Theme by nostrich.
I just read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a fantastic book. It paints an unapologetically bleak picture of a post apocalyptic US, but is incredibly personal. Most of the book features only two characters, “the man” and “the boy”. It’s simply the story of their journey south, through the dead and blackened landscape. It’s one of those books that sometimes after reading a passage I just sit and think about it, rather than poring over the next one. It’s not a difficult read, but the prose is dense with meaning. He says a lot in very few words.
It got me thinking about Fallout 3, which is one of my favourite games of the past few years. It too paints a bleak picture of post apocalyptic America, but it’s nothing to the bleakness of The Road. Fallout 3 does a great job of the setting, burned out cars, big open spaces, ruined overpasses, abandoned homesteads. It’s amazing just to roam around the landscape, but many of the characters are not very engaging. The story is decent and the sidequests are interesting, but the voice acting and animations are really not that great. It’s frankly amazing that the game sucks you in the way it does, since bits of it are poorly done.
So, The Road is a great book, and Fallout 3 is a great game, but could post apocalyptic games learn from The Road? Much of Fallout 3 consists of wandering aimlessly, scavenging items and trying to survive. What it lacks is the strong connection to character that The Road features. I think it should be possible to translate that sense into a game. The Road features little actual story, and is really just a journey, the same way many games are.
The problem, as I see it, is the norms of the game industry. Fallout 3 features a lot of violent combat, and super strong mutants and bandits to kill. This is fair, as it’s the third game in a franchise, but it adheres to game norms; violence is a large part of the gameplay by design. But it also has a secondary focus on exploration and the overall tone while doing so. What if a Fallout type game were made where exploration and the sense of foreboding were the focus? Sure there would the occasional confrontation with bandits and the like, but games like Aliens Vs Predator 2 and System Shock 2 elicit an emotional response merely by the threat of confrontation and they draw the tension out to great effect.
I’d like to play a game that combines that tension with the bleakness and exploration of Fallout 3. I don’t want The Road: The Game, but I think it’s a good book to look to for the type of story that would make not just a fun game, but something more.
