I saw an article criticizing the Fallout series the other day that caught my eye. Not because of the criticism, per se – the later versions of Fallout have their fair share of detractors – mostly to do with the range of bugs and myriad other broken parts of the game – but rather the exact nature of that criticism.
Some of the criticism is probably fair enough, but what caught my eye in this article was that it was critiquing the lack of true role-playing potential in the Fallout games. Their argument, if I’ve understood it clearly, was that, at the end of the day, you have to be one of the ‘good’ guys in the Fallout Universe – you can’t create a world of carnage and villainy, and hence it’s not actually a real role-playing game. In other words, you’re railroaded (ha ha) into one conclusion or ending in order to progress the storyline.
It’s an interesting point, and worth thinking about on a couple of levels at least. Firstly, I think that it’s not entirely true. For example, one might take Fallout 4; I think there is significant choice and nuance in the game -and I think that it actually does much more than most other computer games I’ve played at avoiding easy binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and instead tries to explores ends, means and justifications. There’s some heavy philosophical lifting in the minor details, especially in the interaction between some of the factions in the game, like the Railroad, and their treatment of synths – human-like robots. I think it is in this, minor and easily overlooked detail – that the interesting stuff happens. Not all moral discussions need to be over the fate of the world, after all.
I also think there’s more to role-playing than complete freedom. I know that Fallout makes a claim to be an open world, where players have freedom to go and do anything, and such claims are limited and problematic by the very nature of the game itself, but role-playing doesn’t necessarily mean that players have complete freedom of the role that they play. It can also mean that they are placed in to a role – in this case, the Sole Survivor of Vault 111, and decide how they play that role. It’s a slightly different perspective, but I think it’s an important distinction.
The final, and for me, most interesting point, is what this notion says about narrative – and its role in computer games. Computer games have far more variability in terms of player interaction, and this necessarily means that the narrative has to have an elastic quality in order to capture these different choices. How, then, are video game creators meant to develop compelling and driving narratives when there is an almost limitless multiplicity of options available to players? The answer, in the case of Fallout 4, seems to be finding a tension between a required structure (as encapsulated by a quest line) combined with a range of different, optional, and alternative side quests.