Game notes - Falllout: New Vegas

As usual, I have more written down than I can put into a review or even a coherent essay. So here's a new occasional feature where I dump my game notes onto the blog. There's no structure to this, just a series of thoughts I had as I was playing.

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Flipside

A review will eventually go up at GameCritics.com, but because Fallout: New Vegas is such a large game I couldn't cover everything I wanted to in the detail it deserved. The shorthand for this game has been that it is "more Fallout 3", which is, in a limited sense, a fair assessment. Obsidian doesn't revolutionize anything about the way the game plays, except for the superior hardcore mode. What I would say instead is that New Vegas is more of a complement to Fallout 3 than a supplement. Bethesda's version of Fallout was one in which the environmental storytelling was very strong and the traditional storytelling was fairly weak. What I'd hoped was that Obsidian's talent would combine with Bethesda's in a productive way and produce a more cohesive whole. But instead it was more like two ships passing in the night. Fallout: New Vegas has a very strong story in the traditional sense, but the way exploration plays out makes it seem like Obsidian didn't really get what made Fallout 3 compelling.

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The Dunning-Kruger reticule

In my review panning Alpha Protocol, one of the many issues I singled out for complaint was the disconnect between the reticule and the actual position hit by my bullets. I've received a few comments through various channels that reflect a belief that I simply didn't understand how an RPG works. I think it's pretty obvious that I do; most of these comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of my complaint. The point here is not that when my character shoots there is a complicated set of calculations that decides whether or not I actually hit where I was aiming. Rather, my complaints about this are complaints about the interface, because the meaningless reticule adds a needless layer of opacity to the RPG system.

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The falling action

Most games, even particularly interesting ones, are hamstrung by the fact that they end too soon. I don't mean that the gameplay itself ends too quickly; indeed most games would be served by chopping out a few hours. What I'm talking about here is that the story gets cut short. Whether RPGs, shooters, or brawlers, the finale of most games goes like this: climactic boss battle, short non-interactive cutscene, The End. Sometimes the short cutscene gets replaced with a long one, but the basic pattern is widely accepted. This hurts game narratives because it forces the player to assess the implications of the game's climax while almost entirely outside of the game world. It is left to the player to imagine what the world of the game is like after, and while this occasionally fits a narrative design it does not always do so. Fallout 3 reached a positively manic climax with Liberty Prime's assault on Project Purity, then dove right into an abrupt (and almost inexplicable) closing sequence. The recent downloadable content, "Broken Steel", feels like an attempt to add a real denouement to the Enclave arc, and in this it largely succeeds.

Most quests in "Broken Steel" differ from those of the main game in that they are essentially devoid of meaningful moral choice. The events of the add-on represent a single infiltrator's actions in a military campaign, and as such most of its quests amount to extended dungeon crawls. While a number of new and extremely powerful enemies appear across the Wasteland, none of them take the form of Enclave soldiers — the new Hellfire Trooper is not significantly more effective than his compatriots — and when this is combined with the elevated level cap, the effect is a slow reduction of tension throughout the adventure. Sure, things can get a bit hairy during some segments (particularly the harrowing encounter with Reavers in the Presidential Metro), but every time you face the Enclave they feel weaker than before. In the final act of the add-on, I infiltrated the Enclave's mobile base and single-handedly took down their elite Sigma squad in the space of a few seconds. Things never really got any harder after that.

Broken Steel doesn't have any grand finale to match that of the main story, but that's not the point. The new content isn't about a heroic charge against overwhelming odds to conquer a fortified position; it's about stomping bugs. There's no new antagonist to confront, nor even an old one, as the new segments don't seem to notice if you let Colonel Autumn live. All you have are progressively less dangerous firefights, gradually easing off the pressure until you demolish the Enclave's last stronghold with fire from the sky.

The accessory quests don't add much in the way of gameplay or new areas, but they do allow the player to consider the non-military impact of freeing Project Purity. Notably, the Wasteland still has problems — cleaning up the water didn't immediately eliminate the widespread contamination, mutation problems, or raiders. Solving some of those problems simply created new ones: now the challenge is to ensure that the distribution of the pure water goes smoothly. These quests don't really have much in the way of interesting moral choices, but they help put the player's earlier decisions in perspective, allowing him to reflect on the implications of the choices he made earlier.

The weakness of "Broken Steel" is that it has little to offer beyond violence. The quests are mostly straightforward battles, and allow none of the flexibility inherent to some of the main game's more interesting missions. The player can't side with the Enclave, or even use his powers of persuasion to help destroy his enemies from within. The only choice the player can make is to shoot or die, and while that approach has its uses it's unfortunate that players who take advantage of the full range of character customization available in the game aren't rewarded with interesting alternative routes to victory.

The impression one gets from interviews is that the developers at Bethesda believe players reacted negatively to the fact that their game ended. For me, at least, this wasn't the case at all. It wasn't that Fallout 3 ended, but how it ended that felt unsatisfying. The assault on the purifier didn't feel like a personal triumph, the conclusion of the adventure came as a surprise, and the in-universe reason for ending it was contrived and ridiculous. After the events of "Broken Steel", however, I feel like the game could have stopped without any trouble. The powerful weapons and increased level cap slowly deflate the tension of the narrative throughout this episode, and the final crawl through the Enclave's mobile platform feels like the player's expression of personal dominance over their military engine. Despite its weaknesses, this aspect of "Broken Steel" is quite welcome: it makes the player feel like the story really is at a conclusion, by moving the end of the game away from the climax of the story.

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Critical Thinking Compilation: Fallout 3

I've been meaning to do this for a while now, mostly so I don't have to keep digging things up. Now, finally, I'm going to try it for Bethesda's Fallout 3, and if I like it, and other people like it, then I'll probably start doing it for more games, new and old. What is it I'm doing? Well, look at the title. This is a critical thinking compilation.

It is not a review compilation. I am not interested in anything that provides a "score", explains what the writer loved/hated about it, or tries to tell the reader whether the game is worth the $60. Those are valuable services, but they are also incredibly easy to find using Google. This is something different. I am trying to make it easy for me, and my five six readers, to find analysis, which does not Google quite as efficiently. It can be about the theme, the plot, the mechanics, the art—anything as long as we're going beyond "well, I liked it". The goal is to compile a set of links to quality dissection and discussion from bloggers and other web voices. So, here we go. Expect this page to get updated regularly as long as I remember to do so.

I decided, after looking at a couple of formats, to arrange this post by a series of general topics that have formed core areas of the discussion. Obviously these links will be chock-full of spoilers, so be wary if you've yet to finish the game.

A wasteland rich in story materials

Although built from a relatively limited palette, the world of Fallout 3 feels vast and even boundless. In "The world's your oyster", Iroquois Pliskin compares this game with Oblivion and indicates that the key to its appeal is its ability to keep showing you something you haven't seen before. The limited repertoire of objects and textures is skillfully permuted to create environments that gently inspire players to develop their own stories about the world, as Denis Farr describes in "Seven for a secret never to be told". For an example of such a story, check out this example from Steven O'Dell.

The seeming richness (and safety) of the wasteland confused Justin Keverne initially, because it seemed out of place given the apocalyptic setting. He found it to be more vibrant and alive than the landscape of Far Cry 2. By contrast, Steven O'Dell felt that Fallout 3 kept a sense of danger intact throughout the game, even as the player grew more comfortable and confident in the wastes, through use of dangerous creatures like the Deathclaw. Keverne eventually came to the conclusion that the appearance of population and life was an illusion, that the clusters of houses that he had perceived as tiny villages were really just the last few vestiges of enormous sprawling suburbs. The desolation and emptiness of this world enhances the apparent importance of moral choices, as Allen Cook describes in "Hero of the Wastes". When there are so few people, killing even one feels like genocide, and saving even one feels incredibly important.

Of course, the Washington D.C. setting of the game provides a touchstone for the development of personal narratives. Michael Abbott details one such experience in "Second Thoughts", in which he also ponders his meta-experience of the game. This didn't work out for everyone, though. In "The Mutant Behind the Curtain", Thomas Cross explains that despite the richness of the world's many distractions it just doesn't connect emotionally for him. As Susan Arendt relates in "A Different Kind of Treasure", she found that the design of the world interfered with her experience of the game, particularly in the respect that she didn't get the kind of loot she was expecting.

Some writers felt that Fallout 3 actually constrained them from their desired character narrative. Scott Juster describes in "Role Playing in the Wastes" that his experience of the game simply didn't fit with the character that he had conceived. The mutual accommodation between character and DM typical of tabletop role-playing isn't possible in the context of a computer RPG, which may mean that players must be more flexible in their approach to their roles. Mitch Krpata felt reasonably comfortable with his character concept, but found that Fallout's inflexibility occasionally boxed him out of the karmic path he desired to take. The route to a desired moral outcome was at times needlessly obscure.

What you don't know...

Several authors have identified ignorance as a key way that Fallout 3 draws the player into the creation of a personal narrative. Spencer Greenwood argues in "Ignorance is Bliss" that the decision to supply the character with a minimum of information encourages exploration and experimentation in the context of the game world, in this as well as previous Fallout games. Similarly, Justin Keverne found that his immersion in the main quest was strongest at a point when the game stopped telling him exactly where to go. In "Wasteland Detective", he asks if the game might be at its best when it lets the player get lost.

In "The Wasteland of Forking Paths", Travis Megill points out that the presentation of the main quest encourages the player to explore. Although the central storyline involves a somewhat urgent attempt to save the world, the game hides this until the player is fairly far along in it. This disguise makes it more comfortable for the player to meander. The apparent lack of urgency and potential lack of structure in the main quest changes the way you approach the entire game. In "The Sisters", Duncan Fyfe suggests that these aspects make Fallout 3 less like a novel and more like a themed collection of short stories, explicitly comparing the game to James Joyce's Dubliners.

Mitch Krpata puts forward something of an opposing view in "How I learned to stop worrying and love Fallout". For him, the more obvious RPG aspects of the game, and his uncertainty about what exactly to do next, created something of an anxiety that he was playing the wrong way. For him, it was the fine details of the open world that finally got him relaxed enough to realize there was no wrong way. Borut Pfeifer touches on this feeling in "Your choice, and your fault", pointing out that players who forge an emotional connection with the game world may feel paralyzed by the unpredictable outcomes of their choices (and the feeling that the developers are out to screw them over).

Denis Farr, writing in "Birth of a role" about the character creation portion of the game, expresses some relief that Fallout 3 avoided a particular kind of ignorance, namely the "amnesia" trope. One of Fallout 3's strengths, in his view, is that the player doesn't have to ask who he is, but rather how he came to be who he is.

Immersion failure at the NPC interface

In contrast to the widely-praised open world, Fallout 3's NPCs have come in for some harsh criticism. Michael Abbott contributes the core of the critique in "Genius Jilted" and "People drive me crazy", which also cover some criticism of Fable II. The realistic feel of the world, for him, is entirely at odds with the behavior of NPCs who basically function as "human-esque information kiosks". He calls out the sometimes poorly-written dialogue and the wooden facial animations as sources of his problem. Thomas Cross expresses similar sentiments in "The Mutant Behind the Curtain", stating that the stilted interactions with NPCs are part of the way in which Fallout 3 flaunts its game-ness. Gamey behavior in the finale also troubled D. Riley, as he describes in "What about the oasis?" (for a similar take, see Ben's RAAAAGE).

Duncan Fyfe, on the other hand, feels that most of the NPCs work well enough for what the game is trying to do with them. In "Friends like these", he explains that the NPC interactions really start to break down once you bring the companions into the mix. Their failure to react to the discoveries that give the open world its emotional relevance highlights the fact that they are little more than walking gun turrets. Only Dogmeat, who we don't expect to have emotions, is a convincing character. Mitch Krpata found that immersion broke because the scripting of the game led to the NPCs noticing at once too little and too much, making an example of the Lincoln Memorial quest.

Beyond "good" and "evil"

The NPC writing didn't just foul up the immersion, it also fiddled unpleasantly with the game's approach to morality. In "Fun and loathing in Las Vegas Washington D.C.", Ben Abraham identifies a tension between the portrayal of certain characters and the feel of the game. In his opinion, Mr. Burke comes across as a very cartoonish, moustache-twirling villain that is inappropriate in the context of the gritty, realistic game world. The game seems to make judgments about characters, sometimes without asking the real questions.

I express a similar complaint in "There's nothing in it for you", arguing that the game doesn't provide the NPCs or the player with reasons to be evil beyond sheer insanity. In particular, the relative abundance of supplies in the Wasteland seems to defeat the feeling of desperation that might make an attractive core for such a personal narrative. Shamus Young had similar problems with Mr. Burke's quest, as he describes in "The Power of the Atom", where he critiques the flimsy writing behind what may be Fallout 3's most affecting visual sequence. For me, the chief reason for evil comes not from any of the writing, but rather from the V.A.T.S. system. In "Power's joy and sorrow" I opine that the system presents killing as an empowering pleasure, and in that way makes a case for war.

The case for selfless helpfulness, in my view is much stronger, but the narrative of the good character ends up "Falling apart at the end". The conclusion of the main quest, in my view, suffers because of a weak antagonist and moral confusion.

Justin Keverne critiques the game's explicit karma system in "A measure of morality". The fact that the karmic result of a particular action is made explicit is at odds with feeling of ignorance mentioned earlier. He also points out that almost everyone thinks of himself as a decent person, and that this slippery moral perspective is absent from the karma math. Malcolm Ryan, in his essay "On Moral Detachment" argues that explicit karma systems eliminate moral force by giving every choice a gameplay consequence. He actually felt more moved by an incidental moment in Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, which he found otherwise forgettable.

As a counterpoint, one can consider D. Riley's discussion of "The Situation at Tenpenny Tower" in which he describes a quest where even the "good" solutions leave a bad taste in your mouth. Shamus Young extensively critiques the logic of this quest, the options available, and the game's moral judgment of your choices in "Tenpenny Tower".

What does Fallout 3 tell us?

One of the persistent complaints about video games is that the lack of authorial control diminishes their artistic merits. Much is wrong with this view, but it has a certain resonance in light of games like Fallout 3 that work by allowing the player to construct a personal narrative. Obviously a game can use particular mechanics in order to reinforce certain behaviors, but this can create as many questions as answers, as Justin Keverne mentions in his short post "Its own reward?".

Nonetheless, some messages can be read into any personal narrative that gets built into the game world. Duncan Fyfe opines in "Escape from Vault 101" that at its core Fallout 3 is about the worthlessness of inaction, and the futility of safety, connecting this to Bethesda's own story. As he says, "It's about not staying in the vault." The open-world context itself can also convey a message. In "Bellum omnia contra omnes" I argue that the wasteland, by depicting the state of nature as close to Hobbes' vision, says certain things about humanity. The game's fictional history connects the desperate struggles of the wasteland with wars that may be coming in our own.


So, I hope you've found some good things through this list, perhaps things you hadn't seen before. I'm certain some good pieces have been written that I'm just not aware of or have lost my links to; please point them out to me in the comments. Also, I'd like your opinion of this idea, this format, etc. Should I do this again, or was it a big fat waste of our time?

Last Update: 4/6/09

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Bellum omnia contra omnes

Much of political philosophy concerns a significant thought experiment called "the state of nature". This hypothetical condition is one in which mankind has never had a government, and it is a popular way to address the question of why a person would ever choose to surrender rights to the State. Stories that involve the breakdown of civilization often include a representation of such a state, and naturally the qualities of this created world will depend on your beliefs about human nature. The wasteland of Fallout 3 represents the state of nature as the war of all men against all men. In so doing, and by connecting the wasteland's state of nature to that between countries, the game argues that the death of governmental and international covenants are fatal to both individuals, and humanity itself.

Spoilers follow.

For many Americans, Washington D.C. is synonymous with government, and by setting its story there, Fallout 3 invites the player to ponder the subject. A significant number of the game's quests involve monuments of beloved presidents, or various of the Smithsonian Institutions. Many of the game's treasure troves and safe places are former military installations. And, of course, the player gets around the ruined city primarily via the public transportation system. The shattered state of these locales mirrors the breakdown of government at large. Although a supposed president drones constantly from many of the radios, there is no evidence of overarching government, and little echo of democracy.

[C]ovenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. Therefore... if there be no power erected, or not great enough for our security, every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art for caution against all other men.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

It is force that rules the wastes, even in the remaining pockets of civilization. Towns such as Megaton, Canterbury Crossroads, and Arefu are essentially anarchical, with well-armed sheriffs barely able to contain the mayhem. Tenpenny Tower, Paradise Falls, the Republic of Dave, and even Little Lamplight are run by strongmen. Places that lack an authoritarian leader, like Grayditch and Big Town, are universally imperiled. Each of these towns is an armed camp. Even in Rivet City, where cramped the hallways are endlessly patrolled by well-armed security guards, everyone is packing heat. None of these places have any legal system worth mentioning. There is no law; there is no justice. The only State in the wasteland is the state of nature, aptly matching that described by Hobbes:

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in the condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.

For Hobbes, war means a state of perpetual readiness to fight. He does not argue that the state of nature is a state of constant battle, but rather that it is a place where everyone has a weapon already drawn or within easy reach. This is the war taking place in Fallout 3. It is not a clash of ideologies or civilizations, but a universal war between every man and all his fellow men.

In Leviathan, Hobbes asserts that men in the state of nature quarrel for three main reasons: resources, security, and renown. Fallout 3 addresses each of these motivations. The central concern of the main quest is the scarcity of water. Because nearly all the water in the wasteland is irradiated or otherwise contaminated, agriculture is practically impossible. The only apparent source of relatively clean water lies in the small town of Megaton, and its residents don't share. Fresh food in the wastes means the produce of mutated animals such as two-headed cows or giant ants, or other human's bodies. The only alternative is the preservative-laden, imperishable junk food left behind by the previous civilization.

The struggle for security is also evident. Nearly every settlement around the capital has a wall; Rivet City even has a moat. Those who don't have secure settlements struggle to get accepted into them — the efforts of the ghouls to get a place in Tenpenny Tower exemplifies this desire. The character is repeatedly reminded that the Vault is the safest place in the wastes, and of course the wasteland residents are likely to idealize a miniature city with an impenetrable door and walls as thick as the earth itself. But as it turns out, the Vault is also a violent place, ruled by brutish, simplistic authoritarianism.


The game toys with the player's own desire for glory via the Galaxy News Radio station. In addition to hearing your stories on the radio, the karma system also seems to primarily be one based on renown. Different kinds of characters recognize and appreciate you based on what approach you have taken. One can also interpret some of Elder Lyons' decisions as influenced by a desire for a kind of glory or recognition.

So the wasteland resembles Hobbes' state of nature in several crucial respects, and that implies some basic beliefs about humanity. Fallout 3 by depicting the state of nature in this way, argues that people focus on their own survival and satisfaction first, and only rarely care for the needs of others. Those who attempt to do good for others are destroyed by men who are greedy for power and renown. Were that all, Fallout 3 would merely be a depressing commentary on human nature. But the game also tries to draw a line between this brutal land and the world of today.

...in all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another...

The desperate resource conflicts of the wasteland reproduce on a small scale exactly the kinds of conflicts that led to its creation. In Fallout 3's fictional history, the collapse of the United Nations in the 2050s opened up an era of resource conflicts between nations that culminated in a war between the United States and China over the rich lands of Alaska. This war in turn led to the U.S. annexation of Canada (something our northern neighbors would surely find most vexing) and eventually, catastrophic nuclear war. Now, the United Nations could never seriously stand in for a hegemon, but written materials found in the game suggest that the collapse of this limited international framework returned the world's countries to their state of nature, which also matches the Hobbesian description.

The well-read people of that time seem to have known how their story would end. You can find a townhouse in the Georgetown area containing a still-functional housekeeping robot. Taking a page from Ray Bradbury, the robot can be ordered to recite a poem, which is "There will come soft rains" by Sara Teasdale. But in Bradbury's story this poem is meant for an adult, while in Fallout 3 it is meant to be heard by a child. Imagine what fear you must live in if you comfort your kids with the idea that at least the world will be no worse off without us.

In Fallout's view, however, Teasdale is wrong. Mankind burned the world when it killed itself, and Spring never awakened. The fictional world of Fallout represents the idea that the endpoint of the state of nature is meaningless death, for nations as for individuals. By opting to go it alone, to abandon what little international government existed, we chose the state of nature. And as in the "Tenpenny Tower" episode, conflicts in the state of nature have no good answer. That quest cannot be completed without eviction or murder; there is no endpoint where nobody dies. There is no happy ending. The same can be said of any state of nature — such a world makes monsters of us all. Given that anthropogenic climate change is predicted to usher in an unprecedented era of global resource conflict, that's something to consider.


Even in the final moment of triumph, the game offers an especially bleak perspective. When the Brotherhood of Steel chooses to dislodge the Enclave from the Jefferson Memorial, they do it not out of any higher motive, but out of a desire to ensure their own safety. And when you manage to purify the wasteland's water, what then? You haven't changed the state of nature. You haven't established the covenant that protects men from each other. Water is now safe to drink, but the people of the wastes will just find something else to fight over. The concluding slideshow promises the same thing that the opening did: war will go on, and war never changes. And what is the world like, in war? Well, it's much like the experience of the game's main character:

In such condition there is... continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

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Falling apart at the end

Having made an extensive complaint about Fallout 3's arguments for evil, I should, in the interest of fairness and balance, discuss its case for goodness. Fallout 3 does a better job, in general, of presenting reasons to be good. The backstory supports the idea of a good character, and the dire situation of most settlements in the wasteland provides the tools to construct a compelling heroic narrative. The game falters, however, in the closing chapters. The final battles of the game don't provide a particularly compelling narrative for the good character, and the design tends to support choices that weaken the ending or make it entirely senseless.

Spoilers follow.

The narrative context of the vault supports a player's choice of a good alignment early on. The main character's father, James, is a doctor, a profession associated with helping others. Although he has his moral lapses — stealing a child's toy, for example — the impression conveyed is that he is a good person, and it's easy to tell yourself a story about how his values were impressed on his child. In addition, the game reinforces the good path here because most of the "evil" choices you can make in the vault amount to little more than just being a prick. They feel petty, cruel, and pointless. While there are a few threads that can be gathered into a narrative of evil, most of the materials are better tuned for a heroic narrative.

The world itself has the same feel. The ruins of the D.C. area serve as a grim warning about the consequences of war, and the hopelessness that suffuses many of the abandoned areas the character enters argues against the feeling of power V.A.T.S. provides. In addition, most of the people you meet seem to need your help badly. In part this is just a result of including quests, but the world design and NPCs do a good job conveying the impression of desperate people barely hanging on in a hostile land. The few pockets of "civilization" are all in such dire straits, and the character can become a powerful force so early on, that constructing a heroic narrative becomes almost a seamless activity. In addition, some quests are one-sided enough that they simply won't fit in an evil narrative at all.

The story of the good character starts to wobble late in the main quest, however. The central idea of this quest, a giant purifier that will cleanse all the water in the D.C. area of radioactivity, provides a compelling interest, but the antagonist in this section feels like a limp formality. The Enclave enters with completely inexplicable timing, and the behavior of its officers doesn't agree with any goal other than that of a writer who just wants you not to like them. If the Enclave and its brutality had been demonstrated throughout the game world, the case would be more compelling, but this just doesn't happen. The chief problem with the Enclave as antagonists is that they never appear in the open world except as a few harmless wandering robots, until the moment when you are supposed to already be at war with them. This constraint leads the writers to make them act with irrational brutality. James' behavior is also difficult to justify, because his action is so extreme, and the choice he makes to defend the project against the Enclave also renders it useless to his allies.

And why are we to believe that the Enclave is so bad that dying to stop them is worthwhile? The final acts of the game focus on dislodging the Enclave from the Jefferson Memorial so that they cannot start the purifier, but for a truly selfless character it should not matter who starts the machine, so long as it does start. Elements of the game world begin emphasizing the importance of water purification almost as soon as the main character exits the vault. The credit for such a task matters, but does it matter enough to kill dozens of people over it? Why not let the Enclave start the purifier?

The answer to this, of course, is that the Enclave's computerized leader, President Eden, wants to kill most of the people in the wasteland, leaving alive only the people of the Enclave and a few vault survivors. It goes almost without saying that in light of the very low population of the area this idea is hard to credit. A larger problem is that the Enclave officer in charge of the Memorial is one who disagrees with this plan, so much so that the computer asks the main character to carry the plan out for him. Moreover, the game pushes the character towards destroying Eden; dialogue options leading to the destruction of the computer constitute all of the top choices near the end of the conversation with Eden. And once the computer is destroyed, the Enclave seems like less of a threat than ever. The final assault feels less like heroism and more like murder.

The very end of the game presents additional problems. It turns out that the radioactive blast your father used in an attempt to stop the Enclave from taking over the Memorial has still contaminated the control room. Someone must go into the deadly radiation in order to start the purifier. The good character is clearly supposed to sacrifice himself in order to get the project started. However, the good character is also almost certain to have the follower Fawkes, a giant mutant immune to radiation, with him. The reason for this is that you cannot keep Fawkes from following you unless you act like a complete ass. The writers do an infuriatingly bad job of providing reasons why Fawkes cannot save the day. In short, the only way not to feel like a sucker at the end of the game is to feel like a jerk by dismissing Fawkes or sending Sentinel Lyons in instead. The good character's narrative ends with him killing a bunch of people so that he can do something they would have done anyway, and dying needlessly because some giant mutant thinks it's his destiny.

Fallout 3 provides plenty of materials for the player trying to create a heroic story. The family background of the main character supports an ethos geared towards helping others, and the world provides a flock of characters who desperately need help the character can provide. Where this story falls apart is in trying to create a dramatic final confrontation. The effort to rapidly build up the Enclave as an enemy leads the writers to have them behave in odd ways. Ultimately they're never convincing enough as antagonists to really justify the urgency or brutality of the final assault. Then, the final sacrifice is rendered insultingly needless by the presence of Fawkes. The overall experience of Fallout 3 supports a heroic story, but the main character is denied an epic battle for justice. Instead, he gets a series of senseless deaths, culminating with his own.

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There's nothing in it for you

In my last post I argued that the V.A.T.S. represents Fallout 3's most compelling argument for a life driven by violence and the exercise of power. It's important to have an argument in that vein, because the mass media, including video games, have a pronounced tendency to represent evil people as purely unbalanced or crazy. This is unfair to the mentally ill, to be sure, but it is also unfair to evil. The wicked life has attractions beyond sheer gibbering insanity, which is why so many perfectly rational people are heartless and cruel. The problem with Fallout 3 is that V.A.T.S. is its strongest argument for evil because it is essentially the only argument for evil.

Spoilers follow.

For a wasteland that has been scavenged by survivors for hundreds of years, the D.C. area in Fallout 3 is surprisingly rich in resources. Everywhere you look you can find guns, ammunition, medical supplies, and money just laying around as if D.C. got nuked in the middle of an NRA convention. Your supplies are likely to be tight just after your emergence from the vault, but unless you make stupendously bad choices you should be able to rapidly police up enough weapons and ammunition to get by and, eventually, dominate the wastes. This makes the game, perhaps, "too easy" but that's not the point. The real problem with this, from the standpoint of the character's place as a moral agent in the game world, is that the character is not engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. He has to shoot things that want to kill him, sure, but he is never in danger of starvation, dehydration, or running out of bullets or bottlecaps (the game's currency).

This becomes a problem in the moral calculus because the reward for maleficence in a world like that of Fallout is usually material. Killing a man means you can steal his resources, and getting them is in some way worth killing that other guy. If those resources are valuable, then this assessment of worth is cold-hearted and evil, but at least understandable. If their value is trivial, however, then you are treading dangerously into the territory of the madman. Killing a scavenger might net me a couple of bullets for my hunting rifle, but if I can find just as many laying around in the next abandoned office building or buy them for a trivial number of caps it hardly seems worth it. Besides, that wastelander can't repair my gun if he's dead.

Even mercenary ambitions seem to be thwarted by the game's relative abundance of goods. In the late game a player who has devoted even a modest effort towards exploration should have a tremendous abundance of caps, enough to buy almost anything one might want. Unfortunately, there's nothing much to buy at that point. In the face of such an enormous surplus of money, it hardly seems worthwhile to demand payment for favors. Sure, you'll get more caps, but there's nothing to do with them.

Fallout 3 gives you the option to be evil, but it doesn't do a very good job (outside of V.A.T.S.) of giving you reasons. The resources you can gain through theft or murder have so little value that killing implies that you view human life as having almost none. The caps you gain from behaving as a mercenary rather than a generous protector can't buy you anything you need or even want. Evil isn't an easier route to your goals, even though the capital wastes don't have any law and order to hunt you down.

This isn't to say that the evil character has no place in the game. What Fallout 3 lacks is a compelling narrative of evil. The main character emerges from a sheltered existence with a loving father and enters a vast, dark wasteland. The ultraviolence of V.A.T.S. may be an attraction towards the dark road, but that's not enough to build my character's story.

The game's own characters can't construct a compelling narrative of evil either. Soon after escaping the vault, the character encounters the sinister Mr. Burke, who wants you to detonate a bomb in the middle of a settlement. Burke's dialogue is laughable, the sort of thing a 12-year-old would say if he were trying to be a suave villain. If you take him up on his offer you can eventually probe his reasons further, leading you to the revelation that the town will be blown up because Mr. Burke's employer one day mentioned offhand that he thought it unsightly, even though the place can barely be seen from his balcony. Detonating the bomb doesn't gain anybody anything; it's just wanton destruction. This is worse than cartoonish, it's practically mindless.

If you choose to go ahead and detonate the bomb, you are treated to the sight of a nuclear explosion. Awestruck, Burke mutters that he thinks it is beautiful, and as you watch the lush animation, you can, just for a second, agree with him. That's as close as Fallout 3 comes to giving you a reason. Is that really compelling enough for Burke?

Is it compelling enough for you?

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Power's joy and sorrow

I do not enjoy Fallout 3's Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, because I know what it does. I understand the goal of its slow-motion, dramatic camera angles, and sound distortion. The fountains of blood and gore, arms and legs and heads flying off from precision bullet strikes, speak to the worst excesses of action movies and gladiatorial combat. Death becomes entertainment for the hooting savage; the moral weight of murder disappears in the antigravity of bizarre ragdoll physics. In short, V.A.T.S. makes killing awesome.

But killing is not awesome, not ever, because each time it happens somebody dies. I know this, and so I do not like V.A.T.S. — on occasion I could go so far as to say I find it revolting. Nonetheless, I appreciate the system. Because of its staging, V.A.T.S. is more than a method of fusing real-time and turn-based combat — it is an integral part of the moral arguments of Fallout 3.

In Fallout 3, as with many other "Western" role-playing games, the player is an agent of moral choice in a world defined by the developers. In order to succeed, such a game must provide an engrossing context, compelling choices, and legitimate (not necessarily positive) narratives for the spectrum of available moral attitudes. It is not enough simply to have options. A game of this kind must have reasons, and a world worth making decisions in. In this regard, Fallout 3 largely succeeds.

Among other things, Fallout 3 is about war. The player character emerges from a sheltered Vault into the blasted wasteland of the D.C. ruins in search of his (or her) father. The world above ground has been shattered by a nuclear war; most of the buildings are burned-out shells or crumbling hulks of rubble. In the concrete jungle of D.C. proper, the debris has grown so thick that the only reliable way to move around town is through the old metro tunnels, and even those have mostly collapsed.

The intact buildings you do find are often tombs. Tiny skeletons lie on ruined beds, clutching worn teddy bears; their parents lie dead in the next bedroom, or in a bloodstained bathtub. Security robots blindly patrol the hallways of crumbling factories and office buildings, oblivious to the fact that their creators have long ago passed on, and there is nothing left to protect. Even most of the vaults are rotting sepulchers, their inhabitants long ago fallen victim to Vault-Tec's insane experiments.

The people who inhabit this world mostly live in shacks cobbled together from the metal hulks of the old world. They live off the barely-edible meat of mutated animals and the imperishable foodstuffs of the pre-war era. Some of them live off each other, some employ slaves. Their will to live is admirable, but the means by which they enforce that will are often less so. This is the Hobbesian state of nature in its full articulation, a small-scale re-enactment of the international chaos and resource wars that gave rise to the nuclear holocaust centuries before.

These features create a compelling context, true, but they also give the "good" character something to think about. None of it is pleasant, but it is war. Fallout 3 captures the lawlessness of the resource wars already occurring in places such as the Congo. There, children are even now being enslaved to mine valuable ores. In Afghanistan and other places, they are pressed into the service of armies and forced to fight battles they hardly understand. In these places the forces of order and government always seem very distant, even if their propaganda isn't. Fallout 3 is especially effective because it puts one of the world's great power centers on display as a shattered, irradiated shell, but the destruction of homelands and the ruin of societies are the universal products of war.

If that were all of it, man would never fight.

But that isn't all. There is the desperate struggle for resources, yes, that makes men fight. But a man can fight for what he needs without being evil. Without being good, perhaps, but fighting for his daily bread, if he must, does not make a man a monster. It is power that does that.

V.A.T.S. is about power, about the character's tremendous capacity to destroy. The bloody explosions and painful contortions of his enemies speak to the part of us that cheers when the gangsters get shot, when Arnie mows through a crowd of hapless soldiers. It is not a part of us that loves justice, but rather a part that loves strength. It is a part that loves the ability to mete out punishment, warranted or not. V.A.T.S. represents the seduction of power, and thus the draw of evil. Only a sick and twisted madman could love what war has wrought in the ruins of D.C., but anyone seeing V.A.T.S. could, just for a second, think that killing is awesome.

V.A.T.S., for all that I dislike watching it, represents one of the great strengths of Fallout 3, and may be its best articulation of the argument for war. V.A.T.S. presents killing as an empowering pleasure. The system is a constant seduction towards the joyous exercise of power, just as the elements of the game world are a constant reminder of the sorrow that comes from that exercise. And if the over-the-top gore and ragdoll physics turn you off, they give you something to think about nonetheless. Because even if you don't like V.A.T.S., somebody does, and that attraction plays a significant role in turning a good world into a wasteland.

If you are curious where I got the screenshot, I'm sorry to inform you that it is an actual photograph of Beirut taken in 2006. War never changes.

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