Rock, Paper, Shotgun

08/02/2013 at 03:09 gwathdring says:

Sentience that has nothing recognizably human in it would be difficult to communicate in any medium. We can only approximate inhumanity because we can never truly escape our own experience. For the purposes of a game like Mass Effect, even some of the more understandable inhuman aspects become difficult to portray. When you don’t have words and analogies and verbal imagery with which to explain a foreign way of existing, it becomes very hard to communicate intelligence and sentience and culture without either:

a) Resorting to Space Africa and Space Asia and Space Australia.

b) Resorting to people who are, essentially, human with a few particular things we associate strongly with human society missing and a few new things added.

c) The not-awful version of a. Space Southern Canada, Space New York, Space North Chicago, Space 1850s Middle-Class Boston. Taking real cultures and places and authentically adapting them into the context of the world, rather than borrowing only the sweeping stereotypes.

Mass Effect, thankfully, cleaves mostly to the second route. They suffer a little bit from Space Social Darwinism and Space Racial Profiling, but there are clearly individuals and individual factions within each culture–even if each species only has one real culture entity in the first place. They make a decent effort to avoid cultural monoliths, all in all.

The trouble with truly unrecognizable aliens is that they can easily become animals. Part of the fauna. If we cannot recognize anything of what we deem intelligent and intelligible in another species, how can we hope to understand them as anything other than Space Horses and Space Dogs and Space Cats? We face this problem even on our own planet as exemplified by the common line drawn between people and animals–it’s more severe a line than just humans and non-humans, dogs and non-dogs. We forget about the diversity here, and give ourselves precedence over our imaginary blank landscape. Take ourselves simultaneously for the norm and the glowing, top-of-the-heap exception. We’re starting to uncover intelligences and sentience in other species and starting to understand those intelligences in ways other than “Like us, but dumber in this area.” We’re starting to understand new paradigms that aren’t human-centered. And I don’t fault us for that–it’s hard trying to step outside of yourself and measure the unmeasurable. It’s a lot like Milky Way Astronomy–trying to understand things about our galaxy and picture it as though we weren’t in the thick of it. Indeed, trying to understand any of the cosmos from this (relatively) fixed perspective, relying on the motions of other bodies through our sky to tell us what we cannot see for want of moving our own planet to another spot.

All of this considered, making aliens that are too alien puts us into dangerous territory. It is easy to over-emphasize difference. To misunderstand the importance of difference. To create stereotypes that mimic the social injustices of our society. To find that alien unrecognizable as a thinking creature simply because it doesn’t think or seem enough like us. And then, unless this conflict is the point of the work, we’re in trouble. We can’t use these characters together because they have no common ground. No way to interact sensibly that the audience could understand. We’re left with a funky looking, seemingly alive thing and a bunch of people.

So let’s say we go with Option B, from way back near the top. If we put enough humanity into our non-humans for our characters to understand each other (or indeed, to misunderstand each other in a meaningful way), why not put a little humanity into their biology as well? Make their technology and language and appearance interpretable? You might ask, then why use the aliens at all? My response would be because it’s fun and traditional and that it’s perfectly sensible not to use them and just put people in space and give them time to develop complex, interacting space-faring civilizations.

Edit: ack! Reply fail! I should mention that I’m agreeing with you–just in an overly-elaborate fashion.