game internation relationship

The Procedural Rhetorics of Mass Effect: Video Games as Argumentation in

International Relations

C R A I G H A Y D E N American University

Popular culture is a significant interest for scholars of International Relations and world politics. This article explores the capacity of video games to articulate, represent, and simulate the practice of international politics in both narrative and procedural capacities through a study of the highly popular Mass Effect science fiction series of video games. The intro- duction of procedural rhetoric as a means of textual criticism is argued to address existing concerns within the study of International Relations to ar- ticulate the significance of representation with cultural texts and to extend the implications of claims about science fiction as a compelling set of con- tingent arguments about the broader sphere of social life that constitutes International Relations.

Keywords: video games, rhetoric, identity, pedagogy, popular culture

Popular culture, and in particular the speculative fiction genre, has become a sig- nificant focus of interest for scholars of International Relations (IR). Interpretive and critical studies of science fiction film, television, and novels assess these works as “analytical narratives” in their own right to help explain key controversies, prac- tices, and ideological assumptions that sustain the “real” dimensions of world poli- tics (Buzan 2010; Kiersey and Neumann 2013, 23). Such cultural texts have been recognized as an intertextual repertoire of critical arguments about world politics, ethics, and social institutions pertinent to how International Relations is imagined and translated into narratives of policy and practice (Neumann 2001; Weldes 2003; Der Derian 2010).

Video games offer a similar intertextual discourse that has long been engaged by media scholars to explore the social ramifications of play; the ideological encoding of attitudes toward politics, race, and violence; and more generally, the way in which video games constitute a distinct mode of representation (Bogost 2007; Paul 2012). Games, as a form of cultural expression, “provide culturally dominant views on social conflicts and ethical dilemmas,” warranting their inclu- sion in a broader range of texts to be interrogated by scholars looking to “imagi- nary worlds” as a vantage point to understand contemporary world politics (Bourgonjon et al. 2011, 93; Ruane and James 2012, 2). This capacity has been recognized in international studies. For example, Robinson’s (2012, 2015) textual criticism of military shooter games clearly demonstrates the critical potential for video games to reveal aspects of world politics, its attendant theories, and implica- tions for methodology.

Hayden, Craig (2017) The Procedural Rhetorics of Mass Effect: Video Games as Argumentation in International Relations. International Studies Perspectives, doi: 10.1093/isp/ekw002 VC The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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Unlike other cultural texts, video games offer narratives and game mechanics that invite players to be active participants in virtual worlds, where players con- front the causal logics, institutions, and practices that “render social realities into playable form” (Galloway 2006, 17). De Zamar!oczy (2016, 14) goes further, stating that video games, “through their strong emphasis on active participation rather than passive reception, stand out from the rest of pop culture as the medium that arguably most allows for agency, reinterpretation, and contestation.” This article draws upon both video game criticism and international studies in order to explore the distinctive capacities of video games to articulate, represent, and sim- ulate the practice of international politics in both narrative and procedural capaci- ties through a study of the highly popular Mass Effect series of epic science fiction video games.

The Mass Effect saga comprises three lengthy video role-playing games (RPGs), which puts the player in the role of resolving a galactic conflict between a fragile coalition of racially defined interstellar sovereign nations and a destructive force of ancient artificial intelligences known as the Reapers. Building on the work of other international studies scholars exploring the use of popular culture as a “pedagogical tool” (Dixit 2012, 290; Robinson 2015), this article demonstrates how video games can effectively illustrate, offer a critique, and complicate existing paradigmatic depictions of International Relations through the representational capacities of the Mass Effect video role-playing game.

Video games represent a significant and growing dimension of cultural produc- tion among the global creative industries. The video game industry has grown consistently even during times of economic downturn, maintaining a 9 percent growth rate in the United States from 2009 to 2012 (ESA 2014). Video games have a projected global growth rate of 5.7 percent through 2019, with annual rev- enues expected to surpass $93.1 billion (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2015). The sig- nificance of video games, however, is not simply a reflection of their economic footprint. Video games incorporate the representative power of other cultural texts (e.g., film, television, literature) with the engaging dimension of play, which carries its own particular persuasive capacity to convey, normalize, and embed the value formations and tacit doxa of statecraft. Video games, like other forms of cul- tural expression, reflect distinct articulations of power at the intersection of cul- tural production and institutional (i.e., government) interest, but also carry their own genre- and medium-specific implications for international studies (Slack 1996).

Video games offer opportunities for critique through what they distill in their representation of the world. They can also reveal working theories and assump- tions of politics that manifest in how players can play the game. The Mass Effect trilogy of games examined here provides an elaborate, configurable narrative of international politics. How such politics is rendered through both story and play mechanics illustrates competing claims to the nature of an international system. In the case of Mass Effect, such claims are contrasted through gameplay in ways that reinforce a preferred model for international order.

As Ruane and James (2008) claim in their study of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels, how politics is stripped down to tacit, ideal-typical repre- sentations within a narrative and in character perspectives offers insight into the context dependence of competing paradigms of IR. Their criticism unpacks the politics in Tolkien’s story, showing that

despite its purely speculative basis, [it] usefully illustrates the importance of assump- tions, particularly those regarding ontological conceptions of which key actors and institutions are, epistemological conceptions of what counts as knowledge, progres- siveness of visions of the future, and normative stances on how knowledge should be applied. (Ruane and James 2008, 392)

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Video games like Mass Effect extend this capacity to illustrate how IR conceptual- izes and argues for a depiction of the status quo (e.g., what motivates actors, the role of norms in warranting action, the determinants of rationality, etc.) through player choices constrained by rule systems. As Ruane and James suggest, a compli- cated politics within a story can demonstrate how “no one theory has a monopoly on fictive or actual history” (2008, 388). A politically driven video game like Mass Effect does not only distill ideas from IR as in Lord of the Rings, but also presents international politics through the creation of “possible worlds” created as a conse- quence of choices made within the game, each reflecting the consequences of car- rying out a politics defined by a realist, liberal, or constructivist view of statecraft (Zakowski 2014, 59).

Unlike the static narratives found in other forms of popular culture, the config- urability of play along with stories generated from the game mechanics (the rules and incentives that define gameplay) offer a distinct vehicle for cultural pro- ducers to convey and sustain complex arguments, as well as opportunities for analysis and pedagogy. As Robinson (2015, 454–55) has argued, video games have the capacity to distill elements of International Relations into accessible represen- tations, as well as to make visible core assumptions that underscore pivotal expla- nations of International Relations.

Video games encode assumptions about how the world “works” in the proce- dures of the game itself, such as in valuations of power resources or in ethical reg- isters that reward or sanction action. This has drawn the attention of critical game scholars, especially for their capacity to normalize the use of violence and military force (Stahl 2006; Power 2007; Robinson 2012). Video games not only tell a story, but they instantiate a simulation of the world in ways that elaborate a particular worldview with preferred conceptions of institutional thinking, security, and the consequences of identity on the agency of international actors.

The Mass Effect series of games is discussed here because of its noted popularity as a cultural phenomenon that has galvanized political action, as well as because its content builds upon speculative fiction themes and representations already un- derstood as significant to IR scholars interested in popular culture (Dutton, Consalvo, and Harper 2011). It is also a “blockbuster” for its producers, Bioware and Electronic Arts. The third installment, Mass Effect 3, garnered over $200 million in revenue within a month of its release in 2012, not including over $150 million in revenue for downloadable content (DLC) for extended gameplay soon after (Mudgal 2012). The Mass Effect video game series is a high-profile cultural text that ambitiously addresses pointed philosophical questions that carry implica- tions for international studies, including the politicized nature of human–ma- chine relations, the ethics of bio-engineering, and the significance of human agency in the presence of a material/technological sublime (Munkittrick 2012). Yet, underneath the broader question of relations between technology and bio- logical life, the way the game is actually played reveals a series of tacit arguments about international politics where the player is invited to consider different op- tions to manage differences among racially defined supporting characters and le- verage identity and domestic interest to achieve objectives in a time of interna- tional (or interstellar) conflict.

Thus, the game mechanic functions to reinforce the value of certain forms of International Relations, and effectively makes arguments through how it rewards and incentivizes, in the goals it sets for players, and in its basic rules. These ludic aspects support its narrative, to make Mass Effect a more elaborate and potential persuasive text about IR. Unlike other kinds of games, such as first-person or mili- tary shooter games, Mass Effect (along with other BioWare RPGs) tracks the conse- quences of player decisions through a kind of “moral development” with the “stra- tegic employment” of teammates (Patterson 2015, 211). The game responds to and rewards the social actions of players through how players manage

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relationships with others to achieve goals. In the process, the playability of Mass Effect’s galactic war constructs plausible narratives for alternative forms of politics that impugn actors defined solely by their identity positions or materialist logics of force, and valorize actors who act based on diversity, multiculturalism, and in- clusion over self-interest.

The first section of the article locates the study of video games within the emer- gent body of interpretive scholarship on popular culture and international stud- ies. The second section links the theoretical and methodological insights from video game and media studies, and introduces Bogost’s (2007, 2–3) concept of procedural rhetoric as an analytical perspective to unpack the relationship of ideo- logical articulation within rule systems that encode political rhetoric into video games that rely on the tropes of speculative fiction. The third section of the arti- cle explores how Mass Effect combines ludic (or gameplay) and narrative dimen- sions to deal with competing IR arguments about institutions, security, and identity.

This article argues that the intersection of gameplay elements reveals tacit ten- sions that inhere in puzzles that continue to plague the “real” world of International Relations and foreign policy analysis. Both the narrative and the lu- dic aspects of the game combine in the consequences of player actions to provide a tacit critique of an international politics grounded principally in concerns over security and self-interest. The game elevates the communal benefits from coopera- tion but also extends the possibility of transformation in the international system through the rejection of identity-based politics and parochial concerns over security.

Building on Ruane and James’s critique of Lord of the Rings, the rhetoric of Mass Effect presents the contingency of IR worldviews through the context of stra- tegic player choices. The introduction of procedural rhetoric as a means of tex- tual criticism is presented as an important addition to the repertoire of analytical tools used in the study of International Relations to articulate the significance of representation with cultural texts, and to extend the implications of claims about science fiction as a compelling set of contingent arguments about the broader sphere of social life that constitutes International Relations. As scholars continue to mine popular culture for insight into how texts inform a cultural imaginary about IR and service pedagogical objectives, understanding the rheto- ric of video games can both expand the range of texts as well as provide concep- tual tools to unpack how arguments about politics are rendered persuasive in such texts.

Pop Culture, International Relations, and Video Games

It is clear from a growing set of scholarly projects that cultural texts should be studied in the scope of International Relations scholarship (Weldes 2003; Weber 2006; Nexon and Neumann 2006; Drezner 2011; Dixit 2012). As Grayson, Davies, and Philpott (2009, 157) argue, the case has been well established for the analysis of “what is at stake in the mutual implication of world politics and popular cul- ture.” They argue that the existing scholarship—in particular on the subject of sci- ence fiction—recognizes the “perceptions of political possibility” that inhere in such texts (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 159).

As Nexon and Neumann describe, “second order” representations of popular culture can serve multiple purposes for world politics—as both a site of politics and a contributor to the intersubjective cultural and constitutive dimensions of IR (Nexon and Neumann 2006). For example, pop culture can also be the locus of political action, as in the case of the Danish cartoon controversy, or contribute to the broader discursive formation of national security, as was evident in intertex- tual rhetorics of US anti-terrorism policy and the TV show 24 (Hansen 2011).

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The “low” artifacts of popular culture—including but not limited to television, novels, games, and cinema—inform a cultural imaginary implicated in the “high” politics of IR (Weldes 2006, 229–30). Weldes (2003, 13–14) argues that “there are often striking similarities in the way SF tells stories, the way world politics is offi- cially and popularly narrated, and the way analysts of world politics represent ‘in- ternational relations.’” This convergence warrants attention to the content of such artifacts, both for pedagogical purpose and for how they inform broader nar- ratives that circulate through popular culture and reinforce the rhetoric of pol- icymakers (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle 2014).

But what does this mean, outside of simply asserting an effaced boundary be- tween the material dimensions of IR and pop culture? As Grayson, Davies, and Philpott (2009, 156) assert, “the exact mechanisms at play and those processes, forces and structures—political, social, or political economic—that might under- write world politics in popular culture and popular culture in world politics re- main open.” Kiersey and Neumann (2013) make this case plain in their introduc- tion to a volume on the television show Battlestar Galactica. They observe that scholars should demonstrate some evidence of intertextuality between the text and the world. Given the constraints imposed by dominant strands of IR scholar- ship, it is difficult to draw direct causal linkages between a text and an “event” or a norm that might govern action among international actors. Granted, there are methodological perspectives that account for the interplay between representa- tion and politics even if the relationship is part of a causal story or complex rather than a predictive logic (see Kurki 2008, 286; Jackson 2010).

Thankfully, this is not the principal burden of interpretive approaches, but this does not mean that studies can brush aside such concerns and collapse the dis- tinctions between political acts and the cultural artifacts that may inform them as simply one “social text” (Shapiro 1988). When scholars make arguments about the significance of a book, a television show, or a film, criticism must demonstrate some kind of conversation between the levels of the analysis, the “circulation” that Kiersey and Neumann argue is central to claims about why popular culture matters (2013, 10).

Making the case for the study of a popular culture text tends to revolve around two orientations: (1) elaborating the consequences of representation as a form of cultivation or propagation of an ideological articulation, or (2) examining how so- cial and political worlds are manifest in the content elements of the text. From the science fiction aspects of globalization to the representation of diplomacy through Star Trek, scholars have identified discursive bridges between the tropes of fiction and the doxa of policy arguments that underscore policy (Neumann 2001).

This article strikes a balance between the reliance on the co-constitutive claims about popular culture—that it can normalize and essentialize certain dimensions of world politics that already exist with the necessity to demonstrate conse- quences—and how popular culture can serve as a kind of “thinking through” con- temporary exigencies, controversies, and points of stasis among competing visions for policy and practice (see Kangas 2009). Scholars can therefore interrogate cul- tural texts for how they elaborate and “play out” through narratives the conse- quences of concepts that inform international politics.

This article builds on the latter assumption, and looks to rhetorical aspects of representation that sustain some level of “fidelity” to the actual world of interna- tional politics (Fisher 1987). As Nexon (2011) argues, “popular culture seldom has a direct effect on international politics. Instead, it supplies common referents that shape our understandings of events; its images, narratives, and ideas in- trude into the ‘common sense’ of its consumers.” In the case of Mass Effect, how these “referents” are made engaging to the player is as important as the message itself.

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This article introduces a perspective of rhetorical criticism established within the fields of gaming and communication studies in order to provide a means to assess the implications of video games for International Relations in ways that ex- pand both the range of mediated texts available for critical scrutiny and the mode of representation. Studying video games acknowledges what (Livingstone, 2007) describes as a “double articulation,” a vehicle to convey meaning through repre- sentation but also a technology that carries its own intrinsic meaning-making capacity. The goal here is not to put forth yet another eclectic methodological perspective, but to invite an interdisciplinary approach to analysis that is pertinent to the persistent questions that arise at the intersection of IR and popular culture.

Rhetoric and Video Games

The study of rhetoric is certainly not new to IR scholarship, but it is worth noting some of the common disciplinary assumptions that define the study of rhetoric outside of IR in order to make a stronger case for the study of rhetoric and video games within International Relations. Rhetorical theory outside of IR has evolved beyond the Aristotelian study of the “available means of persuasion” to encompass a wider attention to the symbolic environment that enables social and political agency, cohesion, and identification (Foss and Trapp 2002; Campbell and Huxman 2009). For most rhetorical scholars, language or symbol use without rhe- torical force does not exist—which suggests a broader “epistemic” function to the practice of rhetoric (Cherwitz and Darwin 1995). Rhetoricians employ this per- spective to examine how “situational truths” are established and what they “do” in broader social and political controversies and in episodes of rhetorical exigency. To study rhetoric is to examine the production, circulation, and consumption of messages (Paul 2012, 5).

Rhetorical criticism of video games aims to articulate “a confrontation between what happens in the game with real-world issues and the culturally dominant ac- cepted ways of dealing with them” (Bourgonjon et al. 2011, 98). Given that much of the IR scholarship on pop culture assumes some form of ideological function for media representation, it is important to assess how that works. Vorhees, writ- ing about the popular Final Fantasy series of Japanese RPGs, states that “when every representation is in some way ideology it is not possible to speak about rep- resentation without also considering it rhetorical” (Vorhees 2009, n.p.). As Bourgonjon et al. argue (2011, 92), persuasion in video games is “inevitable, since using symbols implies selecting some and not others, and this selection involves a choice that is not without consequences.” The focus on rhetoric provides a meth- odological stance that directs attention to the elements of the text that function to appeal, define, and otherwise sustain meaning.

Video games offer both a means to explore existing social institutions and op- portunities to challenge the sustainability of social and cultural conventions in ways that are distinct from other forms of mediated popular culture (Castronova 2008; Nakamura 2009; Taylor 2009). Such studies confirm the contention articu- lated by Kiersey and Neumann (2013) that social conventions and practices circu- late in ways that are not necessarily reductive to the medium, the story, or the scene. Paul (2012) highlights the impact of Bogost’s (2007, 2008) concept of pro- cedural rhetoric that captures “computational” factors as much as what they repre- sent. Procedural rhetoric stems from Bogost’s understanding of games as more than simply platforms for cultural, social, or political practices. Bogost (2008, 119) argues that “we can learn to read games as deliberate expressions of particu- lar perspectives. In other words, video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate.” Robinson’s (2012) treatment of Bogost’s work affirms the critical dimension of video game–embedded rhetoric: the structure of the game functions as the platform for the genre to interrogate,

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question, or otherwise disrupt real-world conventions, ideographs, and policy pre- scriptions. This engagement reflects the potential counter-hegemonic capacity of science fiction identified by Kiersey and Neumann (2013) to propose plausible narratives of alternatives to contemporary world orders. For Bogost (2008, 43), games can “have a unique persuasive power” through the parameters of the game, the “processes it supports and excludes.”

Bogost draws attention to the processes ascribed within the system of rules and gameplay of a video game. Bogost (2008, 121) claims that players “explore the possibility space its rules afford by manipulating the symbolic systems the game provides. The rules do not merely create the experience of play—they also con- struct the meaning of the game.” Procedural rhetoric is based on this assumption, and represents “a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes” deployed in video games (Bogost 2008, 125). This concept expands on the established notion within international studies that narratives create or shape meaning about international politics, to explore how a game mechanic itself gen- erates persuasive narratives (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle 2014). As Treanor (2013, 6) argues, rather than provide simple deterministic stories, the processes inherent in video gameplay function as a kind of tacit “theory” of “cor- responding human process.” The fact that gameplay can generate multiple possi- ble narrative structures suggests a degree of player agency that can naturalize the assumptions to be drawn from the game (Mateas 2001, 144). In other words, the game mechanics work to reinforce the kinds of worldviews represented in the game. For Bogost, this means that ideological formations can be effectively encoded into the gameplay and that “video games make arguments about how so- cial or cultural systems work in the world—or how they could work, or don’t work” (2008, 136). Procedural rhetoric illustrates how the ludic elements and nar- rative content of video games work together to create meaning, where the rules and structure of the game give these symbols their argumentative force.

The analytical approach suggested here is to focus on the ways in which the nar- rative and procedural elements work together in producing what Treanor (2013, 28) calls “rhetorical affordances,” or the “opportunities for representation made available by the rules that govern the relationships between objects and processes in a system.” Games cultivate particular views that enforce certain modes of game- play, but also refer to broader social and political fields of reference that enforce the meaning of representation within the game and contribute to the stock of meaning that circulates in the larger repertoire of popular culture.

Procedural Rhetoric and the International Relations of the Mass Effect Series

The three Mass Effect games constitute a coherent story arc that links the games in a serial narrative building upon player decisions in each previous game. Mass Effect is a role-playing game, which “allow players to assume a new identity and participate in a story driven by their own choices, allowing multiple stories to be present in a single game” (Patterson 2015, 211). Mass Effect is also driven by “team-based combat,” where the player must manage the specific abilities of their teammates—a supporting cast of non-player characters in the game—to confront different opponents and challenges (Patterson 2015, 211). At its most basic level, the game progresses through the consequences of interactions with encountered characters and the strategic options available to the character are constrained by previous interactions and “mission” choices. Mass Effect is not a game about shoot- ing per se, but about making strategic choices regarding relationships, managing resources, and when to use force to achieve political objectives.

The following section provides an overview of the story and setting of the game, illustrating how its narrative trappings represent a nominal adherence to a real- ist paradigmatic approach to IR. Then, the elements of the game mechanic

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(the rules and incentives of the game) are unpacked to suggest a more nuanced form of argument on the nature of the international system, in ways that indict the role of identity in the persistence of conflict. This unpacking also suggests the prospects for overcoming an international system that generates intractable cycles of war and inter-species strife. This combination of game mechanic and narrative elements presents an embedded argument about the possibility for agents to change the nature of the international system itself.

The Narrative Context: The Council Confronts the Reaper Threat

Mass Effect begins roughly two hundred years from the present day with the hu- man government, the Systems Alliance, faced with the difficulties of integration into a much older coalition of interstellar great powers. Humans are introduced to such politics after the discovery of a “Mass Effect relay,” a node in a network of portals that enables interstellar travel via an ancient race’s technology. The hu- man Systems Alliance government joins four other dominant races otherwise en- gaged in some form of conflict or jockeying for influence—economic, military, technological, and biological—that have endured for centuries. These races com- prise the principal governing stakeholders of the “Council,” a kind of extra- sovereign government ensconced at a gigantic political and trading space station known as the “Citadel.”

The political context is pivotal to the game, and is introduced as a contentious, balance-of-power dynamic. Despite the presence of the Citadel and its Council, there is no real transnational governing power. The military capabilities of the Taurians (who initially waged war with the relatively “new” human presence) are held in check by the financial and diplomatic prowess of the Asari, while Salarian intelligence and technological advancements allow for significant influence on the collective action and governance decisions of the Council.

On the surface, this narrative representation reproduces mainstream IR config- urations of political motivation around security maximization characteristic of dif- ferent aspects of realism, in particular the condition of anarchy, the primacy of force and material power, and the abiding concern for survival (Morgenthau 1948; Waltz 1979; Grieco 1988; Rose 1998; Mearsheimer 2001). A paradigmatic re- alism presents itself most prominently on two levels: the Reapers’ trans-historical expectation that all life is destined to repeat cycles of conflict regardless of cir- cumstance, and the tenuous cooperation among interstellar powers who appear (at least initially) to be suspicious of seeking collective security arrangements. The response of the Council’s racial governments to the successive crises of the Mass Effect storyline reflects a motive to contain any emergent threats, rather than to co- operate in ways that redistribute the status-quo balance of power.

Another principal antagonist present throughout the series is the human char- acter known as the “Illusive Man” and his Cerberus organization, a well-funded network of pro-human political advocates that operates around the legal institu- tions of the Systems Alliance and its obligations to the other races of the Council. It is revealed through Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 that the Illusive Man’s pur- pose is to ensure humanity’s domination through acquiring the technology of the Reapers. While Cerberus is nominally opposed to the Reaper threat, its strategy is predicated on human security overall by controlling the Reapers through assimila- tion. Cerberus’s actions are repeatedly justified in the stark terms of security max- imalization—where the threat posed by the capacity of the other races to impinge on human sovereignty outweighs all other strategies to reduce conflict and ensure peace.

As the plot unfolds in the first game, it quickly becomes evident that humans, as well as the other races portrayed in the game, confront a threat that precedes the Council government by multiple millennia. Unlike other science fiction epics,

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the setup for the Mass Effect story portrays intelligent biological life as profoundly insignificant to the astronomically ancient “Reapers” that function as the principal antagonists across the series. The cyclopean Reapers are first presented as inscru- table, possessing powers far greater than the principal races of the Council. The Reapers are vast artificial intelligence (AI) war machines, whose purpose (at least as it is initially revealed) is to wipe out sentient organic life.

Through the conclusion of the first game, it is learned that the Reapers “har- vest” such life every 50,000 years. In later installments, it is revealed that the Reapers’ creators foresaw that all biological life would advance to the point of cre- ating artificial life, and conflict between these two forms of life would be inevita- ble. The Reapers “harvest” intelligent life, predicated on a destructive “Thucydides trap” between artificial and organic life (see Allison 2012). The Reapers see unavoidable challenges to the emerging power of artificial life, and periodically intervene because the nature of this cycle demands it in order to pre- serve the continued existence of (lesser) biological life and some form of order. Likewise, the Reapers’ assessment of politics among existing governments predicts that collective action against the Reapers would inevitably be ineffective, as some actors could always be coopted to defect to the Reaper cause for self-interested reasons.

Mass Effect’s narrative setting combines a cosmic nihilism (all life is doomed to be harvested by Reapers at some point in their evolution), with the genre trap- pings of space opera. This serves to heighten the ironic portrayal of political ma- neuvering (indeed, of politics itself) that the player must confront. Like the televi- sion series Battlestar Galactica, the goal of averting catastrophic loss calls into question the value commitments of the status-quo political institutions such as the Council. The player must work to overcome the parochial security imperatives that divide the races, who balk at cooperation and remain suspicious of potential threats to their relative position of influence given a legacy of imperial conquests and other violent transgressions between the races portrayed in the game.

The threat that drives the narrative—the destruction of intelligent life in the galaxy—forces both the player and the story to confront how domestic interests, identity-driven power seeking, and security concerns limit the ability of the player and the governing Council to address the looming threat. The Reapers’ presence recasts the game narrative as one of an existential crisis in a way that both trivial- izes and critiques self-interested political motivation, while at the same time inviting a mode of international politics based on exigency.

The Politics in Gameplay: Managing Identity and Conflict

The politics represented in the narrative backdrop to the Mass Effect game repre- sents only part of the claims about International Relations contained in the game. The game mechanic carries more of the rhetorical burden, elaborating both a tacit theory of international politics and an idealized alternative. Mass Effect is a role-playing game, and as such the mechanic of the game is based around choices made by the player to both develop the central character of the game (Commander Shepard) and impact the course of the storyline. A significant por- tion of the game is also composed of conversations with non-player characters, time-consuming resource management, and decisions about where to travel. Mass Effect is also a time-consuming game, featuring a concatenation of “missions,” both sequential and discretionary, with average times to complete the series total- ing over 120 hours of game time (GameLengths 2015).

The game requires a significant amount of information sorting and a patient at- tention to the acquisition of skills, allies, and knowledge. These basic game ele- ments, in themselves, reveal a series of de facto arguments about how an actor might manage international affairs, though very often the ideological formations

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that arise are in tension. The game alternatively can reward a steady, incremental approach to resource accumulation in order to facilitate cooperative security through the provision of material incentives to allies or, in contrast, legitimize the use of threats and force to override slow diplomatic maneuvering. These choices have consequences that reinforce a particular view of IR that the rules that govern state behavior can be rewritten, and that an international actor can step outside history to overcome legacies of imperialism and racism to build coalitions that transcend a frustrating constant of competing security interests, even though such legacies are inevitably imbricated in idealized world politics (see Tickner and Waever 2009).

At first glance, this embedded view of IR could be construed as what De Zamar!oczy (2016, 14) describes as a video game providing “wish fulfillment for all the latent values of late modernity.” But Mass Effect is not so straightforward. International politics is presented as contingent and open to reform within game- play choices. The player is provided the means to refashion the structure and norms of cooperative governance in order to confront the collective threat. But how does the game mechanic allow for this, and how does this reflect a proce- dural rhetoric that imbues the narrative with a substantive claim about International Relations?

The Mass Effect series wrestles with large questions about the relationship be- tween humans and technology and offers an implicit critique of international po- litical institutions through the way the game forces the player to negotiate between governments, multilateral organizations, and significant non-state actors. The game illustrates the limits of a liberal International Relations where the inter- dependence and shared interests that drive cooperation or move states to defect explain only part of the solution encouraged by the game (Keohane 1984; Moravcsik 1997; Keohane 2012). It is evident, however, that the way the game crit- ically engages with the notion of identity as the source of conflict in its narrative representation of world politics and rewards the player for reconciling and man- aging identity-based conflicts brings the narrative to its conclusion.

Identity politics serves as the backdrop to a struggle over the governance of a multiracial, loose-coalition government in crisis. The game story reinforces the lesson that every time the Reapers destroyed galactic civilization it was because ra- cial divisions could be exploited, leaving governments easily divided during a Reaper invasion. For Patterson (2015, 220), this is the core ideological argument of Mass Effect’s procedural rhetoric, where the player must construct “racial har- mony among squadmates” and then, through an extensive campaign, encourage their respective governments to create a racial alliance.

Patterson distills the latent claim of the game mechanic, claiming that “embed- ded in both Mass Effect 3’s war room gameplay and its narrative of diplomacy is the assumption that both nationalist and imperial governance are failed systems, part of exploitative cycles of violence” (2015, 221). Building on this premise, the player must “right the wrongs of postcolonial injustices throughout the galaxy by brokering peace between former colonizers and colonized, ending centuries long imperial effects such as territorial disputes and the biochemical disease” (Patterson 2015, 219). Only through the extensive summitry of the player build- ing and managing relations among wary partners can the game conclude with ending the Reapers’ cycle of extinction.

Patterson’s critical analysis does not directly engage in conceptual treatment of International Relations, and only through implication does it suggest that the game has a preferred paradigmatic conception for international politics. Indeed, the story does not prima facie privilege a realist, liberal, or constructivist narrative of unfolding political drama, but allows political consequences to “play out” in ways that highlight implicit biases (or rhetorics) toward their ethical trade-offs. Following Patterson’s observations, these implicate the lynchpin of identity in the

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game’s critique of International Relations, as both an obstacle and a vehicle to overturn political systems of domination—an argument that has been scrutinized significantly within IR scholarship (Walker 1993; Katzenstein 1996; Weldes et al. 1999).

The Game’s Underlying Rhetoric of IR

The game mechanic is geared toward two visions of a moral politics, both of which carry a procedural disadvantage. The “Paragon” and “Renegade” dialogue and action options reflect how the game can be played. The Paragon path encour- ages working slowly by nurturing relations and institutions to manage successive crises, while the Renegade set of action and dialogue options encourages an icon- oclastic approach to actor-hood where ambitions and objectives trump relations. This decision-tree dynamic of the game evolves into a meditation on the impor- tance of relation maintenance, social convention, and public good to serve the purposes of international security.

What players can do within Mass Effect appears as a kind of unfolding morality play allowing the player to construct a particular form of protagonist identity. Much of the gameplay takes place within a series of choices featured in dialogue with other characters. The game allows for different kinds of ethical registers to be chosen, which in turn increases the character’s Paragon or Renegade rating. The Paragon or Renegade points a character accumulates eventually unlock dia- logue options unique to that ethical orientation.

The game uses this mechanic to present a series of ethical dilemmas that cumu- late into constitutive effects on the nature of the character itself—Shepard’s skills, powers, and other in-game attributes. The procedural rhetoric suggests two possi- ble tensions as a result. The obvious moral implications of the dialogue response offer a degree of agency in the formation of identity, rather than having the char- acter (and therefore the player) railroaded into particular ethical pathways. The game is careful to avoid terms such as “good” and “evil,” but in the process turns the dialogue options into a de facto choice between a utilitarian versus a deonto- logical ethics that is responsive to the social good. The utilitarian perspective is se- mantically linked to the notion of the Renegade, and is adorned at times with harsh or brusque language, impatience, and sarcasm dialogue options. The Paragon path, in contrast, defers to the sanctity of established social and political institutions, as well as a certain degree of conversational decorum. The goal- oriented instrumentalism of the Renegade options contain a kind of negative aura, as suggested by the impersonal and disagreeable conversation qualities evi- dent in the Renegade dialogue text.

While the mechanic allows Renegade gameplay options to successfully prose- cute mission objectives, the Renegade is also disassociated with the pro-social bias of the Paragon conversation paths. Even so, the Renegade path is not simply an opportunity to play an anti-hero; it also validates the “possibility space” (to use Bogost’s term) where international politics can be resolved through security maxi- mization imperatives that trump social concerns. However, by associating the Paragon style of play with connotations of the social and personal good, the game becomes consonant with a liberal IR paradigm where system/institutional mainte- nance, cooperative goal-seeking, and relation-building are rewarded at the proce- dural level, while other imaginings of more antagonistic political agency are both plausible (and in some cases requisite) in resolving the game.

Because the game mechanic explicitly allows divergent ethical paths (and in some sense was marketed this way to encourage personal configurability), Mass Effect acknowledges the contingent and uncertain nature of international (or in- terstellar) politics. Its game mechanic, in practice, betrays a reflectivist posture representing the tenuous nature of politics at the mercy of actions, circumstance,

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and history. The game generates stories in response to the nature of action, posi- tioning player identity as arguably agentic, but different performances also pro- vide implicit validation (the Paragon path) and critique (the Renegade path) of the social and political institutions that mediate the player’s actions in the game world. The Renegade’s cynical discourse, in particular, highlights the constructed (and arbitrary) nature of the interstellar political structure.1

Despite the availability of the Renegade path, however, the game clearly pre- sents a bias toward the Paragon path, where the player is rewarded for addressing identity conflicts and understanding or managing differences as a crucial means to overcome more material security imperatives. Identity is both a cause of antago- nism among the various racial and political factions of the game (indeed, the ulti- mate crux of the game turns on the identity distinction between organic life and sentient machine intelligence), as well as a resource to be leveraged and managed by players seeking to enlist allies through symbolic acts that signify the overcom- ing of an identity position. As Patterson (2015, 221) argues, the game is ultimately about the plausibility of an actor stepping outside historical context to craft an in- clusive, multiracial, and international order.

The game opens up consideration of the nature of the stable subject in rela- tion to identity, how international actors (e.g., states) are expected to act in accor- dance with preferences derived from their respective identity positions, and how legacies of imperialism and racial conflict might work to construct and sustain a political order. How Mass Effect portrays the complexities of difference, his- tory, and cross-cultural contact as a story and simulation of governance amid these conditions is especially revealing. Both the procedural and narrative aspects point not to universal systemic explanations for political action, but to how identity perspectives limit practical options, constrain actor rationality, and provide the ba- sis for persistent antagonism among international actors embedded in institu- tions designed to manage such conflict, like the Citadel’s dysfunctional Council.

The racial governments of Mass Effect are approximate analogues to the nation- state, but they are not represented as simple caricatures. The Council races each carry cultural traits and historical grievances derived from a legacy of centuries of interracial contact through conquest, trade, and multilateral cooperation. Identities, both of non-player characters and of the “states” defined by particular races, are not stable structures but play out as both intrinsic qualities as much as consequences of interdependence.

In the actual gameplay, episodes of cross-cultural encounter manifest as imperi- alism, war, enslavement, and even genocide, serving as defining aspects of how each racial identity is represented. But the identity politics of the game suggests that identity positions are not structurally determinative—they are rather in- flected with moments of encounter that condition the impact of history, resource allocation, and participation in international institutions.

For example, Commander Shepard is forced to balance competing claims to historical grievances in order to forward the narrative, such as the Krogan gov- ernment’s animosity toward the Salarians who engineered a virus to severely cur- tail the fertility of the Krogan species. While the Salarians and the Krogan each have legitimate security concerns against each other for previous acts, they also benefit from cooperation to defeat the Reapers. In the case of the Krogan, Shepard must convince them to subsume one aspect of their identity in order to sustain the survival of a governing order (the Council) that has done little to preserve their biological security. These kinds of dilemmas recur across the game series.

1This point parallels observations on the rise of “performance” in understanding the semiotics of state actions. For example, see Ringmar (2012).

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Transcending Identity, Procedural Rhetoric, and International Relations

What is rhetorically reinforced in these kinds of stories? On the one hand, in- game appeals made by Shepard to unite races that have sustained serious historical injustices on the part of other Council races suggest a valorization of cosmopolitan responsibility that effaces difference while celebrating rational col- laboration and collective responsibility. Patterson calls out this aspect of the game as privileging an implicit Western, universalist identity that transcends postcolo- nial history and the intractability of “fundamentalist” identity positions that serve only to reinforce the status quo of perpetual conflict among the races (2015, 209). The management of relations among the races (and their governments) puts Commander Shepard in the position of “multiculturist umpire. . .a rational and tolerant team manager” confronting “monoethnic others” obstructing the creation of a “multicultural federation” (Patterson 2015, 213).

Patterson critiques Mass Effect’s underlying procedural rhetoric as a kind of neo-liberal fantasy, where a heroic actor can forge a diverse, multicultural political order through an arguably rationalist rejection of identity as a constraint on col- laboration or alliance building. However, another critical insight drawn from the procedural rhetoric of Mass Effect is to build on Patterson’s observation that para- digmatic views of International Relations are inevitably contingent and open to reinscription, by acknowledging the way identity politics and conflicts inform and sustain ahistorical dynamics of conflict and cooperation. Mass Effect offers a nu- anced representation of a politics predicated on critical constructivist tenets and possibilities for system transformation.

Mass Effect’s deployment of interracial identity politics avoids Inayatullah and Blaney’s indictment of IR’s “deferral” of difference, and rather provides a richer depiction of identity politics that recognizes the inevitable “presence of the other within the self” (2004, 44). The politics of Mass Effect are not a mirror of structural interdependences among sovereign states, but rather a patchwork of postcolonial and parochial positioning, revealing itself on multiple levels within the game. It is a reframing of what is salient in the conduct of International Relations.

Mass Effect’s story does not shy away from what Inayatullah and Blaney (2004) term the “incommensurability” of identities. In the case of the Krogan, who ulti- mately join the forces recruited by Shepard to defeat the Reapers, the Krogan rep- resentatives reject the political norms of consensus-building within the Council yet recognize opportunities for survival. More central to the argument here, the racially defined political actors are not presented as wholly formed identities—as political subjects that approximate some idealization of the nation-state. The Council’s sovereign states are not naturalized as a kind of essential form of inter- national actor-hood. The racial governments embody what Epstein (2011) terms an ongoing identification process and subject position in IR, rather than signifiers of some stable identity category (see also Arfi 2012). Each race bears some mark of its historical moments of encounter with other races, the tenuous stability de- rived from domestic political and racial strife, and the legacy of their ambitions for power within the Council government. This is evident in both elements of the narrative, but also, importantly, in how the game affords these identities the open- ness to be transformed through the actions of the player in the game.

Which is to say, the affordances of the gameplay assert the presence (and ab- sence) of identity politics in paradigmatic conceptions of IR by highlighting the weaknesses of strictly materialist concerns for survival and the limits of interde- pendence and collaboration in the wake of imperial history. In this case, subject positions are not reducible simply to roles, but rather reveal a “politics of the oth- er” that unfolds in a continuous reproduction of the self. In Mass Effect, the poli- tics of racial definition are always positional. Some races, such as the long-lived Asari, claim authority as an elder race and validate their status in reference to

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their bio-technological sophistication, longevity, and economic prowess. The Salarians, likewise, sustain a privileged position based on technological prowess. Mass Effect does not avoid the politics of identity and historical contingency. The Krogan’s ambivalence toward the Council, in particular, illustrates how the cate- gories and norms for interstellar governance are very much dependent on the kinds of exclusions they maintain via trade, and technology, that very often re- quire a necessary other to validate authority.

But what makes this video game different than another “imaginary world”? In Mass Effect, the politics of identity unfold within the context of a simulation of the politics of crisis, where identity is not a deterministic template or script but a con- tentious “possibility space” open to intervention by the player. Unlike a static story (e.g., a film or novel) that may essentialize identity or perhaps embrace hybridity, the game provides a more open process of signification that acknowledges how such factors constrain “traditional” IR matters of security and coordination, while not essentializing them.

This kind of player agency carries rhetorical implications. The possibility of choice may elide the rhetorical nature of the appeal with the illusion of player choice or engagement. Indeed, Patterson (2015) argues that this illustration of choice conceals the ideological thrust of the game to promote a Western, univer- salist world order. Yet, the processes of the game piece also make a tacit argument about the role of identity in international politics: how identity sustains conflict and how it can be transcended if not ignored. Following the insights of previous critiques of video games, Mass Effect models what Treanor (2013) calls a “corre- sponding theory” of a dynamic, messy mode of governance under conditions of diversity and historicity.

The core storyline in the game that most embodies the representation of iden- tity politics as complicating institutional models of cooperation or material mod- els of security is in the relationship between Shepard and the manipulative Illusive Man, the leader of the Cerberus organization. In an ironic shift at the con- clusion of the game, the racialized political imperatives of Cerberus work to has- ten a post-human future as a guarantor of human survival and power, albeit one where humanity remains in control of any organic/machine destiny after the Reapers are defeated. For the Illusive Man, human identity is explicitly about pre- serving the terms of its own sovereignty within a zero-sum political field.

Regardless of the player’s position on this matter, the game’s narrative con- cludes in a confrontation between Shepard and the Illusive Man, with Shepard leading a coalition of alien races and human forces to defeat Cerberus and its shadowy leader. Here, the story holds two competing models for cooperation and conflict in tension, as the Illusive Man, despite his dubious actions in the game, is arguably acting for humanity’s interest through a politics of exclusion. The con- flict between Shepard and the Illusive Man mirrors the over-arching theme of conflict between organic and machine life, and brings into focus the question of whether the boundary conditions of identity are essential, necessary, or contingent.

These previous examples illustrate predominantly representational strategies of state actor identity in both narrative and procedural registers. From a procedural standpoint, the politics of identity in interstellar governance are encoded into a game aspect that is plainly obvious in the third installment of the series. The fall of Earth to a Reaper invasion at the beginning of the game prompts the necessity to confront the Reaper threat that has begun its open hostilities toward the major sentient races of the galaxy. It is reasonable to assume that this common threat would prompt racial antagonisms to be set aside, and an expedient political ar- rangement would be made to address the encroaching Reapers. Yet, this is not the case, as the various racial governments retreat to defend their territories and interests. Instead, the game puts the player in the position of overcoming the

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estrangement between the racial powers and promoting an alternative mode of cosmopolitan political unity.

Earth’s invasion sets in motion the actions of Commander Shepard, who must convince or enlist the material aid of the Council races in the form of ships, tech- nology, economic, and military support. As a narrative, this involves a sequence of symbolic acts of assistance, demonstrations of goodwill, and various forms of prob- lem-solving to cultivate sufficient social capital among the potential stakeholders to overcome other factors that would preclude their cooperation with Shepard (historical mistrust, parochialism, etc.). Shepard must not only demonstrate the benefits of overcoming self-interested concerns, but also demonstrate the produc- tive potential of collaboration despite differences. By acknowledging difference, Shepard builds legitimacy for his or her cause.

As gameplay, this is translated into a procedural aspect of the game featured as an index of good governance that rates the capacity of the coalition the player is cobbling together through technology transfer, personnel, and political commit- ments to take on the Reapers. The game provides “assets” and “readiness” mea- sures to reflect material power, but also legitimacy measures of the multi- stakeholder approach necessary to confront the Reapers. This is not simply a checklist, but a means by which to catalog the social and political outcomes of player missions. The requirements of collective action and the triumph of multi- stakeholderism over identity-based positions become a defining procedural goal of the game.

Read as a coherent text, the rhetorics of Mass Effect provide a number of narra- tive and procedural appeals to cultivate a specific view of the political world as both hampered by narrowly defined concerns with security maximalization and open to normative appeals for cooperation based on reconciliation, diversity, and overcoming identity-based politics. Each chapter of the game features internecine political strife that threatens to undermine the ability of cooperative arrange- ments or regimes to address the problem of the Reapers. The storytelling of the game represents a concatenation of how political relations unfold in response to differing approaches to (international) relations building—one that invites con- sideration of the contingent and all-too “human” nature of politics (even when represented by aliens).

Conclusion

Mass Effect draws heavily on a legacy of science fiction texts that celebrates (often liberal) paradigmatic visions of possibility for the future of international politics. Mass Effect also clearly recognizes that the optimistic worlds envisioned in stories such as Star Trek cannot deny legacies of conflict and domination. While it is pos- sible to interpret Mass Effect as a solution to postcolonial legacies through cultur- ally sensitive universalism, Mass Effect also functions as an effective critique of dominant concepts and theories for students of International Relations.

Because video games are a form of cultural expression defined by narrative and play, the game mechanic becomes available to critics and scholars as a distinct kind of persuasive communication to be interrogated and examine. In this case, the game rewards and incentivizes a particular form of international politics de- fined by breaking the cycle of inevitable security dilemmas between organic and inorganic life. The game’s objective of “breaking the cycle” also reflects the tacit claim that the rules of International Relations are themselves contingent. The game mechanic encourages this view by illustrating that the underlying dynamic of conflict is what Patterson calls antagonists driven by “monoethnic” interests (2015, 218). The game rewards the ability of the player to manage identity-based interests that are steeped in history and cultural specificity. At the same time, the game mechanic allows an actor to step out of the particulars of an identity

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position and create a “multicultural coalition.” The game is clearly a repudiation of a generic realist politics, as well as essentialist claims about the inevitability of cultural conflict (Huntington 1996). The key distinction between its liberal and constructivist leanings, however, can be found in the link between the narrative and the game mechanic.

On the surface, the formation of a global public good (through the strengthen- ing of an international governance structure to defeat the Reapers) elevates the paradigmatic view of a liberal form of international politics. However, the process by which this coalition is forged reveals something different. The game ultimately punishes self-interest and a comparative distribution of power, which is offered as ultimately the reason why the Reaper cycle keeps repeating. The cycle of destruc- tion, millions of years in the making, can be broken only through a politics of inclusion and diversity—based not just on the expected mutual gains for world or- der, but also on expected power of norms to change the rules of conflict between life and machine. In the playable game mechanic of Mass Effect, the rules of a ga- lactic IR can be rewritten.

Mass Effect is an ambitious game in its attempt to portray the messy complexities of politics and identity that complicate what might otherwise be a straightforward space opera about an alien invasion. It provides a means to interrogate assump- tions that inform contemporary explanations about the nature and mutability of factors that drive international politics. In her analysis of international threat re- lated to “otherness” depictions in the British television show Dr. Who, Dixit (2012, 289) observes the capacity of a popular culture text to “question and critique” the normalized ways in which security concerns are presented and rationalized and to explore possible alternatives to dominant narratives of International Relations. This capacity of a popular culture text to represent becomes especially significant to students of IR if we accept the assertion that such representation informs a cul- tural imaginary also present in foreign policy rhetoric and the strategic narratives justifying state action.

The implication of this case is not to say that the representation of IR within Mass Effect validates basic assumptions of constructivist scholarship at the expense of competing explanatory narratives or paradigms. The procedural rhetorics of Mass Effect offer a more nuanced, critical stance toward a constructivist IR, build- ing on the presumption that state action and interests are determined through the socialization of ideas and forms, but also offering how this aspect of IR could be a site for intervention and change (Adler and Burnett 1998; Wendt 1999; Wendt 2003; Mitzen 2006).

Ruane and James (2008) demonstrate in their interpretation of Lord of the Rings that the characters (and the racially defined nations they represent) act as arche- types of differing visions of International Relations in ways that offer pedagogical traction, making Lord of the Rings a rich text for visualizing the assumptions of IR’s diverse disciplinary perspectives. Robinson (2015, 454) describes this as the “the- ory capturing” capacity of a popular culture text. Mass Effect builds on this possi- bility. Its procedural rhetoric represents competing versions of IR as arguments with consequences, allowing the player to participate in the actions that constitute international politics, and, in the process, stresses the agenda of a critical con- structivist position where identity and interest are implicated in the historical per- petuation of conflict. As a video game, it allows players to be “active participants” in critique, where they create or resolve problems that define an international sys- tem (Schulzke 2014, 316).

The analysis presented in this article represents but one tactic of critical inquiry in a systematic exploration of video games as cultural texts relevant to International Relations. This kind of scholarly attention may also be necessary, if we are to take Kangas’s (2009) assertion that popular culture can help audiences deal with pressing contemporary issues that challenge the stable meanings of

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political institutions and terms. Burke, likewise, argues that the function of cul- tural texts is to provide “equipment for living” (1974, 239).

Mass Effect is not a monological text, but rather a complicated (and perhaps ironic) statement on the human, yet socially constructed, nature of politics. It is not a simplistic portrayal or reductionist account transposed into an interstellar, interracial milieu. Rather, Mass Effect’s game mechanics attempt to embody the complexities of ethics and politics that arise from the competing imperatives of international political actor-hood—security, cooperation, and the ability to over- come the inertia of perceived inevitability. Video games like Mass Effect collapse the explicit framing strategies of narrative with the rhetorical affordances of gameplay that encode tacit assumptions about how the “world should work.” They represent exercises of critical inquiry—vehicles through which to consider the contingent, the arbitrary, and the historical inertia of foundational concepts in International Relations scholarship. Video games, in other words, force us to con- front the operative consequences of IR within the laboratory of a game’s proce- dural rhetorics. Video games, in this sense, provide a kind of rich balance be- tween simulation and representation to sustain these tensions, and thus they require an equivalent methodological stance to capture that richness. But such a “methodology” need not be limited to the scholar or critic. As Bogost (2008, 136) argues, “playing video games is a kind of literacy. Not the literacy that helps us read books or write term papers, but the kind of literacy that helps us make or cri- tique the systems we live in.”

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