“We’ve Forgotten Our Roots”: Bioweapons and Forms of Life in Mass Effect’s Speculative Future

Abstract

Many cultural artefacts explore the relationship between populations and politics, including Mass Effect, a role-playing videogame that both critiques and affirms liberal and conservative biopolitical tendencies. Of particular interest is the biopolitical dynamics of the Krogan lifeform. Due to population difficulties deriving from both naturalistic and cultural tendencies, they were targeted by a bioweapon – the genophage. The genophage drastically transformed how they comprehend their own form of life, as the bioweapon infected the Krogan with a plague-like genetic modification targeting their reproductive organs. The player in the Mass Effect trilogy can cure the genophage or not, and reasons are provided to contextualize both options. In this article, I argue that the genophage problematic can be interpreted as a reflection on the attempt to affect a form of life from the outside. I emphasize what Tristan Garica describes as we-expansion: that Mass Effect leaves open the question of the possibility of expanding our sense of we. But Mass Effect also leaves open the question of we-contraction, in so doing it neither offers a utopian or dystopian political vision, but an agnostic one.

Keywords

• political videogames
• role-playing games and biopolitics
• plague and governmentality