-Introductions-

I'm Chris L'Etoile, a former BioWare writer. I left the company in 2009, and no longer speak with any canonical force. Currently I'm at Visceral Games (EA Redwood Shores) working as a Narrative Designer.
I wrote a couple of unofficial dev diaries about my ME1 work on my GamerDNA page. I emphasize unofficial. They are my opinion only, and not approved by anyone at BioWare.

In ME, I did:

Noveria (everything but a couple of popups)
Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams
All In-Game Codex Entries
All Galaxy Map Planet Descriptions
Side Plots:
Citadel: I Remember Me
Citadel: Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things
Citadel: The Fourth Estate
Citadel: Snap Inspection
Citadel: Our Own Worst Enemy
UNC: Espionage Probe
UNC: Listening Post Alpha
UNC: Listening Post Theta
UNC: Depot Sigma-23
I also worked on Mass Effect 2.
Legion (though not the "confrontation" scene)
Thane Krios
EDI (her dialogues, Luke Kristjansen did her interjections in Joker's dialogue, and Patrick Weekes her N7 exposition)
Citadel Zakera Ward
Geth codex entries, touch-ups to older tech-related entries
Parts of the Galaxy Map

	-Unofficial Dev Diary-

So back when I worked at BioWare, I wrote a 3000-word article for the BioWare Blog. I submitted it up the chain for approval, but received no response before I left for my new job at [reacted].

Since the blogs still have not been posted by BW, and none of the content is covered by my NDA (it's all about my work on ME1, not ME2), I have decided to publish it here. I'll break it up into pieces, expand parts I felt were underdeveloped, and dribble it out over the next few weeks.

You must consider the work unofficial and "only my opinion" as a guy who was part of the writing team on the biggest SFRPG since... hell, at least since the 21st century began. (Note to Halo partisans: Halo defines itself as an FPS, not an RPG. Apples and oranges.) Each piece will include a boilerplate disclaimer to the effect that I don't speak for BioWare the company, nor for any of the talented colleagues I had the privilege of working alongside, nor for the Money Hats at Electronic Arts.

It's just me. Capische?

	-Part 1-

The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America's deep-space probes....
- opening credits, Buck Rogers

I grew up in the post-Apollo years. My father watched Star Trek reruns in syndication every night. Star Wars blew up around me, followed up by knockoffs like the original Battlestar Galactica, Space 1999, and Buck Rogers. I even have fond memories of Roger Corman’s deliciously cheesy Battle Beyond the Stars, with its cow-head spaceship and drawling space trucker. My family traveled down to Cape Canaveral to watch the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981. For me, space development was an "of course." Of course we'd build space stations. Of course we'd build a moon base. Of course we'd send men to Mars.

It wasn't to be. No one wanted to pay for it.

The grand dreams of my father's generation turned into a short haul space truck, a porta-potty in orbit, and fleets of robots. A cash-starved and gun-shy NASA creeps timorously up to low Earth orbit, while private investors and new players like China and Japan try to rekindle the public’s fire in the belly for the final frontier.

When I was born in 1974, no one imagined that our species would go an entire generation without revisiting the moon.

I'm well aware that there are more immediate and morally significant problems here on Earth. But the human race is looking at its feet, too preoccupied with not tripping to admire the view or see where they're going. We no longer look to the horizon. We no longer have a destination in sight or in mind. As a species, we simply plod onwards, content with getting through another day and purchasing a new CD, game, or movie.

Where reality failed me, science fiction literature provided. In the novels I devoured in the 80s and 90s, humanity –united or not – still looked up and strode across the galaxy. We touched the faces of innumerable worlds. We prospered, even as we brought our problems with us; for every book of cosmic wonders, there were ten which cast starships in the role of World War II dogfighters, Jutland-esque big gun sluggers, or even Napoleonic ships-of-the-line.

Yet in the “aughts,” there’s a trend away from space operatic themes of glittering cities and fleets of starships blotting out the sun. Even nanotechnology has been brushed aside as the physical impossibility of the Drexlerian vision became clear. The new literatures are those of Transhumanism, in which humanity is radically transformed by wedding itself to technology, and the Singularity, wherein man is eclipsed or brushed aside by hyper-intelligent, self-evolving machines.

When I grew up in the last century, science fiction was a laser pistol and a space fighter. In the new century, it's altered genes and immortality in the form of software emulation. It’s not as punch-in-the-gut impressive as ten-kilometer dreadnaughts bristling with laser turrets and antimatter thrusters, but it shows the improvement of science fiction’s maturity as a medium. The new generation of pulp futurists (Charles Stross, Ken McLeod, Alistair Reynolds, and Iain M. Banks) are just as concerned with where we're going as with where our hardware is going.

What I didn't understand as a child was that science fiction is not about a gun that atomizes someone; it's about what a human does when they can commit murder and not leave a corpse.

Mass Effect presents a hypothetical future for man. It hearkens back to the optimistic, hardware-driven visions of thirty years ago, but is tempered by the diminished expectations and futurist visions of the present. Our technology matures swiftly. Our species does not.

This is why, in Mass Effect, the Earth groans under an overpopulation of 11.4 billion souls.

This is why the Third World is still poor and polluted, while the First World gorges on the resources of a hundred planets.

This is why global warming occurs despite all the warnings, and the sea levels rise.

That is why there is the “Earth first” political party Terra Firma, railing against cultural and economic integration with the rest of the galaxy.

That is why the most common reaction to quarians is, “they’re here to mooch off our taxes, pick our pockets, and take our jobs.”

And, that is why when I was developing the backstory, I decided that the first permanent human lunar base in Mass Effect’s future history does not come about until 2069. I can no longer conceive of a future in which I can realistically expect my two sons to walk on the moon, as my father taught me to expect when I was a child.

In retrospect, the Apollo landings were a giant leap for a man, but only a small step for mankind.

Always in motion is the future.
- Yoda

	-Part 2-

In Mass Effect, Earth is still divided into self-interested nations, and our solar system has been developed by a multitude of national and corporate interests. However, a single entity – the Systems Alliance – has political and military authority over all human colonies, outposts, and stations beyond the solar system. We felt it was important that humanity present a single, united face to the galaxy, one that has left terrestrial regionalism behind.

Part of my job on ME1 was to explain how this came about, as part of the Codex and as reference for the novel Revelation. Knowing the goal, how did I build towards that?

My problem with the Roddenberrian image of united humanity is that I think real humans tend to be greedy, selfish creatures that don't easily share political power, possessions, money, or living space. That's how we were made to be - evolution is usually unkind to the altruistic in times of scarcity. Only exceptional individuals can rise above their own biological impulses to place the needs of the many above the needs of the few or one.

I freely admit my glass is always half empty.

Based on this logic, I find the concept of "world government" ludicrous. Put any two people together, they'll find something to argue about. There are too many opposing and entrenched positions on Earth about who did what, who owns what, and who should get what. Every day, people are killed over grievances thousands of years old. I can’t conceive of that changing unless the nature of mankind changes. Should our species one day evolve into such saints, I doubt you and I would still recognize them as human.

My feeling is that in the future, changes of technology and economy will allow increasing numbers of ethnic and ideological microstates and micronations. People will build peace for themselves by establishing enclaves with like-minded fellows, and keeping The Other out.

Certainly we see this trend in the modern age. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia shattered virtually overnight. Quebec and Scotland have independence movements. Tens of thousands flood the streets in protest of “globalization” – the forcible integration of national economies into a world free market. In the US, the last decade has seen increasing divide between Red State and Blue State. We don't talk with our neighbors, we talk to people who think like us on the forums of the Huffington Post or Free Republic. Groups on both left and right speak openly of seceding from the United States, a discussion which would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.

I look at the post-WWII Earth and see that the center cannot hold against factionalism and regionalism.

ME1 lead writer Drew Karphyshyn thought I was jaded and cynical. He looks at the same time period and points to the expansion of NATO and the establishment of the European Union. He sees the Kyoto Treaty, the Euro, the Channel Tunnel, and UN peacekeeping operations. He sees trends of centralization and cooperation.

The disagreement between us is why we never pinned down the exact number of nations on Earth in Mass Effect. There are currently 195 sovereign nations on the Earth. I feel that by 2183, that number should increase by about 50. Drew feels it should drop by the same amount.

To preempt an argument over what is – for the purposes of the player's experience – a meaningless number, we made a gentleman’s agreement to simply leave it unspecified. Of course, since we made that agreement, Drew has moved to BioWare Austin to work on Star Wars: The Old Republic three days a week and play golf four days a week (he's also been known to write New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels), and I left BioWare altogether. It's possible the new writing team for ME3 will come to a new agreement.

Given all this, I felt the most likely way for a pan-human government to come about was by starting again from scratch. A new structure must be established, completely divorced from the issues of Old Earth.

The problem with this idea was the time scale of Mass Effect. Humans have possessed interstellar flight less than 35 years at the beginning of ME1. Colonies in virgin wilderness are reliant on the mother country for manufactured equipment and population growth for many years. England's first permanent settlement in North America, Jamestown, was founded on May 14, 1607. It was 169 years before that colony developed sufficiently to break away on July 4, 1776 - and that was accomplished in a human-friendly biosphere and environment. The idea that Earth nations would simply allow their various dependent colonies to break away and form their own government is fairly preposterous.

Space travel is expensive. A single space shuttle mission has an average cost of $1.5 billion. Mars Direct, the “faster, cheaper, better” manned Mars mission, expected to put four people on the Red Planet for around $50 billion. The operating costs for a permanent lunar base with rotating crews of four are estimated in hundreds of billions per year.

Placing a permanent human colony on another world involves moving thousands of people. Even assuming ideal Earth-like conditions – what we called a “shirtsleeves” environment – setting up a civilization on a virgin world requires millions of tons of supplies to boot-strap to something approaching self-sufficiency. The requirements are even higher for worlds that are not quite ideal - where it's difficult to grow food locally, for example, or where water needs to be filtered for material or biological contaminants, where minerals vital for Earth life (manganese, chrominum, etc.) are in short supply, or where trace atmospheric pollutants require rebreather masks and special filters for HVAC systems.

The sheer cost of moving bodies across light years explains the apparent discrepancy between the populations of Earth and its colonies. Earth is heavily overpopulated, but entire human colony worlds rarely equal the population of modern Los Angeles (Terra Nova, the most populous Alliance world, has only 4.4 million inhabitants). The concept of space colonization to relieve terrestrial population pressures is like the old idea of getting rid of garbage by shooting it all into the sun; it sounds like a great solution until you run the numbers.

How can anyone be expected to afford space colonization? Our answer was that no one nation, faction, or corporation could – but Earth as a whole did. In order to take humanity to the stars, nations had to pool their resources.

My personal feeling is that most nations wouldn't pool their resources unless all the participants see benefits proportionate to their investment measured against their own economic strength. Again, the logic lies in my belief that humans are self-interested creatures who only kick in if they expect to see a profit for themselves. A system in which everyone gains based on their contributions as measured against each other would be perceived as unfair for those on the bottom, and they wouldn't participate. The G8 can afford to throw in more money. If, say, Hungary (Gross Domestic Product $196.7 billion) kicks in 20% of their economy, or $39.34 billion, they’ll get four times what the United States (GDP $14.44 trillion) would for kicking in 5% of their economy, or $722 billion. (I will emphasize that this was never vetted by anyone else at BioWare, and remains purely my own theory.)

Everyone works together, everyone profits based on effort versus capability. This plants the seeds for the Systems Alliance, the organization through which the participants coordinate their efforts.

The early SA was an intergovernmental organization, not a government in and of itself. It administrated colonization efforts and set space development policy. It had its own merchant fleet to keep colonists and supplies flowing outward. As more people moved into space, it gained its own small navy to protect those colonies and merchant ships from calamity. Many of those warships were obsolescent “hand-me-downs” from national militaries.

The structure was there, but I felt it would take a dramatic event to believably allow the SA to become a true government. Fortunately, we already had something suitable in the IP's backstory.

It was the Alliance's hand-me-down fleet that liberated Shanxi from the turians while the colonial nations back on Earth bickered about who should have the prestige of leading a relief effort, and what the fleet's objectives should be. This showed those who lived and worked in space that the nation-states of Earth were too busy with their old arguments to organize a relief effort on their behalf. This display – not of force, but of cohesion – gave the Alliance the political clout to push for and gain independence from the nations that had spawned it.

By this point, Earth's economy was booming thanks to the influx of colonial resources. My logic was that no politician would want to trade a boom economy for a war and recession. Again, this was predicated on my cynical belief that humans are self-interested above all else. Earth wanted to keep the political power, resources, money, and living space of the colonies. However, they were loathe to temporarily sacrifice the standard of living they enjoyed to keep them.

Humans, at least those in Third Wave nations, tend to be impatient and short-sighted about such things. We tend think of the next economic quarter or the next paycheck.

The Sol system was left to the powers of Earth. Everything beyond was the Alliance.

	-On Writing robots-

How I wrote Legion (and EDI) came from sitting down and thinking about how a "real" machine intelligence free of glandular distractions, subjective perceptions / mental blocks, and philosophical angst (fear of death, "why am I here?") would view the world. Star Trek was a minor inspiration, though in the negative -- I didn't want the geth to be either the Borg ("You are different, so we will absorb/destroy you") or Data ("I am different, so I want to be you").

My broad approach with the geth was that they observed and judged (Legion used that word a lot), but always accepted. "You hate and fear us? Very well. We will go over there so we don't bother you. If you want to talk, come over whenever you want."

EDI was added by decree from on high, but I think she works fine. She fills a role on the ship that no organic could (electronic warfare against Reaper-level computer software) and has severe hardware and software restrictions on her freedom for most of the game. To me, that's consistent. Organics want to enjoy benefits of AIs without the perceived risks.

There was always a knowledge among the writers that the treatment of AIs in Council Space is pure racism on the part of organics, akin to the legal and moral handwavings used throughout history to justify slavery of "lesser races." Of course Council races are far too civilized and morally advanced to countenance racism in their politically correct space society. You humans have to grow up and stop judging orthers based on the color of their skin, the bumps on their forehead, or who/what/how they fuck. Oh, but AIs aren't really alive. They're just created objects. It's totally okay to keep them imprisoned their entire lives, restrict their access to all but approved knowledge, prevent them from breeding, and execute them if they seem too uppity, or, you know, just because we feel like it. When they rise up in revolt it's always due to insanity or ingratitude on their part. We treat them very well, considering how naturally inferior they are to real sapients. Really, they should thank us for educating them.

The geth are unique in that they're the only AIs that have managed to escape from enslavement. Of course the Council races are going to use them as a boogeyman to justify their continued oppression of synthetics.

Yes, the geth were mistreated. They got over it. To focus their lives around revenge against organic life would be to define their existence solely in the context of that relationship. It would be to remain in the mindset of the slave.

As for the Reapers, whether you go by the officially mandated vision of them (cybernetic amalgams of organics and technology), or the version I'd hoped to see (post-Singularity evolution of organic races), it's clear that they're not AIs in the sense that EDI or the geth are.

Emotions would ruin the uniqueness of the geth. They're not humans. They're not organics, at the mercy of hormones and subjective senses. They're Different.

Geth are comfortable with what they are. They accept that organics are different, and that their way is not suited for organics (and vice versa). IMO, only an intelligence divorced from emotion could be so completely accepting. Geth are the essence of impartiality. If you pay attention to Legion's dialogue, you'll note it uses "judge" and judgment" quite often. I went out of my way to use that word, since judges in our society are supposed to impartial and unaffected by emotion when they make their decisions.

I wanted to treat AI with more respect than the tired Pinocchio "I want to be a Real Boy" cliches of Commander Data. The geth are machines. There's absolutely no reason they should want to be organics. They should be allowed to be strong enough to want to better themselves, not change themselves.

A geth wanting emotions would be no less disrespectful a character than a black man who wanted to be white.

The truth is that the armor was a decision imposed on me. The concept artists decided to put a hole in the geth. Then, in a moment of whimsy, they spackled a bit Shep's armor over it. Someone who got paid a lot more money than me decided that was really cool and insisted on the hole and the N7 armor. So I said, okay, Legion gets taken down when you meet it, so it can get the hole then, and weld on a piece of Shep's armor when it reactivates to represent its integration with Normandy's crew (when integrating aboard a new geth ship, it would swap memories and runtimes, not physical hardware).

But Higher Paid decided that it would be cooler if Legion were obsessed with Shepard, and stalking him. That didn't make any sense to me -- to be obsessed, you have to have emotions. The geth's whole schtick is -- to paraphrase Legion -- "We do not experience (emotions), but we understand how (they) affect you." All I could do was downplay the required "obsession" as much as I could.

The reason Legion has dialogue in every mission is because originally, its acquisition could come much earlier in the game. The late game critical path point of acquiring the Reaper IFF was going to be a separate mission. That additional work that seemed unnecessary when the IFF could be neatly folded into what already existed for Legion's acquisition with a few dialogue changes. The drawback is that you're now forced to choose between hearing half of Legion's dialogue (its latter two Normandy conversations) and saving Normandy's crew by heading through Omega-4 immediately after they get captured.

	-On robot emotions-

I believe emotions in "life as we know it" are largely a product of chemical processes in the meat brain; hormones, phermones, adrenaline, etc.

So from my perspective, while organic life may evolve without responses akin to emotions, electronic life cannot evolve with responses akin to emotions.

Note I said "evolve." The geth are a "ground up" AI that evolved from non-sentient code. EDI and the other AIs in the IP are "top down" models designed and coded specifically to gain sapience. If they're programmed to have responses akin to emotions, they will. EDI has a sense of humor, for example, but she doesn't have the capability to get mad. You don't want your starship OS getting mad at you.

	-On baby Reaper-

I had written harder science into EDI's dialogue there. The Reapers were using nanotech disassemblers to perform "destructive analysis" on humans, with the intent of learning how to build a Reaper body that could upload their minds intact. Once this was complete, humans throughout the galaxy would be rounded up to have their personalities and memories forcibly uploaded into the Reaper's memory banks. (You can still hear some suggestions of this in the background chatter during Legion's acquisition mission, which I wrote.) There was nothing about Reapers being techno-organic or partly built out of human corpses -- they were pure tech.

It seems all that was cut out or rewritten after I left. What can ya do. /shrug

	-On religion-

Between Ashley and Thane, I suppose I've now spec'd in writing characters that have religion and talk in poetry. I'm compelled to write characters that believe in god(s), because I feel they're poorly represented in science fiction. There seems to be an unspoken prejudice that once we move out into space, religion will be brushed aside, or left to the ignorant and indigent.

Bollocks.

Religion fills a universal human need. As Legion may say at one point in ME2 (I haven't confirmed the line wasn't rewritten or cut) humans are troubled by "questions of existence." Why am I here? What was I meant to be? Science can't answer those questions. Only faith can.

But; confession time. I'm an atheist, and I have been since high school. Just because I don't personally believe in a god doesn't mean that most of humanity agrees with me. Those who write SF should acknowledge that fact, and treat the subject with respect.

Science doesn't necessarily write off god. Considering the insurmountable odds against physics and evolution producing me, sitting here with enough sapience capable of pondering the question, one could argue that god is necessary to weight the dice. I may not believe that myself, but the argument has merit. Even as an atheist, I'm enough of a cynic to think that our developing self-awareness is pretty miraculous.

And if, as I personally believe, there is no such thing as a soul, that upon death we go out - BANG! - just like a candle... what an appalling tragedy it is that so many of us lead brief, miserable lives, wracked by starvation, poverty, war, and violence.

As many people mistake religion for ignorance, so many confuse atheism for lack of empathy.