Old World Blues

I don’t consider myself a massive gamer. I’ve owned a playstation since the 90’s however and have many fond memories of playing those earlier games, and enjoying the subsequent developments in technology... As I say I am not a massive gamer; I don’t own a headset, I don’t spend my weekends “pwning n00bs” on “CoD” (if that confuses don’t worry... you don’t need to know...), and I don’t queue up to get the latest tech (nearly a decade into it’s life cycle I’ve only just recently bought a PS3).

However, there are a couple of games that, through the ages, have kept my attention either through some accident of association or because the story or gameplay has been spectacular. Two such games from more recent times have been Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas. If those names mean nothing to you, let me hand you over to the capable hands of wikipedia to provide an explanation:

Fallout 3 takes place in the year 2277, 36 years after the setting of Fallout 2 and 200 years after the nuclear apocalypse that devastated the game's world in a future where international conflicts between the United States and China culminated in a Sino-American war in 2077, due to the scarcity of petroleum reserves that ran the economies of both countries. The player character is an inhabitant of Vault 101, a survival shelter designed to protect up to 1,000 humans from the nuclear fallout. When the player character's father disappears under mysterious circumstances, the Overseer, or the leader of the vault, initiates martial law, and sends security forces after the player, who is forced to escape from the Vault and journey into the ruins of Washington, D.C. to track him down. Along the way the player is assisted by a number of human survivors and must battle a myriad of enemies that inhabit the area now known as the "Capital Wasteland".

Whereas Fallout: New Vegas:

[...] is based in a post-apocalyptic, open world environment around the area of Nevada, California, and Arizona. The player takes control of the character known as the Courier, who is hired by a delivery service to take an unknown package across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas Strip but is intercepted, shot in the head, and left for dead by a mysterious man who steals the package. After being found by a friendly local robot, Victor, and healed by a man named Doc Mitchell, the Courier is thrust back into the desert to seek revenge and recover the stolen package. By doing this, the player becomes caught between various factions competing for control over the desert and its most valuable asset, the Hoover Dam, ultimately coming to shape the future of its inhabitants.

Why am I telling you about this? Well I am getting there...be patient.

These games are some of the most compelling, interesting, and thought-provoking games I have ever played. The dry humour and sometimes devastating emotional impact combined with excellent story progression and replay value like nothing else make it worth the price in and of itself.

I was playing Fallout: New Vegas last night, in fact, and had completed one of the Downloadable Content packages called Old World Blues. Now, before I carry on, one of things that is really quite disturbing about the series is the constant reference to nostalgia. Despite total annihilation and utter destruction there is almost a pathetic, desperate attempt by many of the inhabitants of this world to preserve the old way of life and bring back the 50’s style life of the former civilisation.

Completing Old World Blues I was struck by the message of it all; don’t cling to the past to the exclusion of the future. Don’t spend your life trying to resurrect some golden age, instead appreciate what you have now and look to the future to develop something new.

What does this mean for us? Well it’s not my usual pure-behaviour screed, so forgive me a moment of philosophical postulation. I wanted to share with you a sentiment that I felt very strongly from this game. Many characters are practically driven mad, driven to do unspeakable things, in the name of resurrecting a lost and fatally flawed (read; trigger happy) culture. Now we aren’t nearly so bad in our own lives or indeed in our national lives, but consider the implications.

There is always a desire to return to what we perceived to work before. Many politicians in the UK seem to suggest policies that were first put in place in the 1950’s, a wholly different context. Or indeed there is a case of rose tinted glasses. Under state control the trains in the UK were not managed effectively or efficiently, there was chronic under investment and poor service all around. Partial privatisation has led to a massive increase in quality and service provision, but there is still some who nostalgically long for the days of state control.

Under times of stress there is a tendency for many adults to desire regression to a childlike state - something Freud spoke about at length. We also tend to look backward fondly e.g. “when I was a child it was perfectly safe to play outside, nowadays...” and so on.

I suggest we give up looking to the past in an attempt to restore the golden age that never was, and instead look to the future. Analyse the culture we live in and the lives we each, individually live, and say what works, and what doesn’t, and be done with the what doesn’t and work on what does. We can only gain from such an exercise, and maybe - in the words of the Fallout narrator - we can swap out our Old World Blues for some New World Hope.

Wouldn’t that be something?