BioWare: A Gossamer Net

Mass Effect released November 2007 for the Xbox 360. I remember reading previews for it in EGM months ahead of its release, but when it finally came around I was at a weird moment in my life. A sophomore in college, I was deep in the throes of post-adolescent self-authoring. I sold my Xbox the summer of '06 because my long distance Portland girlfriend told me she didn't like the idea of dating someone who played video games. My first night at college she broke up with me next to the Ohio cornfields outside my dorm. Said she'd decided she didn't actually want to go to this school that we had decided on together, and I never saw her again.

A couple years later, I still didn't have an Xbox, but I'd moved in with some guys off campus who did so the house we shared could host Rock Band parties. Around the same time I became friends with a guy on my debate team who was helping me rebuild a sense of self that made peace with my nerdier interests. It was the spring of my junior year - I had just bought an engagement ring and I was fighting my way through Lit Analysis, the English major's weed out class that I'd naively enrolled in. I was realizing that games mattered to me the same way books, movies, and music always had. A million feelings and ideas were in constant play; I was revising and rebuilding beliefs every week. Suddenly I loved poetry and Radiohead, Foucault and cussing, close reads and NPR.

That's when I finally played Mass Effect.

Things become beautiful to our senses because they land in a gossamer net of strange bedfellows. Mass Effect, maybe more than anything else in my life, landed with me on just such a web. I was so obsessed with it that I made it the subject of my senior seminar, a project that introduced me to an idea I'd dedicate the next decade of my life to. The idea that we have a responsibility to pay close attention to what games are doing as aesthetic, polytextual things; that the conversations we all have about games are desperately insufficient; that it's possible to make a life writing about games, teaching students to read them. Mass Effect made me think about sex, companionship, and machines in a way that shepherded (ha) me along my first steps away from my conservative nationalist upbringing. It was, for me, revolutionary.

So when I wrote about Mass Effect, it was about the way the game had inscribed a tacit critique of capitalist personhood in its depiction of cyclical, mechanical apocalypse. I watched a documentary about the 14th amendment judicial ruling that classified corporations as individuals, and immediately thought of Sovereign, a thing that claimed personhood beyond humanity, to whom humanity could only ever be raw material, grist for the mill. I wrote about how the conversation wheel created odd, productive gaps between the player and the Commander, and how that encouraged a sort of literary mode of engagement with the story that more conventional conversation trees didn't. I read my first batch of true game studies crit: Bogost, Wark, Galloway, Murray, and Kirby. I raced to piece together a patchwork of ideas, quotations, and design elements into something cohesive. When my paper was chosen as one of two senior projects to be presented to the whole college it was one of the proudest moments of my life.

I spun that experience into a decade of academic work on video games. I was an odd duck to evaluate as a student. My undergrad degree was in psychology, not English. The Master's program I got into was a downgrade from the Ph.D I'd actually applied for. And in the English departments of University of Rochester and Syracuse, despite the presence of significant games scholars, I always found myself having to justify the attention I wanted to give games to people who didn't really care about them. And when they did, it was in ways I couldn't connect with. One professor taught a whole class in Second Life and was obsessed with hypertext. I hated it. I kept thinking, there's nothing literary about this, and these conversations feel like a strange mix of techno-optimism and academic navel gazing. She wanted us to build avatars and all I wanted to do was to say what a game meant.

BioWare games always felt inviting, in that way - like they wanted to hear your interpretation. Their stories might borrow heavily from generic formulas, and their characters could play a little too close to type, but they always set a world in motion that made me feel as though the tools we'd all developed to understand literature, art, and film needed heavy modification, and it felt exciting to be involved in figuring out what those tools should look like. I felt a little ashamed, sometimes, for how much I loved these pulpy, middle-brow productions, and so I searched for ways to intellectually justify that shame. I dove deep into affect theory, I marinated in porn studies, I became an acolyte of Halberstam and Berlant, I grew angry at the ludology/narratology schism. And most of all, I kept writing about BioWare games because I felt in my bones that it was in their worlds and systems I would finally make the point I can now admit I always wanted to make.

That games were important. And that because I understood them, I was important too.

I remember conversations as I began my doctorate with peers and professors alike about how it was shrewd of me to build an academic career on video games. The job market is getting worse all the time, they explained. Video games are the hip new thing thing, institutions are going to want someone with your background. The constant demands from Victorianists, Medievalists, and poets that I justify my work's existence within an English program no longer felt as burdensome in the light of these assurances. They felt like opportunities - evidence of my work's novelty and vitality that the world only needed to see for it to reward me for my efforts. These assurances, it turns out, were dubious and I was more naive than I should have been.

Only two BioWare games released during my time as a Ph.D student: Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014 and Mass Effect: Andromeda three years later. Inquisition has its detractors of course, but its proponents are many and in the end, you'd be hard pressed not to say it's beloved. Andromeda on the other hand, well, I felt very much in the minority on that one, loving it as I did. It's not that I can't see its flaws, it's just that by the time I'd spent nearly ten years analytically tearing games apart at the seams, Andromeda felt like a cool pillow, comforting and homey. By the time Anthem came out in 2019 I had dropped out of my program, ABD, never to be Ph.D, and like BioWare, I'd never really be the same again.

The thing I'm most proud of from that time is a piece I wrote about The Binding of Isaac and Jade Empire in an edited collection of essays about race, sexuality, and gender. It's the only real publication I ever had. By the time it came out, I was running out of steam in academia, worn down by long gaps in feedback from my advisor and the constant churn of bureaucracy. But this essay felt real, like something no one could take from me. Like something I could have only produced after spending countless hours buried in queer theory, games crit, and conversation. Like something only I could have produced, period.

In it, I argued that while Jade Empire was superficially queer-friendly, what with its player-sexual romantic choices and its bisexual himbo companion, Sky, the future of anti-normative politics in video games lied with the unsettling aesthetics of Isaac. I was pushing for a way to read video games that took seriously the literary value of how, for instance, power-ups are structured, without throwing the narrative baby out with the bathwater. I wanted my game readings to feel like a synthesis - I wanted them to pull the pieces of design and narrative just far enough apart that you could see how perfectly they nested into one another. And most of all, I wanted to say that because of that perfect nesting, games produce meanings in ways that are complex, slippery, and politically important.

It's fitting, I think, that the one real professional accomplishment I have from my time as a failed academic fits like a bookend to the one which inaugurated it. In Mass Effect I saw the future of games as aesthetic liberators of the post-postmodern, sneaking deep, revolutionary inscriptions into blockbuster action adventures. In Jade Empire, I saw BioWare as a regressive, queer-baiting holdover, adopting the same structures of homophobia so much of our popular culture has failed to jettison. That is not what I had set out to find, in Jade Empire. I love that game dearly. But as I pieced together all the tools I'd assembled to make arguments about how games do representation, I couldn't come to any other conclusion. I began my career invigorated by BioWare's liberatory potential. I ended it disappointed by BioWare's circumscription within heteronormativity. Either way, the most intellectually energetic and satisfying years of my life unfolded completely in the shadow of BioWare's work. What a gift.

Today I don't know what to say about BioWare's closure other than that I am simply sad. Sad about it the way I am sad that I have no students, that I have written no books, and that I have created no programs. I don't mean to wallow here, but it's true. There was a future I had hoped for, teaching students how to read games, how to be critical and open to their aesthetic effects at the same time. I had always believed that BioWare's games would be at the heart of many of my students' future projects. Now, it feels like in its death, I hear the echoes of Sovereign's final warnings to Shepard, as the ultimate person beyond personhood, the corporate machine that lives on the gnashing of organic teeth:

You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.

My sense of self is probably still tied up a little too much in the question of whether or not I've meaningfully contributed to how video games are understood. I can tell because watching the powers that be demand BioWare's end feels like they're saying games are not important after all. And it makes me wonder if I'm not either.