The Null Device

Fallout 3 "depressing"

On the question of whether video games can be art: The post-apocalyptic first-person shooter Fallout 3 sounds like an interesting aesthetic experience:
It's an incredibly bleak game. Critics have lauded it for its complex-but-intuitive gameplay, its intriguing story and a go-anywhere world that outdoes even the sprawling burbia of Grand Theft Auto IV. But for my money, Fallout 3's accomplishment is more subtle: It's depressing.
Its mood is so quietly and painfully demoralizing that I regularly had to turn off my PlayStation 3 to take an emotional break. After playing videogames for 25 years, I'm accustomed to wandering around environments that are gory and dangerous, or creepy and scary, or puzzling and baffling. Many such games thrill me, but very few make me sad. That's precisely what Fallout 3 achieved.
The game is also filled with scraps of surviving culture that suggest how people lived before the holocaust, dimly aware of the impending horrors. "There won't really be a nuclear war, will there?" is the title of a government flier aimed at a clearly nervous public. Most post-apocalyptic games do not seek to make you sympathize with the lost civilization. On the contrary, they usually mock the dead culture, as with the out-of-control kitsch consumerism and genetic tampering of Rapture in Bioshock. Fallout 3 possesses this mocking edge, too, but just as often, the game's designers seem to have genuine respect for the culture that died.
Probably the saddest part is the children.
Which is another sign that video games are maturing as a medium. Up until now, the typical game would be analogous thematically to fairly light entertainment; pulp paperbacks, superhero comics, or perhaps Victorian parlour puzzles (in the case of the likes of Myst or ICO). That a game can move one to this extent, rather than merely providing gratification, is somewhat novel.

There are 2 comments on "Fallout 3 "depressing"":

Posted by: Greg Sun Feb 1 06:04:24 2009

Is the vocabulary of videogames limited relative to other genres? I guess novels have the greatest symbol variety. Current videogames don't use language much: their main vocabulary is the set of "player verbs", eg move, turn, fire, pick up object. Potentially they have the same visual vocabulary as painting and sculpture.

Posted by: Newob Sun Feb 1 22:24:02 2009

The prior games that Fallout 3 builds upon, namely Wasteland, Fallout, and Fallout 2, also have the mocking-yet-serious attitude toward the pre-nuclear war world. I can't speak for Fallout 3 since I haven't played it yet, but the post-apocalyptic video game isn't a new thing, if anything it builds on the genre in other art forms such as film, especially the Mad Max movies.