Lost worlds of »Andromeda«

Abstract

The paper offers a reading of Mass Effect: Andromeda (BioWare, 2017) vis-à-vis lost world romance (also dubbed »lost race romance«, or »imperial romance«), a late-Victorian era novelistic genre originating from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and serving as a major tool for British Empire propaganda and a source of early science-fiction conventions. We claim that the narrative failure of this ill-received game stems from its adherence to the rigid principles and forceful themes of the genre and the colonial and imperial imaginary informing it. Our analysis aims at highlighting the way 19$^{th}$-century novelistic convention can be remediated as contemporary digital games, and to expose the link between the imperial imaginary and the ways in which open-world digital games are structured, on both the narrative and gameplay levels, even when they do not directly refer to the historical colonial legacy.