At first, this reflection may not seem like an emotional piece, but hopefully, by the end, I have changed your view slightly on how passionate I am about this. Fundamentally, this will be less emotional than the last piece, and especially the next piece. But I will try my best to keep it still grounded in some emotions, as I had many while exploring this game’s universe at the age of fifteen. Mass Effect 2 came out a year prior, when I was fourteen, but with some strict parents and heavy sexual themes, my parents were reluctant to let me play. As you will find out in my next post, M-rated games were a fairly new landscape I had recently unlocked. Yes, I had many emotions and chaotic thoughts during my first playthrough at fifteen, especially when I reached the Suicide Mission arc. I feel the most important aspect of this game that impacted my life was a more philosophical one than an emotional one; something that took me years later and a more developed brain to realize. Soon, I hope you see the poetic irony in it.
This idea is thousands of years old; it was first seen in history thousands of years ago as an ancient Chinese proverb. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings can be felt on the other side of the world. The Mass Effect franchise embodies this proverb well. With choices from the previous games having lasting effects on their predecessors. With this unique storytelling mechanic of its day, of persistent consequences, it quickly became a favorite franchise for me. The action-packed space exploration, rich and moving character arcs that make you cry when one of your mistakes in a choice gets one of your crew members you spent the last sixty hours getting to know killed. Brotherhood. Sex. Explosions. Sacrifice. Spaceships and Seth Green as your pilot, Joker. It had everything a fifteen-year-old would love in 2011. But the most valuable thing I got was not out of the bond I built with Garrus or Wrex, or the beautifully crafted stories of all the other crew members. It was the fact that your choices can have lasting consequences, some that you may never see or even outlast your own flesh. Good and Bad.
The Butterfly Effect, and no, not the movie, the idea of the Butterfly Effect existing goes much deeper and farther back than 2004 and Ashton Kutcher. If we want to use another movie for an example, Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcom is a good one. The Butterfly Effect theory traces its origins to Chaos theory, which dates back to the 1890s. Over at least the past five years, I have come heavily to reflect on the Butterfly Effect and its existence. One thing I normally contemplate while thinking about it is how most people participate in it unwillingly, much like breathing air; it is an intangible theory we can not stop as humans. On top of that, anything can participate in the Butterfly Effect theoretically; the core concept of it is that any action one being takes has rippling effects that many will not foresee. I think this means inherently that an action can be good, bad, and both at the same time. I tried to show this fact earlier in the semester that anything can participate in the Butterfly Effect, like it is the war for the Iron Throne, with my poem There Once Was a Flea. Yes, the poem was set during the Bubonic Plague, but I was showcasing this fact in the poem as the main plot point. I am sure if you were to re-read There Once Was a Flea you would see the true story hidden behind the curtain. As somebody who is driven more by knowledge than money, academia and philosophy have become almost an emotional state of being for me. I know there was not much emotional reflection on how the Mass Effect games influenced me emotionally, and more on how I look back and see my introduction to the Butterfly Effect. I think a crucial part of understanding your emotions is also understanding how your reactions to those emotions could have consequences you wish you had foreseen. This is not something fifteen-year-old me had the brain capacity to do back then, so reflecting on more than just an emotional aspect of how video games influenced me was a main goal for this experiment. Trust me, next post, there will be plenty of emotions and imagery of how I reacted to things from my first playthrough of Gears of War 2, along with a deep reflective analysis of me; in a sense, it will feel more traditional than this one.
Pixel Therapy Blog 