As I was playing, this form and content match began to remind me of Cormac McCarthy's bleak novel, The Road. In that work, McCarthy plays loose with the conventions of standard English, leaving out periods, quotation marks and other handy punctuation. In interviews, he has stated that for an apocalyptic novel, tight sentences and impeccable grammar seemed...out of place.
But the connection goes further than just a lack of form. Players will spend hours (literally; I'm 35 hours into the game right now) scrounging through trash cans, old boxes, abandoned houses and whatever else they come upon. It gives the same sense of desperation as The Road, in which the father and son consistently rummage through everything in search of food. Creator Ted Howard commented that, "[The team] mix it up, moments of sobering loneliness, with you searching for food and water, and moments of craziness, with splashes of dark humour." It's almost as if he's refering to Mccarthy's novel.
I was most struck by the Road-ness of Fallout 3 when I was wandering through the game world and came upon some "raiders" sitting outside of a run-down house. Upon entering the house, I discovered dismembered corpses tied to blood-stained mattresses, old grimy cooking utensils, a strange beige light, and a strong sense of claustrophobia. It was one of the most disturbing and powerful segments I have played through in a video game. The scene appears to be taken directly out of McCarthy's novel, in which the two protaganists encounter a nearly identical house, filled with screaming victims of a similar group of raiders. The father in the novel has the same reaction I did: get the fuck out. However, in the game, the player has more freedom. Since the character in the game is, in a sense, the same as the player, the situation is less real in a way. The player can linger, rummage for food, wander the house (as long as they as they can stand the ambiance). In contrast to the game world and the player, the situation in the novel is reality to the characters, even if it is a fiction to the reader, since there is a stronger divide between reader and character.
I was amazed at how well Howard and the rest of the Fallout team captured this sense of abject horror in a video game. I had the same sense of repulsion and fear playing the game that I did reading McCarthy's scene. In a separate interview, Howard directly notes the influence of The Road, remarking it was required reading for every member of the team.
What feels a bit disappointing in Fallout, then, is that video games have not yet evolved to a point where experiences this emotionally or artistically intense are consistently conveyed. With all of their interactive power, games should be a prime landscape for artistic forays. Fallout is a brilliant work that presents a beautifully dark world, that can make you recoil or reflect, but so much of it is wasted on standard video game tropes. The writing and voice acting are atrociously bad most of the quests represent the same type of fetch or find actions that were standard in the early 90s point-and-click adventure games. The reliance on experience points, levelling up, collecting an absurd amount of guns and other standard RPG and action elements may add to the game in terms of traditional gameplay enjoyment, but take away from the potential for other types of enjoyment or artistic potential, specifically the ability to experience the decayed world that Fallout so imaginatively renders.
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