Mass Effect is a science-fiction roleplaying game developed by Bioware set in the far future. It places the player in the role of Commander Shepard, a soldier in the Alliance military, who fights an enemy that threatens the galaxy.
As a transmedia property, Mass Effect uses a video game as its primary platform. Because Shepard is designed to be the player’s story, this gives Bioware the room to explore the stories and motivations of other characters in different mediums. In looking at the transmedia properties involved in the Mass Effect series, I tried to take into account the significance of their contribution to the story and the intentionality of their usage.
The main Mass Effect series consists of three games released from 2007-2012 for the PC, PS3, and XBox360. Completing the games takes about 100-150 hours depending on the level of completion and the installation of downloadable content (DLC) that serve as optional ‘chapters’ for the game. Players can determine Shepard’s gender, history, appearance, and combat specialties, and can also determine Shepard’s actions at key points in the game. The game is designed to reflect Shepard’s choices and alter the information and scenarios presented to the player accordingly, although the major plot arcs and turning points are the same.
Mass Effect uses comics in two ways. Genesis and Genesis 2 are interactive comics that can be purchased and accessed through the games. They are an interactive story that allows players who have not played the original games (or those who want to get to the later games faster) to make choices based on significant plot moments in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. The events covered are essentially an abbreviated version of the first two games.
Mass Effect also has more traditional comic books, published by Dark Horse in physical and digital. These primarily expand on character backstories, fill in the gap of time between games, or tie into DLC. There are a total of currently tem different comic series that tie into the Mass Effect universe, plus mini-comics. Some comics are designed to be stand-alone stories, others involve arcs of several comics.
There are four novels published in the Mass Effect series. Revelation is a prequel and features the main antagonist, Saren, along with a younger version of Shepard’s mentor, Captain Anderson. The events in the novel are briefly alluded to in the game. Ascension, Retribution, and Deception follow a story arc that features only a handful of characters recognizable from the games, and several that are novel-only.
In-Universe News Channels were used to featured on-going stories + references to events that occurred in-game. In Mass Effect 2 the news feature was handled through an in-game (and transient) “Cerberus News” update feed that provided information weekly on political, economic, and social events around the galaxy. In Mass Effect 3, this concept was extended by creating several Twitter accounts set in-universe.
The Alliance News Network account began rapidly tweeting about aliens invading earth on March 5, 2012, treating the account as if it was an actual news feed reporting live footage. This was done to drum up anticipation for ME3, which was released on March 6, 2012. After the game’s release, the account was used to promote other in-universe headlines as well as new content (multiplayer events, new DLC content).
During the Fight for Omega, players were invited to participate by tweeting solutions to simple codes/puzzles to a character in-universe.
Collaborating with a Japanese animation studio, Bioware released Paragon Lost covering the story of a squad mate only introduced in ME3, James Vega.
Bioware also released installments on mobile (iOS) in the form of apps. Mass Effect Galaxy is set pre-ME2 and covers the story of two of Shepard’s squad mates. It was specifically designed to be visually distinct from the Mass Effect series using comic-style art. Infiltrator is the story of a completely original character, a Cerberus agent, during the events of ME3. Datapad is designed to be a companion to ME3, providing a minigame to help players increase their resources. These experimented with cross-platform play; ie. players were rewarded for time spent on the app by resulting rewards in-game. The Datapad app also tracked your game progress; your squad mates would send you ‘messages’ through the app that were not available anywhere else.
This presents a rough timeline that gives a sense of how the various transmedia properties are tied together. In general, we can see that Bioware’s transmedia strategy involved a more traditional uncovering of backstory information for characters. It is only in the later games, notably Mass Effect 3, that they began experimenting with other ways of delivering their story, particularly with the use of social media accounts. This also ties into a broader marketing strategy that made more use of social networks (ex. Facebook polls to help determine female Shepard’s default appearance on promotional materials).
Although the games are designed to be played in sequence, additional material such as Genesis that provides a ‘recap’ of previous events actually make it possible for new players to jump in at any time. In fact, it is actually possible for players to play Mass Effect 3 alone and never access the rest of the universe.
The games, comic books, and novels have the most coherence because the latter are also written by the game’s lead writers. However, that is not to say that there have not been discrepancies between information presented in game and in other formats. In one novel, Deception, the discrepancies are so significant that Bioware actually plans to release a corrected novel. While being able to avoid writing about Shepard seems to be an advantage because there are too many player actions to take into account when writing in a fixed medium, it also presents difficulties. Some of Shepard’s actions have such a large impact that it would be impossible to write stories around them— some are literally galaxy-changing. This presents interesting difficulties for the writing staff of the upcoming Mass Effect 4, which is set several years after Mass Effect 3.
I expect that now that Bioware has had the opportunity to experiment with a more involved transmedia strategy for Mass Effect 3 and the Dragon Age series that promotion for Mass Effect 4 will also involve more mediums.
