I Live In Fallout 3
When you’re a writer, you get into the habit of recognizing patterns. You see rhetorical patterns in arguments, you see narrative patterns in stories, and you see patterns in the one thing that most people take for granted- your own life. Ever since I first played through Fallout 3 in 2011, I've recognized a familar pattern. It’s my life. I live in Fallout 3. Even as a kid I think I knew this, at least subconsciously. That may have been why the game resonated with me in the first place.
But this pattern I feel is more than self-insert. I’m not putting myself in the place of the Vault Dweller, as if my life is 1:1 with his, and he only does what I would do. It’s reversed. I feel like the Vault Dweller is an archetype that’s forced onto me. I feel like I, myself, am the vehicle onto which one self-inserts. I feel hollow, in a way. And I feel like despite my free will, I have little agency over my current circumstances. Maybe everyone feels that way. I’m not sure. I never asked them.
I grew up dirt poor. The 2008 housing crisis wiped out what little my family had, and due to a lot of other misfortunes, we were left homeless for an extended period of time. Years, if I remember correctly. Drifting in and out of charity houses and battered women’s shelters. I don’t say this to garner sympathy, but to provide context. I never grew up with TV, or Internet, only the few DVDs of bootleg camrips and public domain VHS collections. My interaction with the culture of Gen Z nostalgia was only through brief glimpses in store windows and limited hours of sleepovers at friends’ houses. So you can imagine, when I finally made it to high school, with all their smartphones and social media cliques, I felt a different sort of isolation. I felt like I’d been living underground for the last decade. I felt like a Vault Dweller.
And what awaited me, when I strapped on my fancy Samsung Pip-Boy for the first time and connected to the cultural zeitgeist? 2016 waited for me. I joined right at the end. I joined right at the ramping up point of the 2010s culture war. The only Star Wars movie I ever watched in theaters was The Last Jedi. The moment I ventured out of that little Vault, the culture was already a wasteland. The bomb had went off already, and all I was left with were the warring bands of raiders who fought over the little monoculture that remained. I was too late for John Cena. I was too late for Club Penguin. I was too late for the early internet. I was too late for everything.
All I could do was wander through the ruins alone, and scavenge through the trash to find anything of worth. Anything that reminded me of what this country was supposed to be. What my parents, teachers, what the world told me this place was supposed to be. And I didn’t find anything.
When you’re a writer, you ask “why” a lot. “Why does a character want this?” “Why is the world this way?” “Why does the villain oppose our hero?” That leaks into your life, too. You ask yourself why you feel the things you do, why you believe the things you believe. Why you want the things you want. But you also ask why of other things. Why was this done to us? Why does no one care? Why was I chosen, of all people, to witness the death of Tomorrowland? Why do I live in Fallout 3?
I don’t know.
