Apocalypse How?
By Christos Reid
In the dark, irradiated future of the human race, videogame design is thriving, capitalising on the potential suffering of those left alone in a post-nuclear wasteland. But are we ignoring the truly engaging issues in favour of five-eyed mutants and big guns?
If you consider, for a moment, the sheer amount of titles emerging in the burgeoning design portfolio labelled “post-nuclear,” you would run the risk of having to run to IKEA to fetch another filing cabinet. With Fallout: New Vegas in development, and Borderlands currently in the hands of those who seek out desolate, ruined, sandbox wastelands, it’s become one of the easiest ways for designers to simply wipe the slate clean while leaving the best bits.
Though humanity may not have endured, the Washington Monument stands tall. As I slowly approach it, my pack heavy with the weight of a newly-acquired satellite dish to attach to said monument, I gaze in awe at the digital rendition of a state landmark I myself had seen in the rather-disappointing-in-comparison “real world” that exists outside the television.
But which do I find scariest – the five mutants with miniguns perusing me as I sprint as fast as possible towards the relative safety of the Monument’s stronghold, or the fact that the Monument is one of the few buildings left standing in the entire state, if not the entire world? Fallout 3 is without a doubt one of the best games around in terms of evoking a particular feeling, one that’s so overlooked by contemporary survival horror that only it and BioShock have managed to conjure it in the past few years: the feeling of isolation.
Jungian psychology teaches us we are most vulnerable to our shadow subconscious – that dark part of your mind that wants to push grannies off the bus and shoot the people who never move on train platforms – when we are in the thrall of REM sleep. However, it’s an oft-used adage that we’re at our worst when we’re left alone with our thoughts, simple musings soon turning into fear, anger, and the failure to suppress memories we struggle to cope with without social groups.
As you first venture out into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, leaving either sweet silence or social comfort behind, the isolation begins to set in. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, and indeed the aforementioned BioShock¸ the isolation is not so much an issue of geographical demographics, but instead a case of lost memory.
Amnesia is, of course, an overused way of allowing seemingly average plot events become grand revelations – a found diary suddenly a journey of self-discovery. The reason this approach to breeding this particular brand of “the lonelies” is far more effective is because the designer is no longer relying on the environment to communicate fear, but rather allowing the fear to emanate from the player and protagonist combined, through their collective reactions to the dark new world springing up around them.
//Different lenses
But taking into account the various different pitfalls we associate with living in a devastated environment, are game designers emphasising the wrong ones? Take radiation, for example – this is a simplistic game mechanic, used in the vast majority of post-nuclear settings in videogames, and every time as a simple deterrent from either going somewhere the designer would rather you didn’t, or as punishment for cutting corners (restoring health by drinking in Fallout 3 springs to mind).
Yet it’s simply a loss of statistics, a smidgen of health bar, or even just a number on a screen. When conducting research for a shopkeeper and would-be scientist in Megaton, Fallout 3 players are asked to get themselves as irradiated as possible to test an antidote. Two hundred RADS is the ideal, and six hundred for bonus points. If we balance this against our contemporary method of measuring radiation in humans, the fatal point comes at 500 Rontgen over five hours. The Chernobyl disaster, an event GSC Game World replicated – with a hefty dose of creative license, relevantly – for its S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, generated 20 thousand per hour.
I’m aware it’s a game, and that we play the game to escape the reality. I’m aware these are also games in which we have telekinetic powers, floating physics anomalies and scorpions the size of a golf cart. But when designing the various obstacles, all intended to deter, or to generate fear, I’d put my lot in the radiation camp over giant bugs, every time. Radiation sickness is an incidental effect, something caused by a brief exposure to a large amount of radiation, causing vomiting, dizziness and many effects similar to ten pints of whatever university alcohol is being served for the same price as slices of bread that week.
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