Mass Effect's Commander Shepard: Avatar or Character?

The Mass Effect trilogy consists of a series of sci-fi games in which the player controls a commander named Shepard. The main storyline is basic: a species known as the Reapers are planning to harvest all life in the galaxy and Shepard is the one to stop them. The real source of emotion and immersion into the game world are, as per usual with BioWare, the game’s characters. Over a period of five years (Mass Effect was released in 2007 and Mass Effect 3 in 2012) countless gamers have become enamored with these games with the characters arguably being the biggest contributing factor. With so many well-written characters, Commander Shepard stands out. He (or she, but we’ll go with he for the sake of continuity) is not just a character, but is also created as an avatar for the player. It is the gamer who decides what kind of person Shepard will be. On the other hand, Shepard is also portrayed as a real character who speaks without the gamer telling them to. This creates tension between the way Shepard ‘is’ and the way the player wants him to be.

            Mass Effect 3 presents the culmination of these tensions in the series. Whereas previous games preserved the avatar aspect of Shepard, Mass Effect 3’s focus was different. It wanted to up the drama and make Shepard more relatable by making his survivor’s guilt more important to the story. This becomes apparent during the opening scene when a little boy he saw from a distance dies and subsequently haunts him in his nightmares. It’s also symbolic of his increasing guilt about how everything’s riding on him and how every second, more and more people are dying, etc. It’s all supposed to make Shepard more interesting, to show he’s not just a shell spouting lines, but that there’s an honest to god human being underneath that skin. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with upping the drama, but here it presents certain problems between story and gameplay. The way you might control Shepard during conversations might conflict with how Mass Effect 3 presents Shepard. In the story, he’s riddled with guilt as seen in the nightmares. But what if you’ve been playing as a hardcore Renegade Shepard? That means you’ve punched people in the face, didn’t rescue David in the Overlord DLC and have let countless people and other species die, all for the sake of ruthless pragmatism (or for just being an asshole), etc, etc. And yet one small boy is enough to make a Single Manly Tear slide down Shepard’s cheek!?

This is just one example of how narrative and gameplay can collide and BioWare only emphasized these issues by laying on the drama in Mass Effect 3, though it’s hardly the only game with these problems. It represents how tricky it is when deciding to make your main character an avatar or an actual character, because attempting to combine the two (as seen above) is a minefield. Shepard’s words and actions that the player has zero control over can easily conflict with the way he’s been controlling him over the course of the game. In other words, you can’t control an avatar when that avatar is also ‘self-aware’, as in spouting lots of auto-dialogue, etc.

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