As consumer entertainment has melded with the rapid expansion of internet capabilities, video games such as Call of Duty, League of Legends, and massively online multiplayer games have risen to prominence among the sales charts. These games all encourage forms of cooperation, interaction, and coordination of skill between friends and strangers alike, making gaming a social experience even in solitude. However, in November 2015, Bethesda Studio’s Fallout 4 broke the established record set by Call of Duty: Black Ops III for the most opening sales, reaching $750 million dollars in just the first 24 hours, dwarfing Call of Duty’s record made in 72 hours by nearly $200 million (Fortune). Fallout’s triumph over the franchise is largely significant in that it is entirely a single-player game, and actively discourages the grounding in reality upon which the social experience of Call of Duty is based. A single-player experience is usually reflective of the creator’s desire to immerse the player in the virtual world. Rather, it is the premise of the game that makes its popularity appear problematic.
Bethesda’s Fallout games are based in an alternate timeline that is the result of a fundamental change: What if American culture remained static in the paranoid McCarthyist age of the 1950s? What follows after a hundred years of government corruption and mass manipulation is the ultimate nightmare scenario: complete and utter atomic annihilation following the exchange of thousands of nuclear bombs between the world powers. Ever since the 1950s, Americans have feared the possibility of nuclear destruction, even coming frighteningly close during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even today, tensions with Russia are as if the Cold War had never really ended. This premise begs the question: under what conditions would someone living under the threat of nuclear war want to play a game that immerses them in it? In this essay, I will bring the conventions and cultural association with Fallout under scrutiny, arguing that Fallout is ultimately a tool for which the consumer copes with the frightening scenario of nuclear war, as well as the complexities of modern society.
In conclusion, the problematic nature of the willful-immersiveness of Fallout is actually not problematic at all. Rather, it expresses a deep desire to confront grand ideological issues that they are unable to confront due to their own inability or the existence of social constructs. The Fallout series provides a world in which factional conflict and social constructs are marginalized, but also emphasizes their necessity in light of the ultimate conflict that persists in human nature that begs the question: are we our primitive nature? Or are we able to move beyond?
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