I finally began playing Fallout 3 last night. Boy, have I been excited for this one. I played for about two and a half hours -- and I never made it out of Vault 101.
"What's wrong with you, Leigh?" You exclaim, chagrined. Perhaps you gloat like a local bully at my clumsiness, my plodding. "What's taking you so long," you cry? We game writers are supposed to be extra-good at video games, aren't we? Am I living a lie?
Well, for one thing, it took me twenty minutes to decide whether to be a boy or a girl.
This is no exaggeration. Gazing at my father's indistinct face through the blur of new life and amnion, I wrung my hands. I put the controller down and picked up my laptop. I pondered Googling for spoilers, for hand-holding, because before I was locked in I just had to know, just had to decide what elements of play my gender would influence. When I'm choosing "boy" or "girl," what am I really choosing, from a gameplay perspective? And even if it's mechanically irrelevant, are there plot elements that I'd rather appreciate from the standpoint of one or the other?
In certain titles, I'd rather be something close to myself, with all the associated parts, and in others, I feel it's more appropriate from a narrative standpoint -- even when we're just talking my own, imaginary, invented narrative -- to be a male.
"Do you want spoilers?" Said my friend on GChat, who I was "courteously" keeping updated on my first experience with the game.
"No, no," I typed back, I knuckle-bit, wondering things like if I woke up tomorrow morning underground amid a nuclear winter and went into the bathroom, would I want to sit down or stand up?
"It doesn't really affect anything," my friend reassured.
Not really?
At last, though, I decided to be a man -- only to find myself in the throes of paralysis once again when I had to name him. I pushed through, forcing myself to pick quick, and going with "Severin" because I had a Velvet Underground song about sadomasochism stuck in my head. My soft-voiced Dad was so proud at my birth, and here I was feeling like a perv. I resisted the urge to reset.
You can imagine that I put the controller down only a few minutes later when asked to make my first dialog choice -- I don't want to be a wuss, man, but how do you expect me to tell my little friends and family, of humble means, that they threw me a lame birthday party?
The "early childhood" phase of Fallout 3 is so poignant and appealing, if you want it to be, that you are really, really hard pressed to try and "game" it. I want my character to be a bad-ass -- but looking in the eyes of a sweet old lady, guilt-addled and terrified of the later consequences of my actions, hearing my Dad and his friends gently call me "pal," I can't do anything but suck it up and be a sweetie.
"Just be yourself," my friend advised.
But, but, I don't play video games to be myself. I want to be a tough guy, and maybe insulting this lady's gift of a birthday poem is the way to do it -- but how can I, when she's looking at me like that, so hopeful that I will like it?
When taking the exam that would sort me into my ideal career track in the Vault, I received the role of "Shift Supervisor." Because I'm upstanding and responsible?
"Wuss," typed same friend when I told him of my outcome.
So I could tell you that I played Fallout 3 last night, but I spent most of my playtime not playing Fallout 3, and instead being dizzied by the apparent array of options. I wanted to resist thinking of behavioral consequences strictly as game mechanics; I struggled to objectify my character into something "cool," or even "different from myself," even while those around me had the sort of subjective responses toward "me" that made it impossible. I had no problem being a dick in BioShock (although believe you me, I stared breathless at that first Little Sister for a long, long while, too), but these are human beings. The quaint, touching, innocence-evoking '50s nostalgia vibe was not helping, either.
I have written more articles than I can count about the much-lauded "choice in games," but you know? I kind of hate it.
I jest, mostly -- I'm canceling various social plans just to be home with Fallout 3 tonight. That's right, you heard me. But there really does seem to me to be a prevailing conflict taking shape now between characterization and immersion. Game design wants us to believe deeply in our circumstances and the characters in them -- but how can you become anything other than your plain old self when you're confronted with such empathetic, borderline-lifelike people and places?
"A bunch of us got Fallout 3 the first night, and the next day, only two hadn't made it out of the Vault," my friend warned me today.
He added, "We still make fun of 'em."
[Note: Thanks to Stephan and Wolf_Dog who were so sick of the meganekko SVGL banner that they sent me a new one. Sick of SVGL banners? Send me nice ones at leighalexander1 at gmail dot com.]
