I definitely didn't get the "I'm a cop doing cop things" vibe out of the games at all back when I played them (when they released originally). But even if I had, and even if I thought that made me...
I definitely didn't get the "I'm a cop doing cop things" vibe out of the games at all back when I played them (when they released originally).
But even if I had, and even if I thought that made me necessarily the "bad guy," I believe that games (and other media for that matter) can make the "bad guys" the protagonists of a story and be great despite that. Or even be great because of that.
Mass Effect didn't portray the player as the "good guy" in some morally black-and-white story, anyway. It was very clear that most everybody in the story fell into a moral grey area. The player's actions were described using a one-dimensional scale between "paragon" and "renegade," admittedly, but even in the choice of those two terms you can tell they purposefully avoided calling that "good" and "evil."
Furthermore, if I were to agree with this article, I feel that I could too easily extend this argument to a condemnation of other science fiction which I value. Could this same argument be made against the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek? It probably could, and it would be wrong in that case too in my opinions, even though it might be wrong for different reasons.
I definitely didn't get the "I'm a cop doing cop things" vibe out of the games at all back when I played them (when they released originally).
But even if I had, and even if I thought that made me necessarily the "bad guy," I believe that games (and other media for that matter) can make the "bad guys" the protagonists of a story and be great despite that. Or even be great because of that.
Mass Effect didn't portray the player as the "good guy" in some morally black-and-white story, anyway. It was very clear that most everybody in the story fell into a moral grey area. The player's actions were described using a one-dimensional scale between "paragon" and "renegade," admittedly, but even in the choice of those two terms you can tell they purposefully avoided calling that "good" and "evil."
Furthermore, if I were to agree with this article, I feel that I could too easily extend this argument to a condemnation of other science fiction which I value. Could this same argument be made against the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek? It probably could, and it would be wrong in that case too in my opinions, even though it might be wrong for different reasons.