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  Fallout 3’s tutorial opens, rather more ambitiously, with your character’s birth, during which you pick your race and gender (if given the choice, I always opt for a woman, for whatever reason) and design your eventual appearance (probably this is the reason). The character who pulls you from your mother’s birth canal is your father, whose voice is provided by Liam Neeson. (Many games attempt to class themselves up with early appearances by accomplished actors; Patrick Stewart’s platinum larynx served this purpose in Oblivion.) Now, aspects of Fallout 3’s tutorial are brilliant: When you learn to walk as a baby, you are actually learning how to move within the game; you decide whether you want your character to be primarily strong, intelligent, or charismatic by reading a children’s book; and, when the tutorial flashes forward to your tenth birthday party, you learn to fire weapons when you receive a BB gun as a gift. The tutorial flashes forward again, this time to a high school classroom, where you further define your character by answering ten aptitude-test-style questions. What is interesting about this is that it allows you to customize your character indirectly rather than directly, and many of the questions (one asks what you would do if your grandmother ordered you to kill someone) are morbidly amusing. While using an in-game aptitude test as a character-design aid is not exactly a new innovation, Fallout 3 provides the most streamlined, narratively economical, and interactively inventive go at it yet.

  By the time I was taking this aptitude test, however, I was a dissident citizen of Vault 101, the isolated underground society in which Fallout 3 proper begins. My revolt was directed at a few things. The first was Fallout 3’s dialogue, some of it so appalling (“Oh, James, we did it. A daughter. Our beautiful daughter”) as to make Stephanie Meyer look like Ibsen. The second was Fallout 3’s addiction to trust-shattering storytelling redundancy, such as when your father announces, “I can’t believe you’re already ten,” at what is clearly established as your tenth birthday party. The third, and least forgivable, was Fallout 3’s Jell-O-mold characterization: In the game’s first ten minutes you exchange gossip with the spunky best friend, cower beneath the megalomaniacal leader, and gain the trust of the goodhearted cop. Vault 101 even has a resident cadre of hoodlums, the Tunnel Snakes, whose capo resembles a malevolent Fonz. Even with its backdrop of realized Cold War futurism, a greaser-style youth gang in an underground vault society in the year 2277 is the working definition of a dumb idea. During the tutorial’s final sequence, the Tunnel Snakes’ leader, your tormentor since childhood, requests your help in saving his mother from radioactive cockroaches (long story), a reversal of such tofu drama that, in my annoyance, I killed him, his mother, and then everyone else I could find in Vault 101, with the most perversely satisfying weapon I had on hand: a baseball bat. Allowing your decisions to establish for your character an in-game identity as a skull-crushing monster, a saint of patience, or some mixture thereof is another attractive feature of Fallout 3. These pretensions to morality, though, suddenly bored me, because they were occurring in a universe that had been designed by geniuses and written by Ed Wood Jr.

  Had I really waited a year for this? And was I really missing a cardinal event in American history to keep playing it? I had, and I was, and I could not really explain why. I then thought back to those two hundred hours I had spent playing Oblivion, a game that had all the afflictions of Fallout 3 and then some. Oblivion’s story has several scenes that are so dramatically overwrought that, upon witnessing one of them, the woman I then lived with announced that she was revoking all vagina privileges until further notice. A friend of mine, another Oblivion addict, confessed to playing the game with the volume turned down after his novelist wife’s acid dinner-party dismissal of the time he spent “with elves talking bullshit.”

  What embarrassed me about Oblivion was not the elves; it was the bullshit. Similarly, I was not expecting from Fallout 3 novelistic storytelling and characterization and I was absolutely not expecting realist plausibility. I happily accept that, in the world of Fallout 3, heavily armed Super Mutants prowl the streets, two-hundred-year-old rifles remain functional, and your character can recover from stepping in front of a Gatling gun at full bore by drinking water or taking a nap. All of which is obviously preposterous, but Fallout 3 plays so smoothly that you do not even want to notice. Anyone who plays video games knows that well-designed gameplay is a craft as surely as storytelling is a craft. When gameplay fails, we know it because it does not, somehow, feel right. Failed storytelling is more abject. You feel lots of things—just not anything the storyteller wants you to feel.

  What I know is this: If I were reading a book or watching a film that, every ten minutes, had me gulping a gallon of aesthetic Pepto, I would stop reading or watching. Games, for some reason, do not have this problem. Or rather, their problem is not having this problem. I routinely tolerate in games crudities I would never tolerate in any other form of art or entertainment. For a long time my rationalization was that, provided a game was fun to play, certain failures could be overlooked. I came to accept that games were generally incompetent with almost every aspect of what I would call traditional narrative. In the last few years, however, a dilemma has become obvious. Games have grown immensely sophisticated in any number of ways while at the same time remaining stubbornly attached to aspects of traditional narrative for which they have shown little feeling. Too many games insist on telling stories in a manner in which some facility with plot and character is fundamental to—and often even determinative of—successful storytelling.

  The counterargument to all this is that games such as Fallout 3 are more about the world in which the game takes place than the story concocted to govern one’s progress through it. It is a fair point, especially given how beautifully devastated and hypnotically lonely the world of Fallout 3 is. But if the world is paramount, why bother with a story at all? Why not simply cut the ribbon on the invented world and let gamers explore it? The answer is that such a game would probably not be very involving. Traps, after all, need bait. In a narrative game, story and world combine to create an experience. As the game designer Jesse Schell writes in The Art of Game Design, “The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience.” In a world as large as that of Fallout 3, which allows for an experience framed in terms of wandering and lonesomeness, story provides, if nothing else, badly needed direction and purpose. Unless some narrative game comes along that radically changes gamer expectation, stories, with or without Super Mutants, will continue to be what many games will use to harness their uniquely extravagant brand of fictional absorption.

  I say this in full disclosure: The games that interest me the most are the games that choose to tell stories. Yes, video games have always told some form of story. PLUMBER’S GIRLFRIEND CAPTURED BY APE! is a story, but it is a rudimentary fairytale story without any of the proper fairytale’s evocative nuances and dreads. Games are often compared to films, which would seem to make sense, given their many apparent similarities (both are scored, both have actors, both are cinematographical, and so on). Upon close inspection the comparison falls leprously apart. In terms of storytelling, they could not be more different. Films favor a compressed type of storytelling and are able to do this because they have someone deciding where to point the camera. Games, on the other hand, contain more than most gamers can ever hope to see, and the person deciding where to point the camera is, in many cases, you—and you might never even see the “best part.” The best part of looking up at a night sky, after all, is not any one star but the infinite possibility of what is between stars. Games often provide an approximation of this feeling, with the difference that you can find out what is out there. Teeming with secrets, hidden areas, and surprises that may pounce only on the second or third (or fourth) play-through—I still laugh to think of the time I made it to an isolated, hard-to-find corner of Fallout 3’s Wasteland and was greeted by the words FUCK YOU spray-painted on a rock—video games favor a form of storytelling that is, in many
ways, completely unprecedented. The conventions of this form of storytelling are only a few decades old and were created in a formal vacuum by men and women who still walk among us. There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.

  I am uninterested in whether games are better or worse than movies or novels or any other form of entertainment. More interesting to me is what games can do and how they make me feel while they are doing it. Comparing games to other forms of entertainment only serves as a reminder of what games are not. Storytelling, however, does not belong to film any more than it belongs to the novel. Film, novels, and video games are separate economies in which storytelling is the currency. The problem is that video-game storytelling, across a wide spectrum of games, too often feels counterfeit, and it is easy to tire of laundering the bills.

  It should be said that Fallout 3 gets much better as you play through it. A few of its set pieces (such as stealing the Declaration of Independence from a ruined National Archives, which is protected by a bewigged robot programmed to believe itself to be Button Gwinnett, the Declaration’s second signatory) are as gripping as any fiction I have come across. But it cannot be a coincidence that every scene involving human emotion (confronting a mind-wiped android who believes he is human, watching as a character close to you suffocates and dies) is at best unaffecting and at worst risible. Can it really be a surprise that deeper human motivations remain beyond the reach of something that regards character as the assignation of numerical values to hypothetical abilities and characteristics?

  Viewed as a whole, Fallout 3 is a game of profound stylishness, sophistication, and intelligence—so much so that every example of Etch A Sketch characterization, every stone-shoed narrative pivot, pains me. When we say a game is sophisticated, are we grading on a distressingly steep curve? Or do we need a new curve altogether? Might we really mean that the game in question only occasionally insults one’s intelligence? Or is this kind of intelligence, at least when it comes to playing games, beside the point? How is it, finally, that I keep returning to a form of entertainment that I find so uniquely frustrating? To what part of me do games speak, and on which frequency?

  TWO

  So it begins here, in your stepfather’s darkened living room, with you hunched over, watching as a dateline title card—1998 JULY—forcefully types itself across the television screen. “1998 July”? Why not “England, London”? Why not, “A time once upon”? A narrator debuts to describe something called Alpha Team’s in medias res search for something called Bravo Team’s downed chopper in what is mouthfully described as a “forest zone situated in the northwest of Raccoon City.” Okay. This is a Japanese game. That probably explains the year–date swappage. That also makes “Raccoon City” a valiant attempt at something idiomatically American-sounding, though it is about as convincing as an American-made game set in the Japanese metropolis of Port Sushi. You harbor affection for the products of Japan, from its cuisine to its girls to its video games—the medium Japanese game designers have made their own. To your mind, then, a certain amount of ineffable Nipponese weirditity is par for the course, even if the course in question has fifteen holes and every one is a par nine.

  A live-action scene commences in which Alpha Team lands upon a foggy moor, finds Bravo Team’s crashed chopper, and is attacked by Baskervillian hounds, but all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close-up. To the canine puppeteers’ credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors, whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky-cam, Evil Dead–ish fugue minus any insinuation of talent, style, or coherence. Once the hellhound enfilade has taken the life of one Alpha Team member, the survivors retreat into a nearby mansion. You know that one of these survivors, following the load screen, will be yours to control. Given the majestic incompetence of the proceedings thus far, you check to see that the game’s receipt remains extant.

  For most of your life you have played video games. You have owned, in turn, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Nintendo 64, and familiarized yourself with most of their marquee titles. The console you are playing now, the console you have only today purchased, is categorically different from its ancestors. It is called the Sony PlayStation. Its controllers are more ergonomic than those you have previously held and far more loaded with buttons, and its games are not plastic cartridges but compact discs. Previous consoles were silent but your new PlayStation zizzes and whirs in an unfamiliar way as its digital stylus scans and loads.

  It is 1997. The PlayStation was released to the American market one year ago. You missed this, having been away, in the Peace Corps, teaching English, which service you terminated in a panic sixteen months short of your expected stay. Now you are back in your hometown, in the house you grew up in, feeling less directionless than mapless, compassless, in lack of any navigational tool at all. You are also bored. Hence the PlayStation.

  The live-action sequence has given way to an animated indoor tableau of surprising detail and stark loveliness—like no console game you have hitherto encountered. Three characters stand in the mansion foyer. There is Barry, a husky, ursine, ginger-bearded man; Wesker, enjoying the sunglasses and slicked-back hair of a coke fiend; and Jill, your character, a trim brunette looker in a beret. A brief conversation ensues about the necessity of finding Chris, your fellow Alpha Team member, who has somehow managed to go AWOL in the time it took to step across the threshold of the mansion’s entryway. Soon enough, a gunshot sounds from the next room. You and Barry are dispatched by Wesker to investigate.

  The dialogue, bad enough as written (“Wow. What a mansion!”), is mesmerizing in performance. It is as though the actors have been encouraged to place emphasis on the least apposite word in every spoken line. Barry’s “He’s our old partner, you know,” to provide but one example, could have been read in any number of more or less appropriate ways, from “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s our old partner, you know.” “He’s our old partner, you know” is the line reading of autistic miscalculation this game goes with.

  Upon entry into the new room, you are finally granted control of Jill, but how the game has chosen to frame the mise-en-scène is a little strange. You are not looking through Jill’s eyes, and movement does not result in a scrolling, follow-along screen. Instead Jill stands in what appears to be a dining room, the in-game camera angled upon her in a way that annuls any wider field of vision. Plenty of games have given you spaces around which to wander, but they always took care to provide you with a maximal vantage point. This is not a maximal angle; this is not at all how your eye has been trained by video games to work. It as though you, the gamer, are an invisible, purposefully compromised presence within the gameworld.

  The room’s only sound is a metronomically ticking grandfather clock. You step forward, experimenting with your controller’s (seventeen!) buttons and noting the responsiveness of the controls, which lend Jill’s movement a precision that is both impressive and a little creepy. Holding down one button allows Jill to run, for instance, and this is nicely animated. A pair of trigger buttons lie beneath each of your index fingers. Squeeze the left trigger and Jill lifts her pistol into firing position. Squeeze the right trigger and Jill fires, loudly, her pistol kicking up in response. All of this—from the preparatory prefiring mechanic to the unfamiliar sensation of consequence your single shot has been given—feels new to you. Every video-game gun you have previously fired did so at the push of a single button, the resultant physics no more palpable or significant than jumping or moving or any other in-game movement. Video-game armaments have always seemed to you a kind of voodoo. If you wanted some digital effigy to die, you simply lined it up and pushed in the requisite photonic pin. Here, however, there is no crosshair or reticule. You fire several more shots to verify this. How on earth do you aim?


  As you explore the dining room something even more bizarre begins to occur. The in-game camera is changing angles. Depending on where you go, the camera sometimes frames your character in relative close-up and, other times, leaps back, reducing Jill to an apparent foreground afterthought. And yet no matter the angle from which you view Jill, the directional control schema, the precision of which you moments ago admired, remains the same. What this means is that, with every camera shift, your brain is forced to make a slight but bothersome spatial adjustment. The awkwardness of this baffles you. When you wanted Link or Mario to go left, you pushed left. That the character you controlled moved in accordance to his on-screen positioning, which in turn corresponded to your joystick or directional pad, was an accepted convention of the form. Yes, you have experienced “mode shifts” in games before—that, too, is a convention—but never so inexplicably or so totally. So far, the game provides no compelling explanation as to why it has sundered every convention it comes across.

  The dining room itself is stunning, though, reminding you of the flat lush realism of Myst, a personal computer game your girlfriend adores but that has always struck you as a warm-milk soporific. You have not played a tremendous number of PC games; it is simply not a style of gaming you respond to. You are a console gamer, for better or worse, even though you are aware of the generally higher quality of PC games. Anyone who claims allegiance to the recognizably inferior is in dire need of a compelling argument. Here is yours: The keyboard has one supreme purpose, and that is to create words. Swapping out keys for aspects of game control (J for “jump,” < for “switch weapon”) strikes you as frustrating and unwieldy, and almost every PC game does this or something like it. PC gamers themselves, meanwhile, have always seemed to you an unlikable fusion of tech geek and cult member—a kind of mad Scientologist.