Showing posts with label Wastelands. Show all posts
My Book Is Out at Last!
After action report
,
agency
,
Becoming
,
Bergson
,
Boal
,
Death
,
Deleuze
,
Magic Circle
,
monograph
,
Slider
,
Spinoza
,
storytelling
,
technicity
,
Time
,
Total War
,
walkthroughs
,
Wastelands
No comments
As some of you know already, my book Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books was published in September 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. Here is the blurb from the publisher’s website:
Grand Theft Auto IV saw more copies being sold than the latest superhero blockbusters or the last Harry Potter novel. Most of its players and critics commend its storytelling experience; however, when it comes to academic analysis, mainstream humanities research seems confused about what to do with such a phenomena. The problem is one of classification, in the first instance: 'is it a story, is it a game, or is it a machine?' Consequently, it also becomes a problem of methodology – which traditional discipline, if any, should lay claim to video game studies becoming the moot question. After weathering many controversies with regards to their cultural status, video games are now widely accepted as a new textual form that requires its own media-specific analysis. Despite the rapid rise in research and academic recognition, video game studies has seldom attempted to connect with older media and to locate itself within broader substantive discourses of the earlier and more established disciplines, especially those in the humanities. Video Games and Storytelling aims to readdress this gap and to bring video games to mainstream humanities research and teaching. In the process, it is also a rethinking story versus game debate as well as other key issues in game studies such as time, agency, involvement and textuality in video game-narratives.
(For more info, such as the Table of Contents and ordering, see the publisher's website: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Video-Games-and-Storytelling/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137525048)
For those inclined towards electronic editions, a Kindle version is also available now. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Storytelling-Reading-Playing-ebook/dp/B017DQ7J3E/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1/276-1064401-1083624
What I don’t say in the blurb but feel I should here is that the book comes with a few warnings. There’s quite a bit of Deleuze in there (as there has been and will be in my work) and there’s my obsession with the now extinct THQ Studio’s hallmark game series STALKER. Predictably, of course, there’s Tarkovsky, Lewis Carroll and PKD rubbing shoulders inside discussions on videogames. My interest in paratexts and walkthroughs takes the form of a chapter-length discussion and of course, time, agency and involvement (called ‘immersion’ by some) figure importantly in what I have to say. Finally, I end with a discussion of eggs and which end to break them on. Ludology vs. Narratology has turned into the egg-endian debate that the Lilliputs in Gulliver’s Travels consider so sacrosanct.
Here's the email address for those wishing to request a review copy: reviews@palgrave.com
Finally, I love the book cover. Thanks especially to Palgrave Macmillan for all their help and patience.
Ludotopia II: An Any-Space-Whatever?
Cosplay
,
Ludotopia
,
Manchester
,
perspective
,
Romanticism
,
Videogame Spaces
,
Wastelands
2 comments
In-between spaces, holes, interstices, people milling around coffee tables and Danish pastries talking about space and the sliding from one reference frame to another. Copenhagen in 2010, Manchester this year - the Ludotopia game was reloaded and revealed a space throbbing with possibilities. Throbbing in the sense of a vibrating space where ideas constantly keep forming, get expressed or even suppressed and forgotten. Ludotopia is a conference / workshop or even what my boss Sue Thomas calls an 'unconference'. Last year a group of around 15 people convened in Copenhagen to discuss various aspects of spatiality in videogames. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and also managed to come up with papers of high quality (as we thought). Hence, the need for a second event to polish the rough edges, expose the papers to further scrutiny and to stimulate a general discussion that would result in a book proposal. I learnt much and can indeed give page-long glosses to some of the changes made in the papers (I reported on their contents last year). Much of these is work in progress at this stage so I shall not outline all the details. Instead I shall discuss in general some issues that struck me as well as the two new papers that were presented. Finally, I have no issues with revealing where my own work will go so I'll attempt to provide a preview of my own paper as it will look later on. As usual, Ludus ex always welcomes feedback.
Among the concepts that fascinated me last year, Espen Aarseth's 'ludoforming' stands out,. Marked with an incisive wit and yet an affable gregariousness, Espen's presentation of his ideas have always interested me mostly because of their contentiousness but this time because I was in full agreement. To ludoform, in Espen's Copenhagen presentation, was to construct a game's space over a real space and it was interesting to see how game meaning's formed / reformed / ludoformed real spaces. Back then, he had used examples from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games' version of Pripyat, the African savannah in Far Cry 2 (where he famously showed a pacman-like structure in FC2's map of its fictitious African landscape). It seems from his recent discussions that as a concept, 'ludoforming' will become much more robust and address even games like Monopoly (in the sense that places in Monopoly have their own specific attributes adapted from their real counterparts that are modified by the game). Sweeping across more games, this concept looks like it'll be an attractive one for Game Studies.
This year we also had a more distilled version of Stephan Guenzel's paper. Stephan explained his concept of trialectic space (first, second and third spaces) in more detail. Essentially, he describes how computer games symbolically exemplify concepts without missing out reality.
Almost all the papers have been developed and enriched but I'll let you read them in their final incarnations. My previous post on Ludotopia and Bjarke Lieborussen's blog will give you summaries of the papers as they were last year.
My own paper is on the use of the wasteland as a spatial metaphor in games and I see the wasteland as a space of possibilities from within which events are actualised (so from a mesh of possible events, one is made to occur depending on the influencing environment -whether this consists of the game affordances or the player's emotional state etc). At first glance, however, the wasteland seems to be a space devoid of meaning and human interaction. Like the railway stations and terminals that Marc Auge calls 'non-places', the wasteland too is a place for passing through. Here, there is no history no human relationships. The game wasteland is, however, not such a 'non-place'. Instead, it is a place that throbs with possibilities. It corresponds with the affective spaces or the vast public spaces where events form despite the apparent nondescriptness of these spaces. Gilles Deleuze calls this the 'any-space-whatever' in his Cinema 1. Whether Deleuze is commenting on Auge we do not know (despite a very problematic footnote in Deleuze) but in game terms, any-space-whatever certainly emerges as a better description for game spaces. Even the wasteland setting in games is not like a bus station where players just pass through Deleuze even in the bus station lies a space of possibility that is going to give rise to an event, an actualisation of a possibility. The wasteland setting in games is such an 'any-space-whatever'. This is a difficult concept to fathom and in spatial terms it is abstract. Some of the immediate criticism that I'd received focused on the fact that after a while, the any-space-whatever exhausts its possibilities in a videogame whereas I was claming otherwise. The any-space-whatever consists of possibilities that are structural (games are unique in that they have such a wide range of structural options) but also at the same time semantic and experiential (all media, including cinema to which Deleuze applies this, would have this plane of reference). A complex notion such as this when applied to a complex medium like videogames causes much controversy and worse, confusion. However, judging by the number of times the term was used in various contexts in the two days, it is a useful framework in game studies. A rewrite, therefore, is necessary where I need to expand on the primacy of the concept of any-space-whatever, tease out the various layers of meaning and pace O Deleuzians, simplify the concept in relation to digital games.
Having expounded on my grand plan for videogame wastelands (yes, I'm building a housing estate in Megaton - ring for bookings), I'll take you through two fascinating presentations by the new guys who joined our Ludotopian spaceship. Speaking of spaceships, the event was organised in the control cabin of the starship Uni of Salford. Lean back with me in your console in ThinkLab to see the two discussions unfold.
The first new paper was Stephan Schwingeler's study of perspective in videogames. He started with a comparison of Uccello's use of the checkerboard with that of the checkerboard base in Wipeout! thus pointing to the development of perspectival spaces in games. Illustrating the use of perspectival spaces through a discussion of Alberti and Brunelleschi with much reference to the art historian and theorist Erwin Panofsky, Stephan announced that videogames are still in their Baroque age and that other artistic movements like Romanticism and Cubism hadn't permeated the videogame world yet. He also pointed at the difference between videogame spatial perspectives and Renaissance ideas of perspective in that although both ideas of perspective 'turn the space of bodily presence into represented space', in digitising psycho-physiological space, spectators become users as well. Some of the questions in response were about non-visual videogame spaces (such as aural games) and about other forms of perspective besides the standard first or third person perspective, such as the Asmodean (Asmodeus is an intrusive devil that can look into people's houses from above) perspective in Sims or the God's-eye view in RTS games. I added to these the problems with the shift in perspective in games like Rome: Total War and also on another level, as Michael Nitsche clarified, in games like Max Payne where the view of Payne drugged and Payne sober are different. Finally, how about non-Western ideas of perspective that may have been used in games. Would games like Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy require a different understanding of perspective? Similarly, how about Echochrome ?
Later, on our way to the Curry Mile in Manchester, Stephan suggested similarities with my wasteland metaphor and Romantic images of ruins (in Friedrich's paintings - but I can think of enough English examples as well). An interesting parallel to pursue.
The second paper, by David Hancock, was equally interesting. Working on Henry Jenkins idea of transmediality, David is looking at scenes in videogames that remediate images from art (as in the Golden Compass videogame) and is then doing paintings based on them (for example, the painting of a sunset in GTA). He is also filming the practice of cosplayers and provided some interesting insights into the practice of local cosplayers. Cosplay, he says, is not a subculture in that it's not a 24X7 identity like the Gothic and Alternative groups have. Cosplayers are apparently more concerned with the character they cosplay than anything else. This also brings up issues in spatial terms. I was intrigued how the cosplayer switches spatial awareness from the game space (which should form the context for the character) to the city space in which they cosplay. There seem to be two levels of spatiality at work here. Stephan Guenzel made an observation about multilayered space existing as a directed space for those players whom Richard Bartle refers to as 'killers' and as a non-directed space for the 'explorers' in Bartle's categories. I'm not sure if Stephan made the comment in this connection but I certainly see two overlapping and interlinked spaces in cosplay - the game space undercut by the cosplayer's city space.
Ludotopia, however, is never about the formal. The in-between affective spaces rule here so here's a random list of trivia. Stephan Guenzel announced that 'Romanticism (as in landscapes that you can only contemplate) in games comes before the epoch of Far Cry'. David told us about the possibility of Zelda going for coffee at Affleck's (a coffee bar in Manchester I guess). We started wodering again about fiction and story as well as the sartorial elegance in British nightlife. Espen definitely has a prospective alternative career as chilly-taster - he ate three raw chillies without batting an eyelid (or maybe he did blink a little). I ate them too but I'm Indian and I have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Michael's designing this huge duck toy that feeds othher ducks with chocolate (I might be making this up by the way so ask him).
Last but not least, I met rapid cyclist on the way to Manchester. Thank God he was there; otherwise I would have read all the papers again and been over-critical. Rapid cyclist is a psychiatrist by profession whose first love is computers and guess what, computer games. He turned out to be an Elite aficionado, having played the game since his Amiga days and now plays Eve Online. We had so much in common. We are both from the Indian subcontinent and I am a games researcher who wanted to be a doctor whereas he is a doctor who wanted to research informatics. As it would happen, the so-called non-place (pace Auge) of a train compartment suddenly resembled an any-space-whatever in that it provided so many possible interactions. It was like having found a friend in City 17. By the by, I'm sure you know this but Rapid Cycling is said to be the favourite malady of artists.
The return from Manchester proved equally eventful. During a walk down the city's lanes (not very nice ones) and a flaneur -like journey around the remains of a Victorian fish market, we discovered a shop that sells PacMan cookie-cutters and Star Wars blasters. I think they also had Obi Wan's tooth but the thought of a Jedi toothpaste was daunting enough. A friend of mine did buy a PacMan stress ball. We ended up in this alternative pub and the behatted barman inspired me to buy a trilby yesterday. The place (or maybe it was just us) inspired us to think of a project where we'd all do peer-reviewed critical close-analyses of games for a journal or a some-as-yet-undefined-thing. Sebastian Moering brought this up and everyone was enthusiastic. As for me, this has been my dream since 2000 and there have been hurdles everywhere. I do a bit of this in Ludus ex as you might have noticed but for a formal project all I have to show is a disappointed face after the abortive funding applications. I've still not given up and Seb's plan is certainly a glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel.
The other Ludotopians dispersed towards the Manchester City Centre for more revels. I was on the tiny train to Nottingham again after having waited in the station. 'Welcome to City 17' , the loudspeakers said. No, it was actually, 'the next station is Nottingham' and the lady exhorted us to remove any remains of our existence - the compartment was gearing up to look like a non-place. Looks, however, are deceptive.
Among the concepts that fascinated me last year, Espen Aarseth's 'ludoforming' stands out,. Marked with an incisive wit and yet an affable gregariousness, Espen's presentation of his ideas have always interested me mostly because of their contentiousness but this time because I was in full agreement. To ludoform, in Espen's Copenhagen presentation, was to construct a game's space over a real space and it was interesting to see how game meaning's formed / reformed / ludoformed real spaces. Back then, he had used examples from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games' version of Pripyat, the African savannah in Far Cry 2 (where he famously showed a pacman-like structure in FC2's map of its fictitious African landscape). It seems from his recent discussions that as a concept, 'ludoforming' will become much more robust and address even games like Monopoly (in the sense that places in Monopoly have their own specific attributes adapted from their real counterparts that are modified by the game). Sweeping across more games, this concept looks like it'll be an attractive one for Game Studies.
This year we also had a more distilled version of Stephan Guenzel's paper. Stephan explained his concept of trialectic space (first, second and third spaces) in more detail. Essentially, he describes how computer games symbolically exemplify concepts without missing out reality.
Almost all the papers have been developed and enriched but I'll let you read them in their final incarnations. My previous post on Ludotopia and Bjarke Lieborussen's blog will give you summaries of the papers as they were last year.
My own paper is on the use of the wasteland as a spatial metaphor in games and I see the wasteland as a space of possibilities from within which events are actualised (so from a mesh of possible events, one is made to occur depending on the influencing environment -whether this consists of the game affordances or the player's emotional state etc). At first glance, however, the wasteland seems to be a space devoid of meaning and human interaction. Like the railway stations and terminals that Marc Auge calls 'non-places', the wasteland too is a place for passing through. Here, there is no history no human relationships. The game wasteland is, however, not such a 'non-place'. Instead, it is a place that throbs with possibilities. It corresponds with the affective spaces or the vast public spaces where events form despite the apparent nondescriptness of these spaces. Gilles Deleuze calls this the 'any-space-whatever' in his Cinema 1. Whether Deleuze is commenting on Auge we do not know (despite a very problematic footnote in Deleuze) but in game terms, any-space-whatever certainly emerges as a better description for game spaces. Even the wasteland setting in games is not like a bus station where players just pass through Deleuze even in the bus station lies a space of possibility that is going to give rise to an event, an actualisation of a possibility. The wasteland setting in games is such an 'any-space-whatever'. This is a difficult concept to fathom and in spatial terms it is abstract. Some of the immediate criticism that I'd received focused on the fact that after a while, the any-space-whatever exhausts its possibilities in a videogame whereas I was claming otherwise. The any-space-whatever consists of possibilities that are structural (games are unique in that they have such a wide range of structural options) but also at the same time semantic and experiential (all media, including cinema to which Deleuze applies this, would have this plane of reference). A complex notion such as this when applied to a complex medium like videogames causes much controversy and worse, confusion. However, judging by the number of times the term was used in various contexts in the two days, it is a useful framework in game studies. A rewrite, therefore, is necessary where I need to expand on the primacy of the concept of any-space-whatever, tease out the various layers of meaning and pace O Deleuzians, simplify the concept in relation to digital games.
Having expounded on my grand plan for videogame wastelands (yes, I'm building a housing estate in Megaton - ring for bookings), I'll take you through two fascinating presentations by the new guys who joined our Ludotopian spaceship. Speaking of spaceships, the event was organised in the control cabin of the starship Uni of Salford. Lean back with me in your console in ThinkLab to see the two discussions unfold.
The first new paper was Stephan Schwingeler's study of perspective in videogames. He started with a comparison of Uccello's use of the checkerboard with that of the checkerboard base in Wipeout! thus pointing to the development of perspectival spaces in games. Illustrating the use of perspectival spaces through a discussion of Alberti and Brunelleschi with much reference to the art historian and theorist Erwin Panofsky, Stephan announced that videogames are still in their Baroque age and that other artistic movements like Romanticism and Cubism hadn't permeated the videogame world yet. He also pointed at the difference between videogame spatial perspectives and Renaissance ideas of perspective in that although both ideas of perspective 'turn the space of bodily presence into represented space', in digitising psycho-physiological space, spectators become users as well. Some of the questions in response were about non-visual videogame spaces (such as aural games) and about other forms of perspective besides the standard first or third person perspective, such as the Asmodean (Asmodeus is an intrusive devil that can look into people's houses from above) perspective in Sims or the God's-eye view in RTS games. I added to these the problems with the shift in perspective in games like Rome: Total War and also on another level, as Michael Nitsche clarified, in games like Max Payne where the view of Payne drugged and Payne sober are different. Finally, how about non-Western ideas of perspective that may have been used in games. Would games like Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy require a different understanding of perspective? Similarly, how about Echochrome ?
Later, on our way to the Curry Mile in Manchester, Stephan suggested similarities with my wasteland metaphor and Romantic images of ruins (in Friedrich's paintings - but I can think of enough English examples as well). An interesting parallel to pursue.
The second paper, by David Hancock, was equally interesting. Working on Henry Jenkins idea of transmediality, David is looking at scenes in videogames that remediate images from art (as in the Golden Compass videogame) and is then doing paintings based on them (for example, the painting of a sunset in GTA). He is also filming the practice of cosplayers and provided some interesting insights into the practice of local cosplayers. Cosplay, he says, is not a subculture in that it's not a 24X7 identity like the Gothic and Alternative groups have. Cosplayers are apparently more concerned with the character they cosplay than anything else. This also brings up issues in spatial terms. I was intrigued how the cosplayer switches spatial awareness from the game space (which should form the context for the character) to the city space in which they cosplay. There seem to be two levels of spatiality at work here. Stephan Guenzel made an observation about multilayered space existing as a directed space for those players whom Richard Bartle refers to as 'killers' and as a non-directed space for the 'explorers' in Bartle's categories. I'm not sure if Stephan made the comment in this connection but I certainly see two overlapping and interlinked spaces in cosplay - the game space undercut by the cosplayer's city space.
Ludotopia, however, is never about the formal. The in-between affective spaces rule here so here's a random list of trivia. Stephan Guenzel announced that 'Romanticism (as in landscapes that you can only contemplate) in games comes before the epoch of Far Cry'. David told us about the possibility of Zelda going for coffee at Affleck's (a coffee bar in Manchester I guess). We started wodering again about fiction and story as well as the sartorial elegance in British nightlife. Espen definitely has a prospective alternative career as chilly-taster - he ate three raw chillies without batting an eyelid (or maybe he did blink a little). I ate them too but I'm Indian and I have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Michael's designing this huge duck toy that feeds othher ducks with chocolate (I might be making this up by the way so ask him).
Last but not least, I met rapid cyclist on the way to Manchester. Thank God he was there; otherwise I would have read all the papers again and been over-critical. Rapid cyclist is a psychiatrist by profession whose first love is computers and guess what, computer games. He turned out to be an Elite aficionado, having played the game since his Amiga days and now plays Eve Online. We had so much in common. We are both from the Indian subcontinent and I am a games researcher who wanted to be a doctor whereas he is a doctor who wanted to research informatics. As it would happen, the so-called non-place (pace Auge) of a train compartment suddenly resembled an any-space-whatever in that it provided so many possible interactions. It was like having found a friend in City 17. By the by, I'm sure you know this but Rapid Cycling is said to be the favourite malady of artists.
The return from Manchester proved equally eventful. During a walk down the city's lanes (not very nice ones) and a flaneur -like journey around the remains of a Victorian fish market, we discovered a shop that sells PacMan cookie-cutters and Star Wars blasters. I think they also had Obi Wan's tooth but the thought of a Jedi toothpaste was daunting enough. A friend of mine did buy a PacMan stress ball. We ended up in this alternative pub and the behatted barman inspired me to buy a trilby yesterday. The place (or maybe it was just us) inspired us to think of a project where we'd all do peer-reviewed critical close-analyses of games for a journal or a some-as-yet-undefined-thing. Sebastian Moering brought this up and everyone was enthusiastic. As for me, this has been my dream since 2000 and there have been hurdles everywhere. I do a bit of this in Ludus ex as you might have noticed but for a formal project all I have to show is a disappointed face after the abortive funding applications. I've still not given up and Seb's plan is certainly a glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel.
The other Ludotopians dispersed towards the Manchester City Centre for more revels. I was on the tiny train to Nottingham again after having waited in the station. 'Welcome to City 17' , the loudspeakers said. No, it was actually, 'the next station is Nottingham' and the lady exhorted us to remove any remains of our existence - the compartment was gearing up to look like a non-place. Looks, however, are deceptive.
Boing Boing Reports on a Post-Apocalytpic Lego City
Nice one from Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:
"Flickr user DeGobbi's 'Crawler Town' is an insanely detailed and most magnificent rolling cyberpunk city executed in Lego: "Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes."
Click here to read more and see Crawler Town. If you get some photos be sure to send them to Ludus ex. I wonder whether Crawler Town has miniaturised the difference engines and whether there is some kind of Teilhardian noosphere that its denizens can plug into (I've just talked about the noosphere commenting on a post, today). Just found the actual Flickr photos here. Apparently the town runs on solar and wind power so the difference engines would have to be 'fired' in a different way. The aero500 races look cool and the crawlers on which the town moves are the envy of many. A Flickr commentator wants to integrate them into a project of his.
Crawler Town kinda reminds me of Rivet City. Wonder why ...
"Flickr user DeGobbi's 'Crawler Town' is an insanely detailed and most magnificent rolling cyberpunk city executed in Lego: "Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes."
Click here to read more and see Crawler Town. If you get some photos be sure to send them to Ludus ex. I wonder whether Crawler Town has miniaturised the difference engines and whether there is some kind of Teilhardian noosphere that its denizens can plug into (I've just talked about the noosphere commenting on a post, today). Just found the actual Flickr photos here. Apparently the town runs on solar and wind power so the difference engines would have to be 'fired' in a different way. The aero500 races look cool and the crawlers on which the town moves are the envy of many. A Flickr commentator wants to integrate them into a project of his.
Crawler Town kinda reminds me of Rivet City. Wonder why ...
'The Water of Life Freely': Water and the Wasteland in Fallout 3
Bradbury
,
Fallout 3
,
Nuclear War
,
T S Eliot
,
Wastelands
,
Water
No comments
'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely'.
King James Bible, Revelations 21:6
'Shantih shantih shantih'
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (l. 433)
T.S. Eliot's The WasteLand ends with the ancient Hindu incantation for peace repeated in triplicate. In Hindu ritual, the chant of peace is always accompanied by a sprinkling of water from the river Ganges. Water has always been of vital importance in the sustenance of the threefold virtues of fertility, purification and peace. At the same time, however, it is also the cause of death – in Eliot's poem there are many allusions of drowning and death. Like The WasteLand, the videogame Fallout 3 brings to us yet another tale of water and wastelands. Set in an irradiated wasteland roughly located around a nuclear war-ravaged Washington DC, Fallout 3 is all about water. Water is seen as the panacea for the restoring the badly damaged values of humanity. The wasteland landscape, like Eliot's, seems to be crying out for the ritual sprinkling of water and the consequent restoration of peace.
Fallout 3, despite its high popularity ratings, has not received the critical attention it deserves, arguably by gamers and non-gamers alike. On reading it as a wasteland narrative and focusing particularly on the game's implicit preoccupation with water, it is evident that Fallout 3 brings a further complexity to the treatment of similar themes in current Humanities' genres. Connecting the game's narrative with literary genres such as nuclear-holocaust fiction and SF or to literary classics reveals a deep exploration of a wide range of themes, which, cross-link with each other in relation to the protagonist's quest for purification, peace and of course, water.
The Lone Wanderer, as the protagonist is called, is the subject of legends after he brings pure water to a world partially destroyed by nuclear war where almost all the water is irradiated. However, the legends may vary given the multiple endings of the game, some of which have darker associations of selfishness, cowardice or even racism. Water, for all its associations with purity, is after all only a resource and as such, a way of wielding power. Another close association, already indicated, is that with religion. The key argument of Fallout 3 comes from the book of Revelations: 'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.' The other and more obvious connection between water and the vast area of the Capital Wasteland (roughly present-day D.C and outlying areas) is, ironically, the absence of water in the stony rubbish reminiscent of Eliot's poem. There is, obviously, a section of the game that features the Potomac river and others that show areas submerged in water. This, however, is 'dirty' water – deadly, irradiated and often the home of dangerous mutants appropriately named Mirelurks. Pure water, although in extremely short supply, is available in small quantities throughout the game and before the Lone Wanderer manages to fulfil his quest, the only source of purified water in the game is seen in the town of Megaton which is fighting a constant battle to maintain its water purifying plant in working condition. Indeed, one of the minor quests that the player finds in Megaton is to repair its leaking water pipes. It is not clear whether the other large human habitations in the game, such as Rivet City (an erstwhile aircraft carrier) and the Citadel have any store of pure water.
The player's / Lone Wanderer's journey begins, not far from Megaton, in an underground vault built to protect humanity against nuclear destruction. The vault is a hermetic area where the self-contained society is cut off from the wasteland outside. Even here, although not too obvious, there is a mention of the game's key water theme: the text of Revelations 21:6 is framed and displayed in the Overseer's office. The protagonist's father is a scientist who almost perfected the research for purified water and much of the game is a quest to find him after he has escaped the Vault – unknown to the player, this also implies that he or she is now on the quest for pure water.
Water is used to highlight a gulf between pure and impure. As a game, Fallout 3 is a shooter and it also corresponds to many generic criteria such as those of survival horror games and roleplaying games. As such, it is game fraught with the need for violent survival strategies. The latter, are employed against those who are morally placed as 'impure'. The game also has a moral aspect where there is a penalty for committing some actions using a system that awards or deducts karma as points in the overall score. There are often situations when the categories of pure, impure and evil become problematic. For example, there are various mutated creatures in the Wasteland that are dangerous but their violence is often not a reasoned-out evil action but rather a territorial instinct aimed at survival. The ghouls, or humans who have been horribly mutated by the nuclear fallout, are a case in point. As the player enters Megaton, he or she might come across Gob the ghoul bartender at Moriarty's pub. Gob, now ill-treated and insulted by his master, will reminisce about the city of Ghouls where he comes from. Gob is good-natured, hardworking and in all respects save his mangled features, he is human. In much of the Wasteland, however, the ghouls are wild and feral. They have lost their capacity to reason and will attack on sight. They are the zombies that one encounters in most first-person shooter games. The super-mutants in the game (with the possible exception of Fawkes, if you have him as your friend) are hostile and deadly creatures and although they seem to have more intelligence than the feral ghouls, their badness definitely does not exceed that of humans, such as the technologically advanced humans who form the Enclave or the marauding groups of raiders who roam the Wasteland. The boundaries, however, are constantly maintained even though who is pure and who is impure is a problematic decision. The human residents of Tenpenny Tower want to keep the ghouls out of their building because they are disgusted by their physical appearance. This decision-making between pure and impure is carried to another dimension when the scientist Dr Zimmerman wishes to terminate an android who perceives that he is human. Reminiscent of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the game merges the dichotomy of impure-pure with that of human-machine. In all of the above cases, the impure-pure problem takes on the aspect of racial superiority and selection.
At a crucial stage of the game, the player is given a choice (and indeed, made to promise) by the supercomputer/President of the United States, President Eden, that he will inject a virus into the supply of pure water that will be lethal for all forms of life that have been mutated by radiation. What Eden is suggesting here can be read as a way in which the pure water would be an instrument of a different kind of 'purification': an ethnic 'cleansing'. Eden suggests a selective virus which will work to destroy all creatures with mutated genes. The transmitter for this virus would be the purified water. In a way, the 'purification' is subverted because the water is made impure by the addition of a lethal agent. The question now arises as to how far the promised 'water of life' can be a panacea for the Wasteland in the game and the wasteland as a concept.
Despite the problems of deciding on the way to make the wastelands fertile again, water is still most commonly seen as the solution as perhaps embodied by Gerald Manley Hopkins's famous line, 'God, send my roots rain'. Hopkins is speaking of the wasteland of his mind and he places himself in the tradition followed by many others (including Eliot), where the wasteland is an allegorical device. In a way, Fallout 3 is an allegory as well as a literal chilling reminder of a possible physical wasteland that might be the result of our failure to keep peace with each other. In one of the side-quests, the player comes across a region known as the 'Oasis', which, perhaps, is the only green area in the whole game. The sudden appearance of foliage after having constantly seen vast stretches of the treeless wasteland makes one assume that this is where one finds pure water. However, here too, the water is as radioactive as elsewhere in the wasteland and the Oasis is revealed to be just another distortion of nature. The people who inhabit the Oasis, however, believe that they live in an area purer and better than the rest of the wasteland: it is only when the player performs the side-quests in the area that he or she finds out that the so-called 'pure' zone is only another aberration.
Water is connected to other examples of promise (and its subsequent frustration) in the game. If the player comes across the McClellan Townhome in Georgetown West, he or she will meet a Mr Handy robot that reads aloud the post-apocalyptic poem, ' There Will Come Soft Rains' by Sara Teasdale (Ray Bradbury uses the title for a short story set in a world destroyed by nuclear war).* Rains symbolise hope; however, even in Teasdale's poem, the promise brought forth by water is ambiguous. In her poem, nature remains as pristine as ever even after humanity dies out. That hope, however, seems ironic if the rains come as part of nuclear fallout. Nevertheless, in Fallout 3 and in the other texts, the 'soft rains' are connected to purity and a return of fertility.
In Eliot's Waste Land, the thunder leaves us with a promise of rain to the 'endless plains stumbling in cracked earth'. The thunder's speech is a threefold utterance of the syllable 'Da' (similar to the ritual utterance of shantih): in the Hindu Upanishads it stands for datta, dayadhvam and damyata – 'Give, sympathise and control', which rings as the final message in Eliot's poem.
The Waste Land also has strong associations with the Grail legend and in this sense, it also employs the quest motif which, in Fallout 3, is of even greater significance as the Lone Wanderer's entire story is that of a quest that branches out into further quests. The end of the Lone Wanderer's quest can be manifold. It might end in failures in the many instances of incomplete gameplay or in-game death. When the player succeeds in reaching the water-purifying mechanism, a multitude of options open. It is possible to inject into water supply, the virus that will kill all but genetically 'pure' humans and in the penultimate scenes when the player is required to sacrifice his or her life to start the purifier, it is possible to avoid this by sacrificing a friend's life. The ideal ending is where the player has good karma throughout the game, destroy's the evil army of the Enclave and then sacrifices himself or herself for the good of all. In this ending, as long as the player manages to activate the purifier in time, pure water flows out into the wasteland and the narrator tells us that the 'waters of life flowed at last – free and pure, for any and all'.This echoes the promise in Revelations 21:6 where it is said, 'I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.' The promise of water, in some sense or other, is fulfilled and the wasteland is fertile again. However, as the narrator tells us, ' the tale of humanity will never come to a close, for the struggle of survival is a war without end, and war – war never changes'. Whether there is another nuclear war we are not told but it is clear that the promise of plenty and purity that water brings to the wasteland is one that eludes humanity even as it is being realised. Like other narrative genres that speak about wastelands anf fertility, Fallout 3 also makes this point. Finally, because of its way of saying this in various permutations of the narrative events, it presents this message in manifold ways.
* I would like to thank Dr Dan Cordle of Nottingham Trent University for bringing this to my attention.
Water is connected to other examples of promise (and its subsequent frustration) in the game. If the player comes across the McClellan Townhome in Georgetown West, he or she will meet a Mr Handy robot that reads aloud the post-apocalyptic poem, ' There Will Come Soft Rains' by Sara Teasdale (Ray Bradbury uses the title for a short story set in a world destroyed by nuclear war).* Rains symbolise hope; however, even in Teasdale's poem, the promise brought forth by water is ambiguous. In her poem, nature remains as pristine as ever even after humanity dies out. That hope, however, seems ironic if the rains come as part of nuclear fallout. Nevertheless, in Fallout 3 and in the other texts, the 'soft rains' are connected to purity and a return of fertility.
In Eliot's Waste Land, the thunder leaves us with a promise of rain to the 'endless plains stumbling in cracked earth'. The thunder's speech is a threefold utterance of the syllable 'Da' (similar to the ritual utterance of shantih): in the Hindu Upanishads it stands for datta, dayadhvam and damyata – 'Give, sympathise and control', which rings as the final message in Eliot's poem.
The Waste Land also has strong associations with the Grail legend and in this sense, it also employs the quest motif which, in Fallout 3, is of even greater significance as the Lone Wanderer's entire story is that of a quest that branches out into further quests. The end of the Lone Wanderer's quest can be manifold. It might end in failures in the many instances of incomplete gameplay or in-game death. When the player succeeds in reaching the water-purifying mechanism, a multitude of options open. It is possible to inject into water supply, the virus that will kill all but genetically 'pure' humans and in the penultimate scenes when the player is required to sacrifice his or her life to start the purifier, it is possible to avoid this by sacrificing a friend's life. The ideal ending is where the player has good karma throughout the game, destroy's the evil army of the Enclave and then sacrifices himself or herself for the good of all. In this ending, as long as the player manages to activate the purifier in time, pure water flows out into the wasteland and the narrator tells us that the 'waters of life flowed at last – free and pure, for any and all'.This echoes the promise in Revelations 21:6 where it is said, 'I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.' The promise of water, in some sense or other, is fulfilled and the wasteland is fertile again. However, as the narrator tells us, ' the tale of humanity will never come to a close, for the struggle of survival is a war without end, and war – war never changes'. Whether there is another nuclear war we are not told but it is clear that the promise of plenty and purity that water brings to the wasteland is one that eludes humanity even as it is being realised. Like other narrative genres that speak about wastelands anf fertility, Fallout 3 also makes this point. Finally, because of its way of saying this in various permutations of the narrative events, it presents this message in manifold ways.
* I would like to thank Dr Dan Cordle of Nottingham Trent University for bringing this to my attention.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)
