I was on a barren world with a blurry deposit of gold. The few people there were chatty.
This was a planet — I don’t remember which — somewhere in “Mass Effect“’s universe. I traveled through that universe for more then 29 hours and 24 minutes over the past month, according to the time stamp on my final save-file when I completed the game last week. I had taken a thorough vacation in that universe. I had kept a yellow Post-It note on which I wrote the names of 17 star clusters available for me to explore via spaceship and intergalactic map. I explored these places not with the free whimsy of a backpacker crossing South America post-college, but with the thoroughness of an American in Rome, nose in guidebook, determined to check off every site there is to see.
I don’t remember the name of the planet with the blurry gold. I didn’t put it on the Post-It. In fact, I don’t remember the names of any of the nearly-barren planets, the optional ones I spent probably about a dozen hours exploring in my quest to fully know the terrain of “Mass Effect.” I had landed on all of them in the same way, my six-wheeled, shock-absorbent Mako tank dropping from my spaceship through the sky, planting itself on the ground. Every one of them was beautiful, mostly cloudless, some white with snow, others red, orange, green and one gray as if (no spoilers) it was the same moon I could see through my apartment in Brooklyn.
How often do we consider the worlds like those of “Mass Effect” as a place, rather than a game or a story? How often do we tell the people who made these places what we thought of spending time in them? Not what we thought of how we controlled our fate, not of how we thought of things in game terms, but how we thought of things in terms of an exotic vacation?
I traveled and I have a report.