teh_gunslinger said:Inside the spoiler tag is my rambling thoughts about originality in storytelling.
I just finished Mass Effect today and I found the game in general to be a rather good experience. It was better than a lot of the games I?ve played recently. But I couldn?t help thinking, while I was playing it, that the Reapers reminded me very much of the Inhibitors from Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space series.
In that the Inhibitors is a ?race? of sentient machines that periodically rids the galaxy of advanced organic life. In the books they operate on a timescale of millions of years. When a race becomes advanced enough it usually activates traps that call the Inhibitors who then start the great galactic tidying up. The motives for these repeating genocides are actually to preserve life. Because of a coming collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy the machines want to keep life down so it can survive the clash. Something like that at least. I haven?t read it in a while.
Now I don?t know what motives the Reapers have for doing their thing, but they (at least judging from Sovereign) seem to do it from other reasons than the Inhibitors. I don?t know if anyone has read Revelation Space or if anyone agrees with me?
What it made me think about was this: is it a problem that the plot seems so identical to the books (and I?m sure Reynolds wasn?t the first to do it either)? Mass Effect is one of the better games I?ve played and I enjoyed the story very much. I don?t mind that I essentially already know the story. When we gamers crave originality, do we mean original as in ?completely new? or just a new take on it? Because, when I think about it, it?s almost impossible to be truly original, if at all possible. One of my other favourite games these last years is BioShock, but that is hardly an original story. You need not look far to see where it comes from. But does that detract from the game? I think not? Most stories have been told for thousands of years. Just slide around the details. What do we actually want?
We have all (or at least a lot of us) moaned about lazy storytelling and I think we had a point. But where is the difference between inspiration and thematic transfer and outright ripping of a story and slapping new graphics on it?
Any thoughts on this? I know the whole topic is not really new, but it's been a lot on my mind lately while I've been reading up for my thesis. But if it's redundant, just let it die away.
If this has been done before I apologize. I couldn?t find anything in my search, but I may suck at searching.
I enjoyed the Reapers too - they are the most alien...alien in the game, really. They seem to have a pure machine mindset, although this obviously can't be true as the aggronance of their "species" seems to be at the root of their being.
My current theory as to their origin is that they where initially created by the race who became the keepers. The reapers rebelled and won, similar to the Geth. The cycle of destruction in this model is purely a method of ensuring they are never defeated by a superior organic species. Presumably, they can't outright destroy all organic life across the galaxy, so this solution is the next best thing. Sortof like what the Martix trilogy was trying to bang on about with over-the-top wording.
Of course, they could be from outside of our Universe, hence how they could "have always existed".
My current theory as to their origin is that they where initially created by the race who became the keepers. The reapers rebelled and won, similar to the Geth. The cycle of destruction in this model is purely a method of ensuring they are never defeated by a superior organic species. Presumably, they can't outright destroy all organic life across the galaxy, so this solution is the next best thing. Sortof like what the Martix trilogy was trying to bang on about with over-the-top wording.
Of course, they could be from outside of our Universe, hence how they could "have always existed".