Mass Effect Explained - What Are Specters?

Ephraim Belnap

In essence, Spectres are the element that let the game be an RPG - a role-playing game where the player can pick from several options about how to play the story. 

The game is essentially an actionized political thriller, and your character is the equivalent of a special-forces soldier. But what happens early on is that you're made a Spectre. A Spectre - which is short for Special Tactics and Reconaissance - is an elite soldier picked to be the lackey of the Council, the galaxy's governing body. While you may be given assignments, you have a wide standing mandate, and are given discretion to do your job however you feel you should. While this ostensibly makes you an assassin, in practice it also makes you a diplomat, an explorer, a policeman, a first contact specialist, and on occasion, a soldier, infiltrator, and yes, assassin. You're basically a cowboy, given discretion to roam the land and right whatever wrongs you see hanging around. And in this world, there's plenty of those. 

The Spectre works really well because Mass Effect is a Western 20% of the time. And importantly, it's often full of really complex wrongs. What we see is that in a galaxy where we can reach most planets, there's a lot of places where there isn't good observation. In real life, half a law's effectiveness is that it can be enforced, but in this world, the sheer number of people and locations really makes enforcement tricky. And plenty of people are ready to exploit that. Companies set up shady holdings. Criminals flee to other planets. People set up illegal operations and rely on getting lost in the huddle. And so the world's so full of injustice that you stumble across. In the second game, most of your allies are terribly-wronged people that just didn't get taken care of. And who's there to help them fix that? A Specter. 

I'm not sure if I like Mass Effect because it's confirmed things I've already known, or taught me new things, or just helped me finish learning things I was already in the process of learning. Or maybe all three of those things. But of course, it's wrong in all sorts of ways. For one, in real life, Spectres are a terrible idea. Creating a kind of agent that gets zero oversight and is explicitly told they're allowed to do anything they want to fulfill the assignment is just a terrible idea. And in a way Mass Effect knows this, because at the start the Spectres are framed as kind of a bad idea, with humanity the newcomer entering into it reluctantly. But once again, it's a terrible idea. You get guys with no oversight who primarily use violence and you get terrible outcomes. The recent HBO special We Own This City (which I might write about later) was all about this. 

Anyway, that's what I have to say today.