A dearth of Indochina

Earlier today (yesterday if you’re in a GMT negative time zone) Corvus Elrod mentioned that he was watching Band of Brothers, the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg epic miniseries that does some pretty great things (in my opinion) with its World War II setting. His quote was that “It's good, but I don't find that war related media interests me much”, which is fair enough. It prompted a bit of a quick whip-around in the twittosphere about the abundance of attention paid to the 1939-45 period by both Hollywood and the videogame industry (to the point where it has now become kind of a joke).

Matthew Gallant then asks “Why isn't there then a similar degree of fascination with, say, the Vietnam war?” At first glance it seems like it’s purely an issue of ‘Well, we won the second World War’, the same for which cannot be said of Vietnam without distorting it into some unrecognizable alternative reality. However, there have been some serious challenges to the conventional wisdom that says videogames should be set in ‘winnable’ conflicts – most notably, Far Cry 2 which I have argued makes a very different statement about conflict than even the somewhat edgy Call of Duty 4, which still essentially sees a ‘win’ at it’s conclusion if at a significant cost.

So if it’s entirely dependant on ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ a particular campaign or situation, then how can we explain the continued focus on the world wars (or even just the Second World War)? Is it just another case of western euro-centrism? On twitter again, Scott Juster, from the experience points blog notes that WWII was “an extremely well documented war. Photos, audio, and video make for an abundance of sources.” Which is quite true. (By the way, sorry for not reading your blog more often guys) Corvus did, however, acknowledge its importance in the formation of national identity, particularly a new American identity in the context of a rapidly globalizing world.

In doing some quick googling for this post, I came across this article in Newsweek from Dec 07, ‘Why WWII Videogames are Hot’ which suggests yet another possibility that I hadn’t quite considered fully before but which seems the more I think about it quite a plausible explanation. The author describes why that particular conflict makes such good videogame fodder, saying:

The close-range infantry combat of Operation Market Garden illustrates why World War II, particularly as it was fought in Europe between 1944 and 1945, has become such popular videogame fodder. The Allies' 11-month campaign across Europe to Berlin was, "to a significant extent a rifleman's war," says historian Niall Ferguson. And though soldiers depended heavily on air and armored support, "they still had to do a lot of ditch-to-ditch, house-to-house fighting—the perfect setting for first-person shooter games."

Which seems to hit the nail on the head in a way the previous explanations didn’t – how many times have you heard about a Mod for a popular FPS game that aims to reproduce The Great War only to be shouted down by people claiming (and perhaps rightly so) that it would be boring (or even frustrating) to partake in a ‘massacre’ like the battle of the Somme. I mean, Christ, who really who wants to be part of a military action where, in just six weeks, a nation like New Zealand can lose nearly one whole percent of it’s population in war casualties. The First World War has been likened by some to a ‘meat grinder’ that absorbed a whole generation of Europe’s men. Add to that the new dominance of the machine gun and of artillery over traditional rifles and cavalry and you have a mix of terribly one-sided gameplay for a first person shooter.

Since gameplay is such an important factor in determining suitable settings for a war game, with that in mind, the reason the Vietnam War has largely been avoided comes slightly more into focus. Not only is proper ‘jungle’ notoriously difficult to depict realistically, not to mention notoriously demanding on videogame hardware, but lots of foliage makes for hard to discern targets. Even in a modern game like Far Cry 2, it can seem like the enemy AI is somehow omniscient – able to see through otherwise dense undergrowth to pinpoint your exact location even it would be plainly impossible for the human eye. Actually, I wonder if the non Vietnamese soldiers felt something like this, and whether it couldn’t be incorporated as a game mechanic, but that’s a bit of a digression.

So to as visual proof of how hard it is to properly see through Vietnamese jungle I’m including here some photos’ taken on my own trip to Vietnam back in January of this year and along side them screenshots of two Vietnam FPS games - Battlefield Vietnam and Vietcong: Purple Haze.

Battlefield: Vietnam


Vietcong: Purple Haze

Somewhere in the Mekong Delta - about 2 hours drive and another hour by bike south and west of Ho Chi Minh City.





I still have yet to see anything in a game like the impenetrable walls of foliage that the Vietnamese jungle presents - and that's probably for the best unless you want a game about going everywhere via boat or roads. Actually, that does remind me of one game...

If you're interested in more of my pictures from the trip in January (all taken by my Dad, an excellent photographer), I've uploaded a choice selection to my flickr stream.

Things I don't want to do

N'Gai Croal can have my man-babies. Hi N'Gai!

This post could also be called “Things I’m not particularly good at, and hence largely shy away from”, but that was a bit long I thought. It might also help to keep that in mind while reading.

As a member of the burgeoning blogeratti, us pretentious, occasionally intelligent videogame writers (admittedly a somewhat unknown in comparison to the likes of Michael Abbott, Iroquois Pliskin, Leigh Alexander, N’Gai Croal, etc.) there’s a particular thing that I see others doing and that I struggle to be interested in.

Reading around, I get the sense that there’s a lot of thought being put into things like defining the proper terminology for talking about games; whether that terminology should be specialist or general enough to be inclusive; and what kinds of things need brand new words or explanations. And I really struggle to want be a part of it. And when I stopped to think about it, I wondered if maybe I was onto something.

This is going to run the risk of seeming like I’m calling him out, but Corvus Elrod (whom I greatly respect) has devoted a generous amount of words and blog posts to things like his definition of ‘play’ or the definition of ‘mechanics’. I think the first time I saw it happening I actually did a double take. Does an established word like ‘play’ really need redefinition just solely for the context of videogames? Isn’t just the context of a videogame blog enough for people to generally understand what you mean? If you do think there is a case for it, wouldn’t it perhaps be better to come up with some new and descriptive word rather than repurpose an existing one? Can’t we also by this point assume that many (most?) people who are reading our blogs pretty much know most of the terms and understand what we mean when we say things about a game? Surely they don’t really need us to explain that “videogames involve a player’s input, whereas a movie doesn’t”. If a particular reader doesn’t know that sort of thing already, what are they doing on my blog?! Go out and play some games first! Seriously, shoo! Go play Halo or The Sims – you’ll pick up on that whole player input aspect pretty darn quick, let me tell you. And if my mum can do it, so can you.

James Paul Gee wrote in What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy that the best videogames, the ones that are successful, actually teach the player about how games work. So why do we in the blogosphere seem to think we have to explain the wheel to our readers? They’ve all played Call of Duty, they’ve know all the tricks. And if they don’t, can we even expect them to understand this interactive medium without experiencing it? Gonzalo Frasca, the granddaddy of academic videogame theory, says that in media that is simulational (videogames), unlike traditional narrative’s with which most people have already had significant exposure to in the form of film, books, etc, you can’t actually come to grips with it from the outside or without experiencing it for yourself.

In another example of the terminology discussion, Iroquois Pliskin (who, again, I greatly admire for his near-overnight rise to prominence and contribution to discussion) in a recent post criticized Clint Hocking’s bastard phrase, ‘ludonarrative dissonance’. He described it as,

“needlessly florid, and…the sort of thing that gives aid and comfort to the people who think that games writin' has gotten too fancy.”

I commented on the post, but I’ll reiterate here – I think ludonarrative dissonance is a fantastic term, and honestly it’s not just because I’m enamoured with the work of Clint Hocking himself (heh). It’s because it’s a term that describes quite exactly a specific occurrence in videogames – one that only occurs in videogames. But hey, just a second ago, wasn’t I advocating against discussing terminology and such? True, but in this instance ludonarrative dissonance is actually a term specific to videogames – unless it involves rules or mechanics that “say” one thing, and a story that says another you can’t get ludonarrative dissonance. There is no potential for ludonarrative dissonance in media like film, so I think it’s quite a valuable term for describing something rather unique to videogames and as such hasn’t really had a name before. And it avoids repurposing old words which, frankly I think is actually doing more to create a specialist vocabulary about games than phrases like the above. In what other context does ‘play’ mean “the self-guided exploration of possibility within a bounded space.”1

Okay, so the counter argument to that all this is, well, look in the dictionary – there’s already a bunch of given meanings for ‘play’ that are all different, some subtly, others wildly. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like this is an issue. The recent hoopla over the snappy gamer’s article, which tried to call out fantastic games writers as being “overly intellectual” and ruining it for everyone else, so pooh pooh, made Leigh Alexander comment that, while the author was being a dick, he did kind of have a point.

All of which makes me think that, shock horror, Kieron Gillen and New Games Journalism maybe actually had the right idea. You really, truly can’t dissect a game without reducing it to less than its whole. I just don’t think it works as it fails to capture the essence of what’s really great about games and why we play them. What I believe Gillen was onto with NGJ was identifying and writing about ourselves. Ultimately, people and their reactions, their feelings, their thoughts their stories (which I am also a big fan of, gaming anecdotes [RPS’ Planetside, the 1% and the ‘I was there, man’ syndrome is an amazing example]) are always going to be more interesting to read than a technical breakdown of game mechanics and why the pistol in Halo 1 was overpowered.

So, let’s bring this train wreck to a conclusion – what am I trying to say? Is it misguided to attempt to nail down some important and novel terms and ways of thinking about games? Well, no not really, there’ll always be a place for that. But, if writing about games is going to really truly transcend accusations of ‘over thinking it all’ then I believe the blogosphere has got to stop trying to clinically explain ‘how it is’. Let it go a little more often - go a bit wild. I think the really successful writers are already doing it, and I tip my hat in the direction of Duncan Fyfe and his writing at Hit Self Destruct. Also, Rock, Paper, Shotgun are often exceptionally good at this too.

Lastly, to both the guys who I criticized earlier, please don’t take it personally. Feel free to disagree with me, take my argument apart and show me the gaping flaws in my logic – please tell me if you think I’m aiming way off base. I am eternally thankful that, largely, we’re all an incredibly mature, friendly and thoughtful bunch and that that in itself goes miles towards overcoming any disagreements.

I have two hands and with them I touch the world

I have two hands, and with them, I touch the world.

In the post release discussions of Far Cry 2 that I have read few others have mentioned what I think is perhaps the single most genre-innovating aspect of the game. The first person shooter’s de rigeur level of interaction is based on weapons – usually guns. Since as far back as Doom and earlier however, the ‘fist’ or ‘gauntlet’ or other hand-held melee device has been a present reminder that a person can readily do other things with their hands than simply aim and squeeze a trigger. Far Cry 2 takes note, and says ‘alright, let’s see what that means for the FPS’.

The things my hands hath wrought in Far Cry 2 are as varied as their real world counterparts – they are utilitarian, opening doors and containers, picking up objects like weapons, briefcases and diamonds. Immersion in the first person perspective is apparently paramount, and the realistic application of my hand to a door-handle is one small detail that is by no means lost on this author. The ‘procedural animation’ system makes my hand always appear to touch the object I am reaching for, twisting, collecting, opening. While it is intentionally perhaps not quite as versatile as the animation system in Spore, it doesn’t need to be. Yet it remains a significant raising of the bar for the standards of first person interaction. We will see only in time whether those standards are met, much as I suggested in my initial post on the game. If Gillen, et al. are to be believed, the Half-Life cycle of influence takes approximately two years, and I would add that the case of Halo seems to follow a similar pattern. That seems an unfortunately long time to wait for someone who, like me, is now well and truly ensnared by the Far Cry 2 immersion factor.

My hands are also my last saving grace when an explosion or gunshot wound renders me close to death, and given sufficient time can work their restorative magic upon the rest of my body. Indeed they themselves appear to miraculously heal from wounds that were inflicted mere moments earlier – an interesting parallel with the gradual healing of whole body wounds which we now take for granted and which are, admittedly, perhaps even sillier in concept than the somewhat arbitrary hit-point ‘n’ health pack combo paradigm they seem to universally have replaced. However I would not wish a return to those heady days of fighting Nazi’s on 5 hp as a result of an inability to find a health pack within arms reach. After all, the health pack only allows me to increase a semi arbitrary numerical value that somehow represents my ‘wellness’ and distance from death. Admittedly, auto regenerating health and body parts vastly improves game flow and rhythm – but it remains an abstraction. Still, even on that front Far Cry 2 proposes a slightly more refined version: Take too much of a beating and your health won’t regenerate beyond a certain point. That is, only until you stop to pump some more morphine into your blood stream – delivered via your hands and lower arms, of course – a novel mix of the arbitrary health pack and the auto regeneration systems.

Lastly, my hands are more than up to the task of bringing swift retribution to those who would visit violence on my own body. After all the above, this almost seems like the least interesting possibility, and I wonder whether compared to the amount of time spent holding a map in your hands or steering a vehicle, this last option does not actually plateau into a more even distribution. My hands are, after all, the most prominent manifestation of my avatar that I see through the game – and that they should spend most of their time trying to kill and maim others starts to seem oddly nihilistic. Then again, that is what the game’s about isn’t it?

In which I post my first ever review: Saints Row 2

So this is the first ever review I've done for any outlet, ever. It's not been published yet (will it? who can say.) so I thought I'd share it with my readers if for no reason other than this game is Batshit Effing Insane... if you want to employ Ben for a game review (will accept food or games as payment) feel free to contact me via email or blog comment.

Edit: This review is now live in it's final form here.

Saints Row 2 is set in a parallel universe from our own, in which gun fights and massive explosions are so commonplace as to become everyday for the inhabitants of Stilwater. The police bat nary an eyelid at your antics as you mow down pedestrians in a bulldozer, doing little to stop the brazen killings and wanton destruction. Choose your weapon of mass demolition. Feelin’ gangsta? Dual wield some Desert Eagle types. Feeling a bit in the mood for some Yakuza-style samurai executions? Borrow a sword from a friendly Ronin on a passing motorbike. He’s not a member of the Saints, so it’s okay to murder him. It’s apparently cool.

“What did you expect?”, quips my middle-aged, ‘west coast Latino’ accented protagonist after another kill. Having not played the original Saints Row, I didn’t really know what to expect. I wanted to create some kind of rationale for my female lead character, however, I wanted some pretense of a credible history to help explain why this middle aged woman had gone mad with rage and no longer seemed to identify other human as worthy of receiving their basic human rights. Let’s pretend that her kids were killed and, now that she has nothing to live for, decided to become a gang leader as a 30-something – your standard revenge story, yeah? So anyway, the start of my experience with Saints’ wasn’t a good sign that the rest of the game was going to be ‘all there’, nicely polished to perfection. After exiting the somewhat hit-and-miss character creator at the very start of the game, I was treated to an intro cut-scene with (surprise, fool!) no voice track. Ah, well played Volition - this must be some kind of trick to make it difficult for me because I’m just such a Pro. When it came time to bust out of jail by beating up a single doctor and a few guards, followed I might add by what has to be the worlds easiest/slowest jail-break ever, I didn’t really have any idea what in the world I was doing.

But that turned out to be actually rather okay.

This review is probably in danger of becoming a ‘how I learned to stop worrying about inconsistencies and start loving Saints Row’ review, so allow me to explain. If one were to focus on all of the strange goings on within the world of Saints Row you would have to conclude that, more often than not, it just doesn’t make sense. As in, none at all. Mow down ten to fifteen rival gang members on one street corner and then, inexplicably, there’s another bunch just round the corner, all fresh and ready to have a cap busted in their collective asses. The AI is pretty whacky at times too; I had some pursuers charge blindly off-road after me, only to promptly fall into and get trapped in an empty swimming pool. I’ve also seen retiree’s sitting on their lawns typing on their laptops, while two more laptops protrude at right angles from their thighs. Hmm. Pimps, casually strolling down the street with Yankee-doodle style feathers in their caps (and heavy jackets, in ‘the heat’ no less) turn on passing police cars and beat down their occupants like they were owed money. Double hmm. At a million points throughout this game I could barely restrain fits of hysterical laughter at the strange absurdity of one or other situation. And no one else seems to notice.

So, perhaps inevitably, neither do you. And when you start to accept the inanity of this world, you start to realize that Volition have actually made a really, really decent GTA clone. Granted, it is just a GTA clone – you’ll find little that’s ground-breaking or genre expanding in Saints 2 – however it still manages to be quite fun, even intentionally humorous at times. Much of the situations and dialogue skate the thin line between taking the piss and treating the slaughter of (literally) hundreds of rival gang members somewhat seriously. When one of your Saint brethren, upon seeing a stripper, remarks “Damn those are nice boots!” it’s genuinely quite a funny moment. It’s also hard to tell whether the developers fully appreciated the irony of setting a mission during a funeral – by that point so many others have been slaughtered in your ambitious gang-advancing rampage that caring about the funeral of just one person seems incredibly nihilistic. It’s like mourning the death of a Nazi prison camp guard in the middle of the holocaust – yes they were indeed a person too, but remind me again what the difference was of this person from all the nameless masses that went before, and why you don’t care about any of them? I assume it was supposed to instill some dramatic tension, however it once again comes over as just another ‘WTF???!’ moment, for better or worse. Maybe by this point you’ll be like me and stuck somewhere between genuine horror, and laughing at how hilariously B-grade it has all become. Well actually, who am I kidding, it’s probably deliberately B-grade, and I guess that’s part of its charm. Again, take it too seriously and the flaws really start to show; switch off your brain for a bit and it’s quite passable as fun.

Key to the joy of Saints is that it runs almost constantly at the full 60 frames per second, or near enough to not notice. Even when the police-car you’ve hijacked smashes into some pursuing officers and explodes in a flurry of sparks and the High Def propagation of super-advanced particle systems, the Xbox 360 keeps chugging along. A note should be made about the quality of the world that has been created by Volition – there’s no loading between city sections and generally it presents an adequate level of detail.

Difficulty is rarely an issue. For some select occasions you are given infinite ammunition for your weapons in the interest of being able to kill all those pesky Brotherhood gang-bangers from up town without having to pop into a corner store and buy some more bullets. In the end it hardly matters that there is always more of them than you as generally nothing short of an RPG to the head will kill you. Try standing on a grenade, and watch as the hilarious, Havok powered rag-doll physics kick in. Get blown high into the air, and tumble to the ground. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep on keeping on, like some kind of insane Duracell bunny for videogames. There’s also some pretty neat full-screen effects similar to what you get in Call of Duty 4 when a grenade goes off in your face – it will make your vision and hearing go all dull and fuzzy. Alternatively, get sprayed by a cop with a bottle of mace and watch as your eyes water, distorting the screen into waves. May I suggest you remedy the situation with a prompt shotgun to the face? The guy had it coming, by the way, apparently all the cops in Saints are crooked. There’s a story here about a big corporation having the city in their pocket, etc, etc, nothing particularly experimental is going on, but if you want to ‘stick it to them man’ Saints Row 2 certainly gives you plenty of opportunities to say ‘Fuck You’ to the establishment. One side mission sees you spending some time spraying feces from a septic truck around an area of the city inhabited by corporate high-fliers. Not my favorite mission-type; that spot is reserved for ‘trail blazing’ in which you drive around on a quad-bike, while on fire, blowing up conveniently placed barrels of gasoline, car, people. Yes that really is the type of game this is.

One last thing of note, and actually one of the better aspects of Saints, is the in-game radio (again, unconcernedly riffing on the whole GTA series) which has a bunch of fantastic songs from some genuinely big-name bands. Hot Chip, MGMT, Does it offend you, Yeah? and Panic at the Disco are all on the radio and there’s a bunch more from other styles of music on the reggae, rock and 80’s stations. Quite a surprisingly solid selection however Volition have clearly chosen quality over quantity for Saints, as there’s only about 8 or 10 songs for each station.

Let me sum up the game by using the character creator as an example – it’s really, really great for some things (pimps, ho’s and awesome cornrows) but it is also quite, er, average when it comes to others – specifically any non-black Gangsta that you can make. The Asian fellow that my younger brother sculpted is rather so-so, and my own Latino momma… well let’s just say she doesn’t look much like a momma. So why did they bother including the creator then? I think Volition would have been better served to stick with the GTA style single type of protagonist approach (think Tommy Vercetti in Vice City) or narrow down the choices to a small number of more appropriate characters. Thankfully, like the rest of the game, it gets better and via the magic of in-game plastic surgery you can change anything and everything you didn’t like about your character.

One last addendum: the game is, how shall I put it, “buggy as all hell”. I have heard story after story of glitched up missions, weird behavior generally and a couple of more serious crash bugs. Still, my verdict stands – if you don’t mind some brainless mayhem, Saints might be a game you could learn to love.

Frank Bilders is Dead

The water was cool and refreshing on my hot skin. I was dirty and sweaty, my clothes stained with grime and blood, some my own, some other peoples. It felt bad to be this clean and refreshed after what I'd just done, and to add to my feeling of guilt it was all premeditated.

Frank Bilders is now dead. I killed him with his own sidearm – a somewhat tarnished .50 caliber desert eagle pistol. I tell you this detail not because it’s important (although the image of that weapon will be forever stamped in my mind) but to distract from the painful sense of culpability I feel for his murder.

I mean, I knew Frank stood a good chance of getting hurt but I had hoped that something with the missions execution would go lethally awry, saving me from having to get any more blood on my hands. Every time we work together the man seemed to take another bullet wound. ‘Heh, just another scar to add to the collection’, he would say. Always focused on the job at hand, was Frank. ‘There’s some bugger out there who cut me out of a deal, and I want him dead’, he’d say in his Northern Irish swagger. No need for a reason, or context - Frank wanted something done, and you were going to do it for him.

When the time came, and he was lying on the ground writhing in pain, the situation hadn’t really forced my hand. I had plenty of syrettes, there was time and I could have saved him, but I wanted him out of the way. So instead of his healing his wounds with medicine I took out his own gun and shot him in the mouth. I hesitated, mind you– I very nearly couldn’t pull it off. But I did, and his body is now lying on a road somewhere in Sefapane, gathering flies and a layer of the all pervasive red dust. And I’m swimming up the river. Getting clean. Getting refreshed. There is no music, no victory anthem. Just the water and the noise my body makes as I move through it.

And Frank Bilders is dead.

It is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a Zombie

Cory Dotorow in his book Down and out in the Magic Kingdom introduced a fictional system of currency called ‘Whuffie’. In his novel, set in the distant future where ‘scarcity economics’ no longer rules, whuffie is based around personal reputation, and is accrued when other people attribute something like ‘coolness’ to you, and add whuffie to your account. It’s also not a zero sum system, so a person with zero whuffie could give and take away from other people, exactly as much as someone with a million whuffie could. A quote from the book, to help explain:

"Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success".[1]

What’s this got to do with Left 4 Dead? Well, L4D embodies perfectly a real world Whuffie system. In L4D you will be hated, hated, if you don’t work with your team. In one game of vs. mode in which I was participating, a fellow survivor (the humans) was evidently an inexperience player or deliberately stuffing around and jumped off a building, killing himself. Rather than just accept this act, someone initiated a vote to kick the player, and it passed (I’ll admit, I voted him out too). You just cannot tolerate incompetence, or worse, a deliberate gung-ho attitude. You will die horribly and quickly, even horribly quickly, as there will be no one there to knock that pouncing hunter off you when he gets you from behind. Your team-mates save you from your helplessness, and in return you just cannot help but like them for it. Speaking only for myself, of course, but I think a degree of this applies across the board, it makes me want to save them just as much in return. This is the essence of good cooperative play – the encouragement to work together with little to no incentive to abandon people to a grisly fate. After all, if they’re dead then they can’t help you.

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately, and it’s all because of Left 4 Dead. The game is really quite hard to stop playing, and largely because it facilitates a strange, temporary bond between a small group of players. Like war veterans, by the finale we are in a groove and all know to when to duck or when to avoid moving, so we don’t cross each others line of fire. Conversely, you can usually tell before the finale if you’re going to make it or not as a team. I can almost not count the number of times I’ve stalled on the third act.

I do have a small criticism, perhaps, for Valve if they ever drop by my blog, and it’s that they didn’t give us more! Sadly, until Valve playtest further and make the necessary tweaks and changes, you can only play versus mode on 2 of the 4 campaigns. That seems an unfortunate limitation. Still, if the modding scene is any good (and all early indications are that it is) then I’m sure we’ll see more than a few custom campaigns before too long.

---

[1] Corey Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, p.10

Fun and Loathing in Las Vegas Washington D.C.

Why is this not as funny as it should be?

Lately, I’ve been trying to play Fallout 3 in a way that doesn’t get me as angry and annoyed as the situation I described in my previous post about the game. I’ve started using a few mods that both improve the interface and make the ‘karma’ system more opaque. While welcome, sadly the changes are a case of ‘too little too late’ to enable anything more than a “meh” feeling about Fallout 3 in general. While the rage has died down, I can’t resist but add my .02c on what’s still bothering me.

Mostly it’s to do with the moral judgments the game makes and the attendant Karma system. One reviewer (I fail to recall who, perhaps Alec Meer?) in their write-up of Fallout 3 mentioned that whatever character you chose to play, the Fallout 3 world would resist the temptation to punish you harshly or judge you for your actions. Having only first hand experience with Fallout 2, I can’t speak for the whole series, but this seems quite consistent with the feel established by the first two games. If you wanted to kill random people and take their stuff, you’d be feared, naturally, but that was about it. There was really no judgment about what kind of person you were. Similarly, the villains were primarily cartoon-stereotype individuals, deluded madmen (and women) or brutish bullies. They conformed to typical archetypes that allowed them to transcend cliché and enter the realm of intelligent satire.

In Fallout 3 there is a character called Mr. Burke. He is a suit who works for a very rich man and apparently revels in nihilistic destruction. Let’s imagine how this character would have appeared in Fallout 1 or 2. He would probably be suited, probably comes with a bodyguard or two and would fit into the “madmen killer” stereotype. You understand him, and that he is meant to be a stereotype. You know that he is unstable, a ruthless killer, but also otherwise completely rational. He sees life as something that is made more precious by death, and so seeks to spread death in order to re-value life in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. You understand his twisted and flawed logic, his broken personality and know that there is some kind of rationale for why he is this way, something in his past, perhaps. Maybe he just read too much Nietzsche, either way, you are never supposed to believe that he is inherently bad or evil, just misguided in the extreme. There is no presiding moral outrage here unless you choose it yourself, just impartial acknowledgement of the fact that he must be stopped or he will continue to kill. End of story.

Let’s contrast this with the character of Mr. Burke in Fallout 3. His voice and character says he’s some of these things, and his dialogue is written to make sense this way… but his voice actor (voiced I am sure by the same person who did the The Speaker for The Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion) inflects in his voice that, “I am slimy and evil”. His voice drips with “evil” and “nastiness”. You should hate me and be outraged by my actions, it says. This is not Fallout. This is too ham-fisted for Fallout. If Mr Bourke is to be serious, it should be more like the disturbing style of Heath Ledger as ‘The Joker’ than cartoon-villain Jack Nicholson.

The difference lies in that while my earlier characterization of Mr. Burke was intentionally simplistic, he was a parody of and commentary on that simple-minded, 1950’s aesthetic. His character manages to pose deep questions while being simplistic when the latter is a po-faced affair that lacks the same semi-aware playfulness that says “I know I am a stereotype and I’m playing up to it”. In short, Mister Burke pisses me off for taking himself too seriously. It would be fine if he did, except there is no accompanying pay-off in additional depth. He should be scary to be around, intimidating and edgy.

This picture also has nothing to do with this post.

I think most of this is a result of a combination of voice acting, writing and animation, and Fallout 3 to me seems to end up making judgments without asking the real questions with regards to the Mr. Bourke character. Instead of traditional morality being destroyed by the nuclear bombs that wiped out so much else of civilization, it has been dragged into the apocalyptic wasteland without a care for how well it fits. It fails to capture the levity of the original titles and loses the accompanying ability to contrast the whimsical with the horrific. It would be all too easy to blame this on the transition from cartoonish 2D sprites to full 3D models, but I think that’s a bit of an easy out.

I don’t quite know what the answer to this problem is. I have the feeling, though, that there’s something they could learn from Left 4 Dead’s ability to blend being constantly surrounded by death in the apocalypse (the serious) with the decidedly upbeat characters. The aesthetic at least seems closer to my taste than Fallout’s. That said, however, the beautiful wasteland remains pretty much the only place in Fallout that I can enjoy without cringing at something or someone every other second.