Bethesda — a truly wonderful game company, unfortunately recently purchased by Microsoft(1) — has been making pretty good computer games for a long time now. Mostly each game they put out out has advanced the art of all gaming on computers to some extent. Some times a lot, sometimes less so.
They always have (in the Bethesda games I’ve played, at least) buried lessons, social commentary and fairly enlightened attitudes lying lightly below the surface of the game. They don’t rub the player’s nose in these things, they just show them as part of the “make believe” world you are roaming around in.
Example: In these games Women can be just as competent and nasty a warrior as any Man. Women can lead criminal gangs and have the toughest armor. (Randomly generated gangs or groups — by what ever name or disposition — in the games tend to be about 60% lead by Women and only 40% by Men.) They’ve been doing that since long before the current Gender Identity Craze became acceptable mainstream.
Always a strong anti-drug culture embedded right in the game, though in a far more effective manner than “just don’t do it” — which can’t possibly work on anyone in the typical target age group — and doesn’t. Often some anti-slavery messages. Often some positive reinforcement on education or learning things. (Sometimes you actually have to read books [actual books! My Gawd!!] to learn how to do things, for example; though this has fallen off somewhat in the Fallout series and was more strongly emphasized in the Elderscrolls series.)
Lots of good messages lying lightly under the surface of the game.
In Fallout 4 — arguably their best creation to date (speaking technically, not necessarily the subject matter or the story itself), they have some rather … umm … interesting comments built in. Not necessarily where you might notice them right off, either — which makes them subliminal for most players. That is, these messages will be taken in on a deeper level where they can percolate over time.
The game takes place some 210 years after a nuclear war of unknown dimensions. That is, we don’t know how much of the world was devastated by this “war” — another of their persistent messages is that in war everyone loses, no one wins — and the survivors have other concerns to deal with anyway than “who won”). That’s 210 years after Oct 23, 2077, 9:42AM (they got pretty exact on this one) when the bombs fell in America / Amerika.
210 years later we wake up from a freezer vault (it’s complicated) into a world that’s post-nuclear, post-holocaust. Ignorance, rubble, some fantasy (radiation can’t do that for instance, 1950’s “sci-fi” movies where radiation turns people into things, say; ignorant fantasy, but entertaining perhaps), casual violence, altered biology (e.g., two-headed creatures that could not possibly propagate [work on it] — sloppy fantasy, but, again, entertaining), no living trees… Ok.
Fine. Here are some of the more subtle items you find:
* The majority of people survive by stealing from each other. Much like the darker aspects of the Internet and the Scam phone calls that are now how too many people in the world make their living. (That’s a living? Maybe Al Capone would think so, but I don’t. It’s only a way to die slowly as a Human and as a Soul.)
* Decent people are few, and are easily victimized by bandits, the takers and fakers — again, just like on the internet, here in this world.
* Your role in this “game” is to bring the decent people together and start forming cooperative enclaves. (It’s much more complex than that, but I’m making a point here. So are they.)
* However, these “decent” people are too stupid (or too under-motivated, or both) to figure out what needs to be done; you have to assign them to their tasks. (Again, uncomfortably like the “real world” here today, or what our world has become, rather.) Though, once in a while, some one just self-assign a task in the community, but you have to watch newcomers to each community carefully; too many will just stand around, eating and drinking and not working. Again, kind of familiar for this weird 21st Century, yes?
* “Money” as money is not a factor any more. Pre-war money (paper bills, say) are useful for the paper and the fiber they contain, nothing else. Though there are “caps” (bottle caps are valuable, because they are small and can’t be duplicated again yet) which can be spent as coinage, still the Real Economy gradually happens as a free exchange of goods between your communities; that is when your people start to thrive. (I really like that one. Yay! I mean, money *is* trash, really. We put far too much stock in it [so to speak].) Economy and Money are only so-so related to each other — economy is vital, but money is trash… deal with it.
* That world (parallel to this one, a some what different history in the years following WWII) enjoyed “fusion” power, yet this left the world with a huge mess of radioactive waste. Either no one at Bethesda knows what Fusion is and how it works — that it is not radioactive, can never be so, produces no waste at all other than heat and a little helium — or we’re to suppose that the company producing the fusion generators (“Mass Fusion”, which always sounds like “mass confusion” to me) was lying all the time (back before the war) about how their stuff worked. Take your pick there.
* No one cares a wit about skin color, gender or any other irrelevant detail(2).
* The “minority” classes are two: ghouls, who are distinguished from “humans” by having a warped, bubbly skin (or perhaps it’s no skin, hard to tell which) who live a really long time (radiation transformation), and “synths” who are synthetic humans, a robot+ kind of thing. Ghouls are excluded from some places, though are generally very gentle souls. Synths, however, are generally shot on sight by everyone — except the “Railroad” who conducts a freedom train to get the advanced model synths away from their masters and into a new life. (Bethesda doing the anti-slavery thing again, which was also in their very early game: Morrowind, (2002). Nice.) Take you pick of “minority” treatment, here, but it isn’t about skin color or anything else that *we* think is so important.
* The more nefarious, more criminal a person is, the dirtier they will be. Literally. Unbathed. Filthy. You can almost smell some of them. (Nice trick, that.)
* As the game progresses, you have a choice of sides or factions to support. These are really various forms of government. Anarchic, Totalitarian, Father Knows Best (pseudo military, that is), Cooperative, etc. To an extent you get to chose what form of government is going to pull it all back together. Of course, the precise form of government *I’d* like to see installed isn’t an option — no surprise there to me (my first choice is almost never on the list, form or menu). I do appreciate that millions of people are being exposed to such options in government, though and the probable repercussions of each. Nice job, Bethesda!
* No one cleans up around them. Ever. There are some “cities” or villages, or even just groups squatting in rubble, that have come together under various influences, yet apparently the Broom, the Shovel and the Dust Rag are lost inventions. (There are bars of soap lying around here and there, but you never see anyone using one.(3)) No one cleans up in that world 265 years from now any more than your Teen-ager cleans up his room today, or the Public (bless them) all work together to keep the local laundromat clean and comfy. You can build things in your role in the game but even then you can’t sweep away debris; you have to build around it. Yuck.
* The stupidest creatures in the game — the “Super Mutants” — vaguely reminiscent of the Pakleds from Star Trek — are the only ones who go in for Suicide Bombing. I won’t expand on that one any further; that comment is obvious.
* There are a lot of robots left over from before the war, though what sort of power supply they have that can last that long is never made clear. The most dangerous of the robots are the military ones, the “Mr Gutsy” and such, because they will attack any one these days. Any human moving around at all. I don’t get that one; I mean, it’s not like any one is actually stupid enough to be developing Robot Soldiers for real, is it? Oh… wait a minute…
* Here’s the real kicker, the one I just “love,” above all else. In this post-nuclear, barely surviving world, where food and clean water are hard to come by and luxuries are what you can glean from the rubble before some one else gets there, at least every woman still has lip rouge. No baths, rags for clothing mostly, but at least there’s lip stick. Yeah… priorities, Dude. Like just being alive isn’t Gift Enough, in that or any world; one has to Gild the Lily? Really?
That last item is clearly a commentary on OUR world. What I can’t decide is whether it was deliberate or not on Bethesda’s part.
I hope Bethesda keeps marching forward. They have Hidden Value of educational, social and philosophical nature in their work, often not that hidden, either. I hope, hope, hope that now being owned by Microsoft doesn’t end up making their future products as empty, bereft and lugubrious [there’s a word I don’t get to use too often!!] as too much of the rest of Microsoft’s product line has become in the last 22 years(4).
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(1) I say “unfortunately” because Microsoft has a pattern of ruining the products / companies they acquire (in the last couple decades, at least). Or, to put it more fairly, of bringing those previously successful products / companies down to Microsoft’s questionable level of indifference to quality. On the other hand, Bethesda never fixes their bugs either — Skyrim, for instance, shipped with literally 1,000s of bugs, including a broken main quest, yet it was selected as Game of the Year by those who judge such things. Those bugs were never fixed by Bethesda, but rather by the gaming community, with “unofficial patches” and such. Why do we reward inferior craftsmanship? Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for a company that never fixes its own bugs? Wow. Says something about both of them.
(2) I hope we can get to that point without a nuclear holocaust, and even without too much more political or social bull, but some times I wonder. You know, it’s really very simple: stop caring about these things that aren’t worth anyone’s time. Stop making an issue of any sort out of so-called skin color, so-called gender, so-called hair color or hair length, so-called economic class [most of the millionaires I’ve known in my life — more than a few — literally didn’t have two nickels to rub together most of the time. How’s that rich?], so-called dress or fashion or labels on your pants or shoes, so-called race, or any thing else that can’t possibly actually matter in the least. The Divine Spark inside the material package is all that matters. Deal with it. Start treating ALL PEOPLE as PEOPLE, as the most sophisticated object we know of in the entire Universe — 200 trillion autonomous cells cooperating to make up each package called a Human Body, and we think the most surface details are the ones that matter the most? Come on! <Sigh>
(3) Also, I suspect (though I do not know for sure) that in 210 years a bar soap would literally have evaporated away. Long before it could have evaporated, though, it would more likely have been eaten by bacteria (soap is generally made from fats, after all — organic material all bacteria love), even people in a pinch can eat soap (real soap, not the name-brand, over-manufactured and chemicalized soap-like thingies on the market). Unless the radiation from the bombs is supposed to have killed all the bacteria? But then, life would be impossible if that were the case. But then… and etc. The only fantasy I know of that is 100% internally consistent and very hard to poke holes in is JRR Tolkien’s work (Lord of the Rings, et al), and it took him a life time to create that world. Literally. Bethesda doesn’t have that long to craft their worlds, so maybe some of their story holes can be forgiven. yes?
(4) Why 22 years? Work on it. What happened to Microsoft 22 years ago? (in 2000, that is.) Or rather, what has happened to them since that event as a consequence? Clue: similar thing happened to Apple in 2011, and they also are now following the downward spiral. Microsoft is ahead of them on the plunge, but Apple’s catching up. <Sigh> Inevitable, I suppose, when the Genius has left the Building. Or when the Corporate Mind takes over, which is a form of the same thing, unfortunately.