Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Fallout 3 and The Modern Age!

You’re raised in a closed off unconscious parody of suburban America. Your days are largely ordinary, only marked by birthday parties and exams. But you know there’s a world outside your own, seen through cathode rays and books and missives. After all, this can’t be all there is. But you never really know until, one day, you’re forced out by circumstances beyond your control. You have to leave your home and stumble into the blinding light of day.

And suddenly you’re free. More so than you might be comfortable with, in fact. And for better or worse you’ve got to make your own way. No more parents telling you what to do, keeping you safe. The world is yours to wander aimlessly through. Or to do exactly what's expected of you in. But who’d choose that life?

Fallout 3 is a coming of age story at heart. But it’s a very grown up coming of age story in a strange way. Because it’s as much about being an adult in the modern age as it is about becoming an adult.

If you simply follow the central storyline the entire game could be reduced to following in the footsteps of your father. The central plot is all about this literal journey towards adulthood through both physical space and the history of your parents. You learn more about who your father was at your age, what he did and the impression he left on the world. You learn of his life’s work, of the places he visited and the dreams he aspired to, and in the process you come to understand and shape your place in life. You grow up.

There really aren’t many options as far as endings go for Fallout 3. There’s clearly a “good” ending and a “bad” ending. In fact, the ending of Fallout 3 almost destroys the game and its message. As with Bioshock, the true wonder of Fallout 3 comes in the space between set pieces, the tiny beginnings and endings that players create in interacting with the rich world that Bethesda created. And Bethesda delivers these moments, both intentional and unscripted, with expert skill.

Fallout 3 manages something most open world games aspire to; the ability for a player to simultaneously have almost total freedom and to still have an impact on the game world. From that first blinding moment of sunlight, the player feels a connection to both the world and the character, and the journey we’re on truly becomes our own.

In doing so Fallout 3 steps outside of the boundaries of traditional coming of age stories. Instead of offering us a tale exemplifying or explaining a way to grow up, instead of just expressing how we need to become adults, it shows us that adulthood is less a journey and more an expectation.

Players are given a guideline, a very very general guideline: follow the white rabbit. But players who slavishly do so will find a dull experience punctuated by moments of scripted wonder, something that hardly warrants an overwrought essay posted on some d-bag’s blog. But this sort of slavish waypoint chasing is discouraged from the moment you exit the Vault. Instead it pushes the player towards a decaying scenic view point as if to say, here is your new world. Have fun.

And in our exploration of these set pieces we begin to build our character, both mechanically and textually. Not that the world knows who our character is, really, and that’s sort of the brilliance of it. Each time we come to a new place we have to rebuild our reputations.

Sure, this isn’t the case for everyone, and it’s not a perfect parallel. Certain things about you carry over. If you’re a dick you’ll give off a dick vibe, and so on. But for the most part each time you arrive in a new place and each time you deal with a new organization, you do so with a clean slate. And even if they don’t know your name these new faces are forever changed by meeting you.

With this simultaneous expression of importance and insignificance Fallout 3 truly uncovers what it means to grow up in the world today, where we are all too often seen as interchangeable or disposable parts, more resources than people, more numbers on a sheet than faces in the world. Fallout 3 grasps this dichotomy and exploits it, forcing players to exist as both.

Sure, everyone isn’t going to bond with the world and develop personal relationships with the people they visit. But not everyone does that in the real world, either. Fallout 3 gives players the opportunity to form these bonds, offering up resonant and realistic characters simply trying to live their lives. If the majority of the side quests weren’t so simultaneously banal and epic the game wouldn’t have hit its mark so well.

But it blends the every-day and the exceptional. The setting is the perfect entry point: a world both pedestrian and alien, devastated by war and populated by eerily familiar characters. It is harsh and uncaring and warm and enduring. It is a game of dichotomies, and it succeeds at what most open world games fail at with almost no effort: it makes players a part of the world, let’s them have a home, neighbors and people to care about.

Consider GTA4 for a moment. GTA4 wanted players to care about their world so badly it crippled itself, interrupting game flow so that you could receive unsolicited phone calls from characters they desperately wanted you to care about. But they forgot the key in making people care was caring in and of yourself.

It’s hard to see sympathy and compassion in the characters that Rockstar made to draw us in to GTA4. Roman, debatably the most human of the bunch, vascilates between quiet vulnerabilty and mysoginy. Packie, the only other identifiable character of the bunch, moves between postured masculinity and a bittersweet commitment to family. The only character in my “friends” list I could really care about was Little Jacob, and in that case simply because of his outlandish cartoonishness and his effortless humanity. And he was built as a charicature, not a character.

No, Rockstar listened too long and too hard to people calling them “visionaries” and forgot that the act of creation requires compassion. But compare the “friends” and “relationships” of GTA4 to the inhabitants of Megaton. Nova, an NPC prostitute with only a handful of responses to her name, manages to elicit more emotion and interest from me than Carmen or Alex. Because her story, while familiar and perhaps even trite, was human. Her responses were believable, and she seemed like a person, albeit one who didn’t let people in. Carmen and Alex were parodies of people, shoddily built and put there for the game makers and the audience to guffaw at together. They were insubstantial, frustratingly so. I couldn’t believe that these people existed when I turned off my console. In Fallout 3 I could believe that Megaton was a real place, filled with struggling people living their lives, each day on the brink of oblivion.

Fallout 3 managed a profound and difficult balance, the same one that previous Fallouts walked. It embraced self-referential comedy while simultaneously presenting an unflinching and unexaggerated portrayal of human nature. And in this portrayal and its parody of the culture of the 50’s it managed to show us something about our present day.

Disconnected and isloated pockets of society, communicating unfathomably and poorly like children playing telephone. Incredible technology counter-pointed by profound ignorance. Brilliance and childishness together, represented by resonant and identifiable characters in a setting lovingly recreated from an actual American city. Fallout 3 offered a vivid image not just of human nature but of the state of the world today as well.

I’m not saying it was bereft of problems. It still suffered from having characters who stared straight ahead like talking heads, reciting the same lines of dialogue again and again. It had a difficulty curve which went from spot on to piss easy by game’s end, and a shooting mechanic that could politely be described as “shitty.” But the personalities filling these talking heads and the vivid, poetic gore populating these gun battles more than made up for these flaws.

In these talking heads and improvised shootouts Fallout 3 presented us with a gripping story, one that was at times pontificating, horrifying and frustrating, but through it all resonant and beautiful, with the message that however strange the world becomes, people will always be people. In its half-deserted streets, fraught with peril and awkward haircuts, it offered up the knowledge that beauty will always remain to be found however horrible things might seem.