Abundance in Fallout 3

Fallout 3

Wandering through the benighted wasteland of Bethesda Studios’ Fallout 3, I am struck not so much by the oppressive quality of desolation, as I am by a strange ubiquity: everywhere I travel, littering the ground and filling containers of various types, including the many corpses of my enemies, are the innumerable leftover objects of an enormous and prolific industrial economy.

Certainly, the landscape and architecture of Fallout 3′s Washington D.C. region is overwhelmingly one of destruction and decay. It is for that reason all the more striking that the world is filled with so much abundance. Contrast the bloated miscellany of Fallout 3, consisting of countless medical supplies, still-edible (though irradiated) food, innumerable and varied weapons, and stores of random objects (e.g., tin cans, crutches, surgical tubing, forceps, baseball gloves, toy cars, etc.), with the stark and highly realistic scarcity of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Fallout 3′s resident carbonated beverage of choice is the Nuka-Cola, which can be found in virtually any room in the game, and almost always in one of the literally hundreds of still-functioning Nuka-Cola vending machines that not only occupy abandoning buildings, but peculiarly dot the landscape and abandoned outdoor hovels of the Fallout world as well. Against this unexpected wealth of potable beverages is the early and tragic scene of McCarthy’s father discovering a single, rare and precious, bottle of Coca-Cola, which he offers to his son with all the solemnity of a priest bestowing final rights upon a civilization.

The Fallout world has been ravaged by war, but it is still in a sense fertile, alive, and inhabitable.

The Fallout world has been ravaged by war, but it is still in a sense fertile, alive, and inhabitable. Some of its residents even thrive amidst the waste and general climate of violence. Indeed, life is clearly a vicious and often mortally dangerous struggle, but one which promises to the exceptional few all the trappings of comfort our own world can provide. Inexplicably, active power lines run beneath the surface of the Wasteland, providing electricity to hundreds of still-functional computer terminals, and almost every building is lit by bulbs that glow with remarkable stubbornness (especially considering that the nuclear apocalypse responsible for all this devastation happened approximately a hundred years before the events of the game). Some residents, like the notable Allistair Tenpenny, sequestered in his luxurious and fortified Tenpenny Tower (whose penthouse balcony affords the most stunning and encompassing view in the entire game), stare down upon the world from a vantage of absolute privilege and wealth. In most cases, this wealth is achieved through violence and exploitation — yet how does this differ from the realities of socio-economic inequality in our own world? Only, I feel, in the particulars.

On the other extreme, there are the ordinary and predominantly poor wastelanders who wander the land scavenging for salvage and food. Some of them are raiders and hunt travellers and the weak for their survival, or create and trade in narcotics. Others are slavers, who traffic in human cattle and sell to the highest bidder. Some, though few, are sedentary and live in immobile communities, guarded by one or two strong-willed men or women with a penchant for violence; yet, even in these places, the peace is fragile at best — maintained only by the threat of violence and at the expense of individual autonomy. A Hobbesian wilful sacrifice of power is observed in such places, where often-times a pseudo-militaristic regime appoints itself to govern what would otherwise descend into abject chaos (as in the case of the Republic of Dave, whose megalomaniacal self-appointed monarch drafts all the men of his village into mandatory military service). The logic of the wastes is normally fascistic, but in some rare cases it is anarcho-syndicalist, run by a spirit of cooperation in opposition to the dangers of the outside. Yet even in the most egalitarian communities, the constant threat of annihilation imposes rigid structures of fear and coercion of the freedom of the individual.

The largest community in Fallout 3, Rivet City, inhabits a derelict aircraft carrier at the mouth of a large river. There is a board of elders who govern the city in a more or less democratic manner, and the city’s inhabitants are policed by a squad of rugged and intolerant men and women in combat armor, who brandish shotguns at the slightest hint of transgression. Theft is prohibited, murder is repayed by same, and the highest order of the day is the smooth guarantee of untrammelled business. The currency of the Wasteland consists of bottle caps and pre-War money, which can be used to barter for food and weapons. By some magic of collective trust, the value of bottle caps is more or less consistent throughout the land. How is it that a world ravaged by war and left with the scattered fragments of an empire would choose to adopt bottle caps, objects in themselves almost completely useless and as such a fair fascimile of modern day money, to buttress a system of commerce? Or to pose the question more aptly, why would a post-War society choose to adopt a system of commerce at all?

Fallout 3 is in no way a land of scarcity.

I could of course point to the structural lineage Fallout 3 inherits by being one of a series of games developed by Bethesda Studios. Its cities and varied systems of local government, at least in the purely abstract, very closely resemble those of the medieval fantasy game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. But doing so would gloss over the developments that make Fallout 3 unique. Fallout 3, by being indisputably a game about the post-Apocalypse, must be considered on its own (and genre-specific) terms. So why, then, so much abundance? And how can so many of its residents occupy themselves with frivolous pursuits, as in the case of Sierra Petrovita, a woman living in the small town of Girdershade, who spends her time giving tours to visitors of her accumulated Nuka-Cola paraphernalia? One might respond with the answer, “Post-traumatic madness!”, but surely in an environment filled with giant carnivorous cockroaches, ferocious wendigos (called Deathclaws), and countless human assailants, the insane would quickly perish.

There must be some other principle at work that could permit the existence of a culture, despite various militaristic regimes and autocracies, that produces a rampant spirit of individualism. Every settlement in the Wasteland is distinct, and its inhabitants overwhelmingly idiosyncratic and normally (with a few exceptions) concerned with their own pursuits. In Rivet City, there is a well-equipped medical laboratory tasked with the creation of non-irradiated fruit. Somewhere in the blasted, crumbling ruins of Washington D.C. there is a rebel radio host who passionately declaims the rise of a fascistic order called the Enclave. The user’s own quest concerns the purification of water. In short, the world is full of people with ideals and personal dreams. A people reduced to a state of pure survivalism could never aspire to such lofty pursuits; hunger and fear would quickly overpower any secondary or tertiary desires.

The solution, of course, is that Fallout 3 is in no way a land of scarcity. To the contrary, it is overwhelmingly rich with food and other resources. All the necessities of life are accounted for. Could this be a failure in Bethesda’s design? Or perhaps a deliberate sacrificing of realism for the sake of playability? Indeed, I am not equipped to judge or say on either of these points, nor do I consider it especially important; what interests me is how Fallout 3 stands as a symbol of our own relationship to abundance.

Our world is the very dilapidated, rotting, post-War Wasteland realized in Fallout 3. Its buildings in a state of near-collapse are symbolically our own. Its slavery and drug trafficking mirror ours. Its irrepressible individualism juxtaposed against micro- and macro-governments with fascistic intentions and militaristic might is a precise representation of our own plight. For those of us in the affluent developed world, are we not all of us Vault Dwellers, sheltered from the Fallout of our actions? How long before we are made to awaken from our secluded sleep of privilege and face the world? Will what greets us be as prolific and habitable as the seeming and deceptive scarcity of Fallout 3?

How entertaining would Fallout 3 have been had it faithfully rendered the apocalypse of McCarthy’s The Road, I wonder?