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In Praise of Head Detonation: Fallout 3

Fallout 3's world is the long-nuked and obliterated, irradiated husk of Washington, DC, re-named "The Capital Wasteland." Square miles of urban wreckage and barrenness lay wide open from the start. Scavenging, hustling, questing, stealing and butchering, you can visit the corroded but still standing Washington Monument, the blasted capital dome, the crater where the White House was. They're all infested with grotesque, mutated vermin loathsome as their politician predecessors. Everywhere buildings are totally collapsed, food and water is contaminated with radiation, cannibals and mutants roam the hills and ruins. And you can murder and plunder from nearly everyone. Scattered people and settlements still live, barely. Even as a "good" player, there are several massive orgies of violence available to increase karma, including a slaver camp and a fortified tower headed by the world's last rich asshole, who shoots people from the top with a sniper's rifle in something he calls "wasteland safari." I blasted him and took his Hugh Hefner robe and rifle for myself.

Tune into the radio and you'll hear Malcolm McDowell as the phantom President, his weird American accent hypnopaedically intoning, invoking a very bygone American century. It's not so much a satire of contemporary American jingoism as it is a ghost-like echo of the essential qualities of national pride, rendered farcical by contrast with the dead civilization around you. McDowell's president is a sterile beacon broadcasting from nowhere, his voice alternating with simplistic tunes, the stars n' stripes, patriotic marches. He's not really trying to whip up fervor or allegiance in the few thousand remaining residents of D.C. His calm voice and circumspection seem aimed to feebly bolster and reassure the human remnants of the blighted wasteland, like an adult's firm tone of voice placates a fearful child. He talks about the sanctity of baseball, and its coming return, provides well-known Bartlett aphorisms as if he were a new American Chairman Mao. Talking about his childhood, he longs for his innocent youth on the green prairie alongside his inseparable companion, a dog named "Honey." Good stuff.

The dog bit echoes the player's actual companion, the mangy but vicious Dogmeat. Loyally trailing you and attacking when appropriate, Dogmeat tends less to the president's idyllic Lassie, and more toward tearing the throats out of mutants after you headshot and incapacitate them. You can almost smell the canine bastard, the blood dried into his matted fur, feel the ribs sticking out of his side. This is a real inseparable companion, the kind of dog they found buried next to that Neanderthal-killer interred in Bonn-Oberkassel circa 12,000 BC. Dogmeat is the kind of inseparable companion your little sister brains with a crude axe and dumps in your grave after you have that heart attack at 36. You know, just to make sure the dog makes it with you "safely" to the Pagan underworld.

Barring intermittent narrative brilliancies along the way?including a cult that believes each atom is a distinct universe, thereby making atom-splitting, atomic explosions a creative, life-bringing force?some of the writers for Fallout 3 manifestly weren't up to the visionary task of creating stories as great as the setting. For instance, there's laughable gender equality (post-apocalyptic PC? Seriously?) even amongst the cannibals, which would have had the old guard of science fiction in stitches. I actually found myself thinking of little touches Cormac McCarthy got right in that structureless and meandering novel The Road. You didn't see much of the horror, but you got vague references to something called a bloodcult, which marched like consuming cannibal Mongols under banners. Very, very scary. Maybe due to the Fallout series' trademark humor, Kurtz's "horror" is mostly exchanged for the "awesome," but that was always there, like the edge of the straight razor that Kurtz slug is walking across.

There's not narrative genius omnipresent, just serviceable role playing game questporn and competent hackwork, set against great game dynamics and an incredibly detailed, vivid post-apocalyptic world, all way superior in an industry with writing so bad. But eventually, even the idiotic and stock residents penned by the script hacks fit fine. These sorts of uninspiring shanty-town dwellers without perspective, consciousness or self-awareness just serve to remind you of the intellectual paucity of human beings, how absolutely and thoughtlessly survivors would actually adapt to their circumstances as post-apocalyptic hunter-gatherers. Everyone seems unaware they're on the cusp of nonexistence, which can occasionally create some wonderfully sublime sensations, as you wander through the vast, impeccably dead and comforting landscape. It's not the expansive old west, it's that deteriorating, ever-degrading world, plummeting from the ideal, the cosmology the old Medieval priests liked to beat off to.

If the script hacks weren't exactly first-rate artists, there's love and subliminity in every pixel of the devastated, dead virtual world. Considering how lifeless contemporary American novels, art films, essays and music feel, it's just disappointing a game like Fallout 3 can't stand as tall or transcendent as its great science fiction predecessors, or even a solid Hero with a Thousand Faces superhero myth. The ideas innovators of science fiction brought into existence are still robustly and vitally in circulation here, but the obsessions with anthropology and human nature that birthed the notions are safe in the library. It's a distinction that prevents Fallout 3 from being a decisive artistic coup against the noxious, snobby New Yorker crowd nobody even cares about, not that the New Yorker crowd would care back even if Fallout 3 were that great.

Maybe the writerly nitpicking is irrelevant, though, as what you primarily do is Fallout 3 is kill, kill, kill, with a huge variety of powerful weaponry, including a minigun, flamethrower, and mini-nuke launcher. You can blow limbs off, decapitate cleanly at the neck with high-caliber weapons and awesomely detonate heads and bodies into clouds of incredibly gratifying, slow-motion blood. The monsters are really gross, too, from enlarged cockroaches, to something called a "molerat," to something else entirely called a "centaur," which has these sick grasping tentacles. This sort of deathporn makes this thing a boys-mainly kind of violence-wank, but women have always been manifestly inferior in their comprehension of the smutty, a failing of their sex.

At its root, Fallout 3 is cleansing infestations of life, then stealing and hoarding their shit, which is the real narrative innovation of modern role playing games. The last innate human drive unfulfilled by media was simple power, and as the video game evolves, it evolves to look like the kind of power that was adaptable to the evolving human species. Whether it's Nazis or Lovecraftian horrors, you can safely de-humanize tribes of enemies, then annihilate and profit from them.

And our children will continue to flock to this head detonation, because it is great, and because it is a celebration of life. With the coming worldwide proliferation of computers, games like Fallout 3 will have some of the longest half-lives and influence of any media, way beyond Moby Dick, and that's that. The sick thing nobody wants to admit is that species of highfalutin art are weird cognitive fetishes, while pure fetishistic death-orgies like Fallout 3 will be more or less immortal.

So, without the customary imbeciles whooping up the corruption of youth, now we have, free of idiocy, the tiny revolution of Fallout 3, which Karachi kids will be enjoying in 2070 as their personal secret adventure. Our life-infestation, sadly, probably won't be wiped out, even after a hundred nukes. At least we can all safely become the God of war crashing down mercilessly upon the surface of a dying Earth, a deep, deep fantasy. Like gambling, it's all a farcical and vaguely distasteful illusion, but so is life. Grow up.