear and shield, and Lords of Shadow tried to emulate with Gabriel’s trademark fighting style of Brutalswing, where every attack looked grim and epic, but had the meatiness of a vegan soufflé.
   Out there, somewhere in the ether is a better analogy about bringing a feather to a pillow fight, but I don’t think a mention of Lords is ever complete without making fun of the game from how grim and brooding it constantly tries to reassure the player it is.
If Lords is a hollow experience and DOOM is a weightless experience, I think the cinematic-ness of a lot of first person shooters is rooted somewhere in there.

  Multiplayer focused titles have aren’t excused, switching from the bag of holding inventories of yore to two weapon gunfights with each player essentially in a played out match of quickdraw. Videogames ape cinema, but surprisingly not modern cinema; they ape the old Cowboy movies from a Hollywood now decades past.
   Guns too, in videogames function just as much as they often do in cinema. The weight is all in the action of firing or brandishing, and not in owning or having a gun.
The Guy Ritchie film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels treats firearms as a sort of plot device; the plot only moves forward because of the inclusion and possession of them. Videogames are hardly any different, and although stylistically the game I’m going to bring up is completely the opposite of that movie, the way it uses violence to motivate the story is almost entirely the same.
   Mass Effect is of course the trilogy that started in 2007, a sci-fi space opera reconstruction that collects the tropes tying together the Space Opera genre for the last forty to fifty years, combining influences of western sci-fi novels, anime and movies, blending them together in a (semi) cohesive mix.
   From the very outset in the game, specifically in regards to the first one, more important to you than any tool in your arsenal of dialogue options and negotiating skills is your firearm.
You will settle disputes violently, you will sometimes find yourself taken by a need to fuck shit up (with bullets) because you can.

    There are two choices of alignments in the game, which unlike the static bar of good-and-evil that Bioware offered you in its previous roleplaying titles, Mass Effect embraces a kind of dual-forked alignment system where Shepard is intended to not simply be quantifiable one or the other, but capable of making decisions that themselves can be “Paragon” or “Renegade”.
Bioware structured it this way to, I think, reflect the kinds of stories that Mass Effect took inspiration from.
    Paragon isn’t necessarily good and Renegade isn’t always evil, once you’ve committed to a choice
for either alignment, especially in regards to recurring characters, that choice will affect the future options you’re given. Alignment is more noticeable especially on an initial playthrough,
   It’s not uncommon to want to muck about with morals like some kind of bipolar reddit user given a position as the galaxies most unbecoming emissary of the human race, and notice later that a key ally treats you like a reprehensible jackass.
    Even as a Paragon what interests me the most is that you still receive just as many violent action choices as a Renegade; it’s just that as a Paragon you’re more likely to threaten “Evil” people (Noticeably, the rest of the cast doesn’t abide by the same alignment rules Shepard does and tend to fall more on one side of good or evil than the other).
    Violence continues to be an answer to most situations. Especially in regards to the games central villains. You can’t convince the Asari Matriarch to lay down her weapons in the first game any more than you can convince Saren at the end of it that his path towards genocide is wrong.
   If you can put a bullet in Saren’s head, than his goals will never come to fruition (which leads directly into the two sequels.)
The villains are always taken care of this way, with very few exceptions that are generally relegated to side missions. “I’ll let you live” is a choice the player seldom gets, and there are always negative repercussions for it.
   When the player levels up, there’s much more focus on combat skills than there are on improving negotiation skills with certain races or anything like that; the player receives one or two areas to improve regarding his people skills in comparison to the seven or eight ways given to murder opponents
   Regardless of the alignment choices you make in the game, as it asks you “A good natured, stern but softly spoken Paragon, or the violent, racist Renegade?” Either path you choose to walk, like a voice of the Paragon with the actions of a Renegade, or a stern manchild who gets upset when they don’t get their way; the character shoots the same.
   Once you pull the trigger for the first time in a situation in Mass Effect, there are no options for getting out of it. You cannot surrender, or offer to Parley with the enemy; there are never any options for negotiations given.
   In regards to death, the problem with the series (and really it could be argued, games as a whole) is there’s no thematic weight to the idea of killing someone, regardless of the implement used.
One of the only games I can think of that really averts this doesn’t even use it in regards to humans; the game is Shadow of the Colossus. The way the game highlights the death of the colossi individually is somber and melancholic; the orchestral fanfare fades and what was once a majestic giant falls into a heap of stone. 

   The player is given just enough time to reflect on it, it’s something that never happens once in the entire Mass Effect trilogy.
When an important villain in the first game is killed, the game just ferries the player to the next cinematic interaction, lost somewhere in the rapid cuts between people’s faces (it’s ‘cinematic’) the game loses all feeling and emotion it was building up to, so you can interrogate some fucker over where you’re supposed to be headed next.
    Mass Effect's commitment to making you feel like a super-cool space marine far overshadows any thematic resonance it strives to build, especially in regards to the first game.
The floaty, weightlessness of the combat is nailed down as the series continues to progress, creating a kind of parallel with how seriously the games begin to take themselves; yet never quite crossing the “David Cox” threshold of games that take themselves too fucking serious, thankfully.
   No matter how serious the games become, though, or how dire the situation is, the only choice you're ever really given is to keep shooting and move on.

-skeletons