In April of this year SpAmazon is releasing a streaming show piece based on the video game franchise Fallout, a post-nuclear war apocalyptic scientismic pulpy action romance role playing interface that allows players to experience the joys and frustrations of interacting with an environment that’s a mash-up of A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Road, Atomic Cafe, Mad Max, various bits of Heinlein, Philip K Dick, and Lovecraft, Night of the Living Dead, THEM, Mars Attacks! and Dr. Strangelove, and probably a host of other pop culture meme-able materials that escape my mind at this moment, provided one is into that sort of thing, which indeed I am.
I want to be clear at the outset, I am not so much into the wish-fullfilment of the game as I am into the screaming atomic-powered cathode ray signage that lurks behind the game play itself: THIS FANTASY WORLD YOU’RE BLASTING SUPER MUTANTS IN SUCKS, IT’S A BAD IDEA, LET’S NOT GO THERE.
But, of course, in the world of the game, we went there. And in Murikuh, there’s a good many doomsday prepper1 who salivates at the idea of us REALLY going there and there’s a certain android multi-billionaire2 who is certainly planning like we are going there, and they aren't helping things with that kind of inertia.
I like to think that science fiction in general helped stave off a decent into Nuclear Armageddon by showing just how terrible it would be to wake up in such a world, but as often is the case, some citizens have the worst hot takes, and see surviving an apocalypse as an opportunity to do whatever they want with whatever is left of the world, even as the sins of that old world would slowly kill off any such survivor with a lingering kind of flair.
Unfortunately for the planet, climate change is a disaster that happens much too slowly to capture the imagination of the tens of millions of Pretty Comfortable People (PCP) whose capital would all need to be leveraged in unison to avert that disaster. Climate change lacks the flash bang cinema extravaganza of a mushroom cloud and the immediacy of radiation sickness. It is too far down the road to be of today's concern when there's wars and other atrocities of the here, now, and elsewhere to contemplate and fund.
And the designers of the first Fallout game back in ‘97 seemed to anticipate this apathy to a certain degree. You play as a vault dweller who has to go outside the vault to find equipment to fix said vault, and along the way have harrowing adventures. The game is full of pop culture easter eggs from Blade Runner to Doctor Who (I mean, how can I not like this3) but there is one tiny little psychological aspect of the game’s instruction manual I’d like to focus on, and that is this: the game is a simulation, according to the instruction text, and you are actually in your vault too timid to go out into the world. So you need to play the simulator on varying levels of difficulty so you can nut-up and go outside.
The Vault-Tec Research Group has determined that after a long period of security, many Vault-Dwellers will feel "uncomfortable" with the idea of returning to the outside world. The SimTek 5000 will provide a safe and reassuring return to life on the outside world.
Not that anything is nice outside of the vault, ha-ha, but still, this is one of the only times I can think of where I have had a video game experience slyly suggest to maybe go outside and look around the world you're in, rather than be a perpetual immersion experience that you Should Never Ever Leave Because Money For Other People Who Aren't You.
The manual for the game is worth checking out in its own right, full of tongue-in-cheek fun such as meta-fictional survival manuals:
Coping with Mr. Virus!
How to Eat Rat
Flotation Homes & Seaweed
How to Dodge Falling Rocks*
*Document not available at this time, will be available the 3rd quarter of 2078
Not to mention actual facts about atomic blast and fallout effects. It harkens back to the Infocom “feelies” of yore, when their text-based games provided you with physical props to enrich your playing experience whilst also indulging in a bit of piracy protection.
The idea of going outside beyond some certain boundary seems anathema to a great many PCPs now, as population pressure mixes with income disparity to trend us ever towards vault living, even if that vault is spread out horizontally. Most of my week is already spent indoors, starting in our lovely townhouse, proceeding in my almost pneumatic tube along i-70 to a one-million square-foot filing cabinet for eight to twelve hours a day, five to seven days of the week, depending on how close it is to tax season, and let me tell you, if the bombs drop while I'm at work, I’ll be locked down for a good long while in that cabinet and expected to continue processing forms. Cuz that's gubbment.
Where do you think youre going, Mr. Hill? No no no no, have you never heard of Proclamation Ninety, Sub Section J? Sit yer ass down and man that stapler for Uncle Sam. This is war, dammit, war!
And its rinse-lather-repeat. The same is true for most of the American population to varying degrees. There’s a semblance of freedom of movement, until you start walking around and find all these fences and sign posts everywhere. At some point those directional controls are backed up by tactical weaponry and psychosis, but at least I know I’m free?
Armageddon lurks in our darkly-mirrored subconscious, suggesting its radiological method as the best way of regaining the time when we were hunter-gathering on wide open fields vaster than horizons where mighty battles were fought against the saber-toothed big cats with nothing but spears…a harder time, but simple in its hardness, its harshness…just survival, day in, day out, don’t make me think about stuff and things…
That desire lurking within certain hearts is a sucker’s game, with too much lost for anything or anyone to come out as a ‘winner’, let alone some prepper who thinks they’ll be the lone survivor in such a scenario. Perhaps we need a new game, with new mechanics that make being an active steward of the garden of eden we have right under our noses so much fun that all the other games we play fall by the wayside, left behind not so much in disgust but rather in obsolescence, having been outgrown and put aside as a historical, hysterical curiosity. Such a game might just set us all free of contemplating Doomsday by allowing us to find glory in the Here and Now.
many of whom, in a pitiable and laughable kind of way, got their aces handed to them by a certain virus a couple few years back
I mean, this guy could be straight out of the Institute, c’mon…
In other synchronistic aspects, the Great War that destroys the world in Fallout happened in 2077, when YT will be one hundred years old and likely shouting i told you so’s from a solar-heated aerostat in between munching on Nabisco Algae-Crisps©®™ and wondering why my dentures require access to BitCoin12.oh in order to chew properly.
Back in grad school I remember reading a scholarly essay on John Muir’s books, saying that his writing was successful because it promoted its readers to put the book down and go outside.
A book that encouraged the cessation rather than further compulsion of reading?? Imagine!