Gameplay Journal #7 — Values in Games
After reviewing how games and their mechanisms — especially in their failings and subversions — can provoke complex thought, it’s important to remember many games by their content, mechanics, and themes do the same, not by accident, but by design. While avoided in the past, the industry’s willingness to cater to adult gamers in a non-casual context means there are — and have been, for some time now — series of games with political and philosophical messages and commentary. The best of these, in my opinion, are those that let you experience different viewpoints, and decide for yourself, such as in Fallout: New Vegas. Seen as the best game in the series by many and being one of many games made by Black Isle studios and its successor Obsidian — including the highly philosophical Planescape: Torment and the new corporate-dystopian space opera Outer Worlds — the game introduces the player to the complex political landscape of the post-apocalyptic Mojave Wasteland as a relative outsider, positioned to have great influence on the course of events. Throughout the game, the player can or must interact with key figures in the New California Republic — seen as lawful but also corrupt and inefficient, and a foreign influence in the Mojave region, Caesar’s Legion — a warlike tribalist society that shuns technology and follows the self-declared Caesar as their unquestioned liege, the Brotherhood of Steel — a technologically advanced but hidebound and isolationist society, and the government of Vegas itself, holding itself up as the truest successor to the old world, being run by the only surviving normal human from the pre-apocalyptic era, Mr. House.
Each faction has its own distinct philosophy that is not only stated to the player but can be observed in action. Dealing with the NCR, the player will have to truck with bureaucrats and politicians, bend the rules to get the best outcomes, deal with corrupt quartermasters and help fix problems everywhere the NCR is ill-equipped to handle. Largely, such tasks are thankless, and while they have many supporters, many NPCs see the NCRs presence as unwelcome, and they can become an antagonist to the player as easily as the Legion, who can seem to many as a designated antagonist faction. While the Legion’s values might be abhorrent to modern sensibilities, the player is fully allowed to side with them, and can learn about those who prosper and suffer under legion rule. Merchants appreciate the lack of corruption in the legion, and the security they bring to the legion — ignoring the hardships of others. Women in the legion however, treated harshly owing to the medieval state of the Legion’s social norms. While the player can side with them as a female player character, they still suffer discrimination by the legion’s rank and file, and certain activities are locked from them. Finally, the player can choose to support any of the three factions — or none of them — and each of the four outcomes has its own consequences for virtually every town in the Mojave — which the player can learn in the postgame credits, and it is near- to impossible to achieve a ‘good’ outcome for everyone. While legion supremacy turns out badly for most, the Followers of the Apocalypse — an unambiguously ‘good’ group of humanitarian workers — receive fair treatment from the Legion, while under and Independent Vegas led by the player, they receive some of the worst. In all, the web of cause and effect and end evaluation gives players who want to achieve certain gamestates a puzzle of quests and decisions they would have to follow almost every step of the way through the game — getting them to think about how what they do might have unintended consequences and question the real righteousness of whatever path they pick — because they are all flawed. As stated by Bogost, “Policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one another. Videogames afford a new perspective on political issues since they are especially effective at representing complex systems. By understanding how games express rhetoric in their rules, we not only gain a critical vantage point on videogame artifacts, but also, we can begin to consider how to design games whose primary purpose is to editorialize, teach, and make political statements.” (Playing Politics) This sort of immersion into a fictional political system is both a playground for players who want to explore consequences in politics and policy, and an education in the complexities of such dealings.
Anyone interested in seeing the game for themselves can watch this video by Northernlion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwFO8pUOtDw
All rights to the video and its content belong to Northernlion, and I am not related to or endorsed by them, nor are they endorsed by me.
Works Cited:
Bogost, Ian. “Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy.” First Monday, 2006, doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.1617.