Fallout 3: The Art of the Game

A new article on NPR discusses the author’s fascination with post-apocalyptic themes while also arguing that a game like Fallout 3 should be considered art.

Wiser heads than mine will continue to hash this one out, I’m sure, but in my book, the world of Fallout ranks right up there in the annals of vividly imagined sci-fi dystopia. Since I was a kid, I’ve had an obsession with post-apocalypse stories. (I blame the infamous 1980s artifact The Day After — the made-for-TV movie that launched a million nightmares.) Over the years, I’ve read pretty much every book of this sub-genre in the science fiction canon — Earth Abides, The Stand — and have seen all the doomsday movies, too.

Fallout has gotten into my head (and dreams) more than any of them. A big part of that is the nature of the videogame medium. Fallout is a first-person RPG (role-playing game) — the most immersive of the various, blurrily defined videogame types. When you play, you are the hero; you are there — wandering the wastelands, dodging mutants, getting radiation poisoning and otherwise enjoying the end of the world as we know it.