This contrasts unfavorably with older media. In the broadcast television show torchwood the main character is a bi-sexual male. In Iain M Banks popular "Culture" series of novels it is common for some species to change gender, for example.
in contrast, the extent to which the Mass Effect franchise pushes the envelope of, say, the social norms of j. average suburban American community is roughly on par with the average pg-13 movie.
I think the last part of your comment is true for white suburbanites, but it is generally new that you have options to change your race and gender to something that can match your own. It's easy to not realise the difference in immersion if you're white (as I am) and the main character in games is the same as you. In ME1 I ended up going with an Indian main character, simply because I've never played a game which had an Indian protaganist. So it's not so much about stretching the suburbanites as allowing non-white-suburbanites to feel like it's accessible to them.
I also wonder how long it will be before main character voices can have their accents tailored - the Australian female lead in ME2 kept popping out like a sore thumb to me. Here in Aus it's weird to mix Australian and American accents in media. When watching US media, the accent is filtered out a bit and you can get immersed. When you get a mix like in ME2, I find it breaks immersion a bit. Hard to explain, but it's sort of like "these characters are speaking in 'movie' voice, except this one which is speaking 'natural'". A friend of mine was talking to an English teacher relating a story in a drama class in high school, where the kids had to write up some dialogue and present it. Halfway through, she asked "Why are you all doing this with American accents?", the response being "That's the voice you use when you're acting" :)
The writer of the article didn't consider any novels to be in the running (or non-US television shows really), so of course Banks didn't warrant consideration (although humanity is in a pretty privileged spot in The Culture, just not terrestrial humanity)
The general setup of Mass Effect vis a vis humanity's political significance is pretty similar to Brin's Uplift Universe. We're small potatoes and upstarts and most of the players hate us.
I'd also have to say that the article almost seems to ignore Mass Effect 2, in which humans are (or can be, depending on what you did in the original) pretty much running things. (that's how it was for me, and I believe the proximate cause was that I didn't go out of mY way to save the council at the end of thE first installment, because I hate the worn out "let millions die to save the privileged few / my girlfriend" trope in action adventures.
in contrast, the extent to which the Mass Effect franchise pushes the envelope of, say, the social norms of j. average suburban American community is roughly on par with the average pg-13 movie.