Video games may or may not be art, but they definitely tell stories, and have done ever since the release of Pong (‘two people are playing tennis’ might not be The Wire, but it’s still a story). What’s more, they tell stories in a specific and unique way, one that can’t be found in film or books or comics, and even more traditional themes and topics come out completely different when put through the medium of video games – compare and contrast Heart Of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, and Spec Ops: The Line, all of which are masterpieces of their medium, all of which deal with the exact same theme. At the same time, there are basics of storytelling any video game creator must consider when creating their game. From that perspective, let’s look at Bioware’s RPG/Shooter from 2007, Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is a conscious throwback to Golden Age science fiction, taking old-fashioned tropes of the genre – humanity’s best and brightest exploring the galaxy, colourful aliens, incredible psychic powers – and either updating the politics (women and people of colour filling any spot in the cast, up to and including protagonist) or the style and mode of writing. Aside from the eponymous ‘mass effect’ (there is a material that can infinitely change weight depending on the electrical current through it), all the science is completely accurate. You play as Commander Shepard, customisable as a man or women of any appearance, who stumbles upon a plot by Saren Arterius, a top-level government agent who has gone rogue, and are given a special position with the goal of investigating him.

The game is remembered (even by those who like it) as flawed at best. Partially this is the result of dodgy controls and a lot of ‘dead air’ in the gameplay, where you accomplish nothing but the task of getting from one point to another (later games would both simplify level design to cut down on time wasted, and make individual sets more interesting and unique), but it’s also down to the way the story is written.

Detractors remember it as a formulaic plot, where you’re given the task of finding four macguffins scattered around the galaxy, then when they’re put together send you off to fight the villain; this is a structure Bioware had been using in every single one of their games. Even fans will concede this story isn’t terribly exciting, but I think there is a simple explanation for why I and others like it: it’s best enjoyed in the spirit of literature.

The game’s story is essentially a series of vignettes, in which you land on a planet or ship, are presented with a mystery, shoot your way to the answer, and then make a decision on how to deal with it – for example, on one planet, you fight a xenomorph-esque alien race called the Rachni, thought to be wiped out. You discover the queen, who proclaims her innocence, being born after the Rachni War, and you’re given the option: kill her and wipe out the Rachni again before they become a threat, or let her go. Not all the decisions are on that scale, but all of them are divided like that, between “attacking the enemy” and “defending the innocent”, or more accurately between “badass” and “nice”.

Your receive points in different areas depending on how you act – nice acts generate Paragon points, badass ones earning Renegade. If Shepard has high Paragon, the player can access charismatic options in dialogue that allow them to charm their way out of problems; with high Renegade, the player can threaten themselves out of the same situations. But that’s just the gameplay reward – the emotional reward is seeing an almost literal yardstick measuring your morality. Paragon points are a reward for a certain kind of morality – a Star Trek captain morality of unity, kindness, tolerance, and patience. Renegade points are literal badass points for a Vic Mackey morality of destroying your enemies and punishing the wicked. Seeing either the blue or orange bar fill up is like seeing your morality quota, every good (or ‘good’) deed you ever did laid out in plain sight. It gamifies the process of interpretation, and living up to that interpretation.

But it’s very much lacking in drama. None of these decisions are connected – your relationship with the Citadel Council i.e. your bosses always shifts, but only in one direction and aside from your final decision, it shifts in that direction no matter what you do. The real joy of the game is, again, in interpreting it as literature – you’re exploring the galaxy and rewarded for it by learning more about it (literally, in that you receive Codex entries as you play – encyclopedia-like articles on species, organisations, technology, and other in-game information). Even the individual beats are structured like traditional mysteries, presenting you with strange imagery and slowly revealing the true picture, and as you play through the game you slowly learn more about Saren’s awful plan.

(There are three big dramatic choices, and I think it says something that one of them is the most emotionally resonant part of the game)

And even by the standards of literature, the game is a bit weak – a lot of the information is exposited at you via lectures from characters, and many of the mysteries aren’t all that compelling, either in initial surface or in revelation. The worst of this is Saren, who you’re told is a compelling and charismatic individual but is ultimately a tedious cartoon supervillain who sneers his way through the game committing one evil act after another. The closest thing he has to a moment of depth is when he turns out to be open to criticism, which as we all know is a mark of quality dramatic storytelling, not quality literature. There’s no interesting explanation for why he is the way he is, he’s just a boring prick.

On the other hand, Shepard is one of the most wonderful creations in video game history, and in a specifically literary way. You can of course play them as an uncritical hero or antihero, but there’s also room to build a character. You choose two halves of their backstory – first, where they were born (a child who grew up on military ships to two military parents; a colonist child who saw their home razed to the ground by batarian slavers; or an orphan who grew up in an Earth slum), then their military background (sole survivor of a meeting with an alien animal; a leader who sacrificed most of your unit in a ruthless attack; or a hero who held out during a long siege).

You can allow this backstory to either factor into or contrast with your current actions in whatever way you please – my favourite run is as Colonist/Sole Survivor/Paragon, with two payoffs in motivation: valuing what decency and relationships she can create in the present, and hoping to redeem herself for her self-perceived failures in her military backstory. But there’s also room for a bitter, traumatised Shepard inflicting that trauma on the rest of the galaxy, or a Shepard who’s ruthless for the sake of ruthless, or a Shepard who earned a reputation as a ruthless butcher but is trying to redeem herself, or anything else you can imagine with those parameters.

There are limits to what you can do with this – for one thing, there’s only so much mixing between Paragon and Renegade you can do before you cut off gameplay options; after Mass Effect 2, Bioware would dispense with morality meters entirely, only keeping a deweaponised version in Mass Effect 3 out of tradition. But for the most part Mass Effect allows you the fun of creating a character and deciding why they are the way they are, as well as the act of dog-paddling through an invented world. It’s the pleasures of literature in the format of a video game.