My New Habit

I've never really gotten into role-playing games. To my mind, they've long been associated with elves, fairies, swords and all that, a genre that has little interest for me. But recently I've been curious about a video game called Fallout 3 (winner of several "game of the year" awards in 2008) and decided to try it, and now it's taking up a lot of my free time.

It is a role playing game, but involves a setting I'm much more interested in: a near-future (albeit one based on an alternative history) post-apocalypse, more in tune with the hard-science fiction I enjoy reading. To my mind, it's more in league with "sandbox" games like Grand Theft Auto. I've enjoyed these games for years as they have large environments to explore, and this really stimulates my brain. In addition, in playing both games, the player is given an ever-expanding set of tasks to perform in order to progress the game's plotline. As a player, you choose which tasks to take on ... or not - you can always take the day off and just wander around. The major difference with this game is that the character is continually making choices (you can be nice or a meanie), and these choices affect the progress of the game.

But it's Fallout's particular environment that is most captivating me. There's a vast tract of post-apocalyptic Washington, DC to explore, and unlike most sandbox games, in this one the buildings and structures can be explored internally also. There's the desertlike wasteland, the irradiated Potomac, the urban core of crumbling buildings, the abandoned Metro tunnels, the museums and monuments of the Mall, and interesting settlements created out of scrap metal and highway overpasses, all patrolled by and/or infested with a menagerie of mutated beasties and rogues. Granted, there's some repetition in environmental elements - you couldn't expect such a vast world to be made with everything being unique - but there's so much for me to explore. And the game's pacing is quite rewarding - just when I think I've seen most of what there is to see, the game reveals some juicy new scenario, like the room at the top of the Washington Monument that houses an alternative radio station's transmitter; the water purification laboratory in the rotunda of the Jefferson Monument; and the black-and-white VR world based on 50's conservative American suburbia that you get temporarily stuck in.

Another attraction for me is that, in this game, there's always something interesting to do. Finishing one quest (grrr, that's such a role-playing term ... should I say "task" instead?) can lead to several more.

So most evenings, when Sarah and Margo go to sleep, I put on headphones, boot up the PS3, and soon I'm in my shack in the town of Megaton, ready for another excursion across the postnuclear DC landscape, with my sledgehammer at the ready.