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Tag Archive for Videogames

Fallout was the Future

The thing about Fallout 4, for my generation this was the future that was dangled in front of us. We had movies like Mad Max that codified this post-apocalyptic world in such a way as to make it easier to deal with. It became less of a boogie man as our TV, movies, our books dug into the idea and familiarized us with the potential outcomes.

This game is riddled with touches, with background moments and still life’s that are like getting an ice pick in the ribs, emotionally. There are lots of things to shoot, there are lots of unreasonable enemies who never seem to fall their morale checks, but they’re all set against a visual backdrop of unspeakable tragedy.  By and large Fallout 4  is a slow game, it’s an exploration RPG at its heart and it gives you plenty of time to mull over the state of that game world in comparison to the state of the real world.

The artist in me goes so far as to note this is reflected even in the brightening of the color palette. We are given an option to play in the pre-apocalypse world, just for a time. This 1960s that might have been, were all the colors are bright and the sky is clear. That hopeful imagery, that feeling of immortality, those bright colors underlie all of the texture development, all of the environment development in the game. There are very few places so blasted and destroyed that you can’t help but be reminded of that Utopia that the game began in. Bright blue shelter in place pods are scattered throughout urban environments, few of them contain corpses, but all of them contain reminders of the people who sheltered there, protected and preserved until you open them to take a look.

And as a parent, because by now many of us Cold War Kids are, you can’t help but place your family in the scene. You can’t help but look at the well preserved, scattered toys inside of a shelter and think, that could have been my kid in there.

If you couple the emotional devastation of the world with the agency of being a player, it can double down.  The attraction of being a player in a world like this is that you can do something.  You can save the town, you can eliminate the Raiders, you can actively engage to make the world a little bit better. But at the same time you are constantly reminded of the tragedies you could not affect. It’s an implicit failure, one that underlies every action you take in the game. And when the adrenaline rush from mowing down super mutants is over, you are still left with the world that may never recover.

The Lens of your Lifetime

There is this ongoing problem that I’m (and most likely you) are aware of.  Because we do love to lament the “dumbing-down” of our current crop of kids (just ike out parents did, and their parents did on back through time).  It’s been brought back into focus for me by some of the recent goings on around the Hugo Awards, but also I just had a glowing, glaring example shoved in my face this morning by my own two kiddos (which was disturbingly topical).

The Things downloaded the newest Black OPS Beta this morning and are going through it, nitpicking every single thing they have ever seen in another game.  Thus far we have: Jetpacks being stolen from Halo, Giant Mechs being stolen from Titanfall, Supers/Specials being stolen from Destiny…  Do you see where this is going?

All of their references are from recent games they have played in their very short lifetimes.  They have no clear knowledge of the history of Mechwarrior as a tabletop RPG, or the many attempts to bring the Giant Mech Battle games to the videogame fold.  They have no idea that jetpacks in the FPS genre are decades old, in fact, you might as well say that Jetpack Joyride stole their jetpack idea from Halo, for all the sense that makes.

Now, because I’m a bit of a Legacy-buff, I’ll spend some time educating my kiddos on this (as I do on a number of topics, including the history of science fiction, robotics, spycraft, space exploration, etc).  I also know from experience that it will probably not stick as well as I’d like (or, they will continue to kvetch because it’s a power and control thing, rather than actual, genuine kvetching).  But it brings to mind the question, how do we, as fans, as developers, as CREATORS or a product, widen that lens of experience?

Historically (or so I am given to understand) this was the job of the previous generation.  The established would tell their stories to the new and the new could move forward with a better-informed fanview.  But there are a couple of key problems with this.

One, fandoms (games, pop-culture, etc.) are bringing in people faster than ever.  You no longer need an entre to become a part of fandom, you can hop online and find a group of new fans to join and even meet up with at conventions.  That means that the influx of new people is looking through the aforementioned lens of limited experience.  That’s not a BAD thing, but it means that those that went before have to spend extra time and effort to educate (which, granted, is annoying, I get that.  You don’t get to rest on your laurels, you have to show the color of your boxers every time you meet a newbie).

Two, no two people remember things the same way.  So what might be an insult to one party was a clever turn of phrase by another.  Yes, we should all be able to sort these things out, but when the grievance was decades old, reliable information may be hard to come by, and the “newfans” won’t know if a mistake has been made, if they are just listening to one piece of a complex issue, and where/how to correct it.

Ideally, there ought to be a frictionless way to sort this out (yes, I know EFFORT should genuinely be put in, but humans, all humans, are designed to be lazy critters, we need to work around that).  But barring that, I think a certain level of awareness might be the best, first solution.  If newfans are aware that they are missing something (because many of these fan-bases have stunningly and engagingly rich histories and a stunning number of fans seem to be unaware that fandom existed long before they were born) and the fanbase can find ways to make that information obviously available, then we might be able to reestablish a coherent, fully-shared experience.

Witness File 770, for example, which was established as a single-source record of the recent Hugo divide.  Almost every writer with a fanbase of their own has repeatedly referenced it so that newfans know, and that unified sourcing has made a very big difference.

Thing is, there’s no way around this yet without a metric butt-load of work on the part of one or more people.  This kind of thing has been tried before, with varying degrees of success.  And it does have to be a small, ongoing group, you can’t pass this kind of thing from one elected keeper to another because then you lose the purpose, and agendas get involved and eventually the whole thing goes down under a pile of bit-rot.  We have hit a point where those databases of memory can be easily searchable, the trick now is going to be making sure they contain the best (and preferably impartial) reporting on events, as well as including all the old histories as far back as we can go.