Scheer Madness

Fallout New Vegas represents a successful way for a video game to do an interesting narrative.  It is a role playing game set in a post-apocalyptic environment.  The game begins with a cinematic intro to set the mood and explain some of the back-story to the game.  After you create your character, and fill out your character’s statistics, you are ready to explore the game’s environment.

Normally stories progress in a linear fashion: you have the intro, you follow a sequence of events, and you reach a climax and resolution.  What makes Fallout New Vegas a great game is the flexibility it gives its users.  It is essentially a choose-you-own-adventure: there is a main quest, a multitude of side quests, and random events that occur.  You are in total control over when you want to complete the main storyline.  You get to decide which direction you want to explore and when to finish a quest.  Don’t feel like following up on the main storyline?  No problem!  Each location you go to has its own side quests that are often independent of the main story line; just pick and choose which quests you want to beat.  Feel like exploring the map?  Knock yourself out!  There is no time limit, you can explore at your leisure’s pace.

There are numerous factions that you interact with.  When you talk to characters, you are given a list of dialogue options that determine how the AI will respond to you (the options range from serious dialogue to smart ass snide remarks).  Each character is voiced by an actor to make each in-game character unique.  Animations, background music, and sound effects set complement the story (think the Wild West meets 1950′s science fiction and Mad Max).

Fallout new Vegas demonstrates the effectiveness of choosing-your-own-adventure story-lines.  But can the same be done to historical narratives?  As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, not all historical events contain exciting plots filled with conflict (sometimes reality is just plain boring).  Conflict is the driving force to Fallout New Vegas.  The choices you make lead to new conflicts and sometimes dark humor.  The environment is only half of the reason why the Fallout franchise is popular; the other half is the ability to explore the environment at your own pace and choose your own story line to follow.

You can probably tell I like this game.

Digital media is great for replicating and creating objects and preserving historical artifacts, but there is always the concern that we will lose connection with the cultural heritage of those objects.  Sure, we can replicate 3D images with mathematical precision, but there is no interaction with the object; space has gone to waste.

But, according to Bernadette Flynn, it doesn’t have to.  She looks to video games for examples of 3D objects/realms that people can interact with.  There are plenty of games that demonstrate different approaches to creating big open worlds and interactive environments.  There are also some good history-inspired games as well.  Flynn argues that creating interactive worlds would be useful to historians as a form of digital tourism (why visit the Stonehenge in real life, crowded with too many tourists, when you can visit a virtual one instead?).  The key concept behind using video game technology is the idea of immersion: getting people “lost” in a historical environment that allows for interaction and active participation.

But is this really a good idea? Can virtual worlds replicate real world experiences in the same way (compare physically climbing a mountain versus arriving by helicopter)?  Games are meant to be competitive and entertaining; are there limits as to what kind of history should be replicated into a game (for example, would people want to enter the virtual world of Jane Adam’s Hull House if it didn’t have cars, guns, explosions, or bizarre physics like this?)?  And, probably the most important question of all: is immersion a good idea or a bad one?