Kotaku articles on Fallout 1 and 3

[Gnarles Bronson]

It's only worth to add minorities and references to certain issues to the game if it adds value and if it's in line with the given setting.
It makes no sense to waste writing and development time to it, if it doesn't actually makes the game better and is only there to prevent people from whining about their special little minority not being represented.

The only problem is that what adds value for you isn't going to add value for someone else, and vice versa. I can see how the story line of an asian american feeling ostracized living as a minority might be really compelling for someone, but honestly might make me feel a little uncomfortable.

 

[Sander]

It's only worth to add minorities and references to certain issues to the game if it adds value and if it's in line with the given setting.
It makes no sense to waste writing and development time to it, if it doesn't actually makes the game better and is only there to prevent people from whining about their special little minority not being represented.

Having "minorities" and "references to certain issues" is not something you add into games or other forms of fiction. It's something that is present in every society we know, and not having those things represented in a game is a choice to omit a very real aspect of human society, and of human life.

It's also about an entire medium speaking only to one perspective, about groups of people not seeing themselves or their experiences represented in any game. There's a long history of movies and books and TV shows that include or are even about race and gender. I can't think of a single game that really addresses those issues. And yet I can think of many, many games that don't include any people of color, and many other games that don't or barely include any women, and certainly not any with any agency in the game world. That's kind of an issue.

And yes, that extends to Fallout. That's a world built on a 1950s Americana vision of the future. The 1950s were filled with racial conflict, but Fallout doesn't even come close to talking about it. The games include some black people, which is good, but they stay the fuck away from anything remotely to do with racial oppression -- even though that probably would have made the world more interesting and dynamic. Now making a choice like that is kind of defensible and it's not necessarily an issue if an individual game chooses to do that, but it is an issue if almost every single game chooses to do so.

 

[The Vault Dweller]

As much as it would have fit the setting to make race an issue it's one that wouldn't be acceptable "entertainment" wise. Besides I'd like to think that after all that time "Fallout being in the far future" people just got used to interacting with various races and the situation calmed without any real conflict.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

 

[Sander]

As much as it would have fit the setting to make race an issue it's one that wouldn't be acceptable "entertainment" wise.

The Fallout games are fun, but they are also bleak and dark and present some of humanity's worst aspects. Societal conflict is at the core of these games, and slavery, sexual exploitation and abuse, oppression (of ghouls and super mutants), eugenics and ubiquitous violence are all recurring themes throughout all the Fallout games. But the one thing that would stand in the way of them being acceptable entertainment is some acknowledgement of racial oppression in the world-building? Nah.

Besides I'd like to think that after all that time "Fallout being in the far future" people just got used to interacting with various races and the situation calmed without any real conflict.

That's....not very realistic? I mean you can rationalize it that way, I guess, but it doesn't really work. Slavery is a recurring theme, yet there's not a single reference to the historical American slave society. The ghouls are segregated from Vault City, but no one talks about the history of racial segregation. The Master wants to create a new race of superbeings, and no one talks about the history of eugenics in American society (or outside of it). The entire history of black people in the USA is effectively erased from the Fallout games.

 

[PlanHex]

So, you've just pointed out that huge chunks of the first two Fallouts can easily be read as direct parallels to the international slave trade, racial segregation, eugenics and racism in general.

And your problem is that... It's not being mentioned explicitly? That they're not forcing it down your throat at every turn?
You don't think it kinda ruins the point if your fellow slavers loudly exclaim "HAHA THIS IS KINDA LIKE THAT THING THAT HAPPENED HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO" while you hunt down innocent screaming tribals to enslave using your superior firepower, in order to sell them to the rich gated community later?
Besides, you think it would've gotten in the game if they did? If they explicitly called the act of blowing up the Gecko power plant 'ethnic cleansing', that shit would've been pulled out before they removed children.

 

[Hassknecht]

To be fair, large parts of ALL history is erased from all but the most high tech of Fallout's societies. And it's kind of the point of Fallout, isn't it? War never changes, history repeats itself. The instances of slavery, eugenics and segregation in Fallout ARE the historical references. And I don't really see how the writers could have made those allusions more direct or obvious. I mean, do we really need everything spelled out? Do we need some unkillable character running around quoting Derrida, deconstructing everything?
As for there not being any (human) racial tensions being in the Fallout universe itself, well, surviving a nuclear apocalypse is kind of a big deal, and the appearance of mutants makes intra-human racism appear kinda stupid.
All in all I think race (besides asian, maybe, among the societies that have access to historical knowledge) is simply not an issue in the Fallout universe, and it's one of the rare instances where I think making it an issue would not actually benefit the narrative.

 

[naossano]

Do we have to remind once again that racism is already handled with super-mutants & ghoul ? It is getting tiresome.

Beside that, racism is commonly used to talk about the fear or strangers. Colored people aren't strangers anymore. They spent decades/centuaries in the same vault/wastelands, not mentioning the fact that segregation was over long before the great war...

 

[Sander]

I'm not saying that you need to make everything super explicit. You can make those connections in lots of subtle, different ways. It doesn't need to be an overt theme. It doesn't need to be a constant. But small things can go a long way, and help recreate a little bit of a kind of perspective that's missing from these games. Maybe you'd have someone in Vault City going "did you know we used to segregate black people?" Perhaps a slaver talks about the idiocy of how enslaving everyone is much more efficient than just enslaving black people. Maybe there's a single line among the ghoul agitators about Frederick Douglass. Perhaps there's a throw-away reference to Booker T. Washington from Marcus, or one to W.E.B. Du Bois from Harold. Those kinds of things ground the game in reality, and create an acknowledgement that that perspective exists. Instead, there's not a single line in the games anywhere, as far as I know.

And none of this really would be an issue if these things were well-represented in games generally. But they're not, and the absence of that perspective and that history from games (and pop culture more generally) creates the sense that that history is not central to the history of the United States, when it is. The absence of that perspective is one way in which black history is decentralized or even erased from American history. And the Fallout games are a representation of that -- even the game that includes the Lincoln monument.

In a fictional universe, this is not necessarily a problem. Arcanum does this very well: the game is filled with 19th-century racism, oppression and eugenics, and it's dealt with through the lens of classic fantasy races. They do some pretty cool things there. But if you take that approach in a world based on real history, you are effectively erasing real history.

Beside that, racism is commonly used to talk about the fear or strangers. Colored people aren't strangers anymore. They spent decades/centuaries in the same vault/wastelands, not mentioning the fact that segregation was over long before the great war...

Black people have lived in the USA and Europe for centuries. And yet, racism. This is also a rationalization you're applying in hindsight, not the actual in-game explanation.

 

[Gnarles Bronson]

... I can't think of a single game that really addresses those issues.

So... just so we're on the same page, name an issue that video games do address.

Black people have lived in the USA and Europe for centuries. And yet, racism.

I'd like to think, and think there is reason to believe, that there is less racism now than there was 200 years ago. Ergo I think there is reason to believe racism would be virtually non existent 200 years in the future.

Maybe you'd have someone in Vault City going "did you know we used to segregate black people?" Perhaps a slaver talks about the idiocy of how enslaving everyone is much more efficient than just enslaving black people.

This is pretty hamfisted. Maybe the Lanette should say, "did you know that three hundred and twenty years women couldn't vote?" Who cares what happened 320 years ago? How often do you reference 1694 in daily conversation, or have heard anyone else do so?


It's crazy that we have this society without prejudice based on (human) race or sex, and people are still demanding that we make it an issue. Live it up minorities! The dream is alive and well in the post apocalypse!

 

[naossano]

Beside that, racism is commonly used to talk about the fear or strangers. Colored people aren't strangers anymore. They spent decades/centuaries in the same vault/wastelands, not mentioning the fact that segregation was over long before the great war...

Black people have lived in the USA and Europe for centuries. And yet, racism. This is also a rationalization you're applying in hindsight, not the actual in-game explanation.

- Yeah, they spent centuries as slaves, as savages (for colonialist POV), as pirates, as suspicious foreigners. Which of those do you consider as reason for white and blacks to love each other all this time ?

- Then, the slaves got their freedom, but it needed decades/centuries to get equal rights. (segregation only officially ended something like 20 years ago in South Africa)

- The Rosa Park/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King only happened an half-century ago. Old people still remember it and their children/grand-children had the story told to them many times. This is fresh history.

- Even that didn't lead to an instant worldwide equal recognition. It is still a progressive process that take that recent past into account. It leads to more equal in the future.

- There are those who complain about immigrants coming to get their job. This isn't old, this is today as these people just got here. Immigrants are people moving in everyday. Those aren't 999999 years grudges. Nobody in america currently complain about the irish immigrants sons. They complain about those who just arrived or arrived yesterday.

- Then, there is the fact many of these people of color have a segregation/racism/poverty background or kept cultural roots that made them regroup together into ghettos our ethnics neighbours. You don't live with those people, you don't know them well, you can easily be overwhelmed with distrust, and act racist. So it isn't distant past either. This is now.

I am not a great racist historian or sociologist but it seems utterly obvious that the current situation cannot compare with centuries of people not in guettos but living mixed in the very same vault or the very same wastelands for centuries, withouth slaves in the vault, or foreigner coming to take jobs while there is not enough people and so many needs, no memory of prejudices agains't minorities, the poverty background being all mixed by the wastelands living conditions.

You ask for history reference, but you totally miss the context of history.

How do you expect the racism to magically appear if you don't give it any reason to exist ?

(To clear any misundertanding, i am not saying racists are right. I am saying that racism always have causes. If you strip all the causes, you can't have the consequence)

 

[Gsonderling]

Why does everything have to be about race these days? I mean how would Fallout or any other game be improved by forcing comments and references to slavery of black people into our proverbial throat.
Not to mention the fact that whites were slaves to in various nation. Not based on race but still they were slaves. Also why do whites get all the blame?

Slavery is international phenomena and african countries had legal slavery well into 20th century. In Mauretania you could own slaves in 2006!!
When do people stop blaming whites for what was issue in most of the world.

 

[Hassknecht]

It's not really about blaming, but more about simply acknowledging a significant part of american history.

 

[Sander]

So... just so we're on the same page, name an issue that video games do address.

I probably should have said 'include' rather than 'address', and it's wider than just 'issues' but also about perspectives. But for instance, there are tons and tons of historical games in lots and lots of different settings -- and each of them tries very hard to do as little as possible with the slave trade. Even Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and Assassin's Creed 3 barely touch on it, despite the fact that both are set in the Americas at a time when the slave trade and slavery would be extremely prominent. The old Colonization game doesn't include slavery. A game about the colonization of the Americas, and it doesn't include slavery. That's impressively blinkered.

But even commercial games often include a variety of issues. The Fallout games address societal breakdown and societal rebuilding, for instance. They address, at times, gendered oppression (see for instance the women in New Reno). And as I noted above, they also address slavery and segregation -- but they do so in a way that's completely divorced from real history, while set in a world that shares that history. Arcanum addresses a lot of 19th-century racism and oppression. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games address aspects of international war and terrorism in their narratives. The BioShock games address authoritarian, Utopian societies. Games have narratives, and those narratives say things.

They just rarely say things from a black perspective.

I'd like to think, and think there is reason to believe, that there is less racism now than there was 200 years ago. Ergo I think there is reason to believe racism would be virtually non existent 200 years in the future.

Could be! I'm not saying that there has to be racism present in Fallout games at all. I'm saying that excluding any reference to the American history of racism is an erasure of history, a removal of a certain perspective. And again, that doesn't need to be an issue if Fallout is the only game that does that -- but it happens consistently, in nearly every game.

And it's not just that it talks about things that are obviously modeled on the black experience without ever actually talking about the black experience. It's that any evidence of the black experience has been removed. Elvis Presley is there, but Miles Davis isn't, for instance. There's a dude with a British accent (!!!), but no one with an African-American vernacular dialect. You'll see snippets of real (often a little mangled) history throughout the games, but never anything about a history of black people. You'll see slavers and slave rebellions at the Lincoln memorial, with the ex-slaves viewing Lincoln as their hero, but their history is so mangled that they don't have a clue how race intersects with those issues. Those are choices made by the developers that make the games weaker, not stronger.

This is pretty hamfisted. Maybe the Lanette should say, "did you know that three hundred and twenty years women couldn't vote?" Who cares what happened 320 years ago? How often do you reference 1694 in daily conversation, or have heard anyone else do so?

I'm not saying this needs to be everywhere. But I am saying that those perspectives should be somewhere. How often do people have conversations about any form of segregation that don't mention race? How often do they talk about slavery and not mention the Atlantic slave trade? How often do you have people fighting against oppression not referencing MLK or Gandhi? How often do people talk about a fight for freedom and not mention the War for Independence? How often do people talk about Lincoln and not mention race and slavery? It happens, but for the games to not have a single character, not one, anywhere to make those super-obvious links is an exclusion of a certain perspective. They could have included black perspectives in many different ways, I'm just suggesting one way this could have been done. It's certainly not the only one.

Why does everything have to be about race these days? I mean how would Fallout or any other game be improved by forcing comments and references to slavery of black people into our proverbial throat.
Not to mention the fact that whites were slaves to in various nation. Not based on race but still they were slaves. Also why do whites get all the blame?

Slavery is international phenomena and african countries had legal slavery well into 20th century. In Mauretania you could own slaves in 2006!!
When do people stop blaming whites for what was issue in most of the world.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was very different in quality and quantity from slavery throughout most of world history. It also created a slave society, which is distinct from a society with slavery. It created a system of racial discrimination that still has a significant impact on today's societies. It displaced millions of black Africans.

Also as @Hassknecht notes, it's not about blaming anyone. It's about acknowledging world history, the impact that history has and has had, about understanding the way in which all of this works.


@naossano: Racism goes much, much deeper than just fear or dislike of strangers. You're absolutely correct that there's a lot to it and there are many different aspects, which is what I was getting at.

 

[SuAside]

*snip*

When making a game, you constantly make abstractions and remove real life things. You cannot add it all. In Fallout they chose to largely remove -human- racial tensions and focus on Ghoul & supermutant tensions, as well as the "tribes" in FO2. It doesn't need lots of effort to give in to the suspension of disbelief of "when you're stuck in a post apoc world, you might have bigger issues than skin color", unless the groups are very different and seggregated (think asians in San Fran).
But they made hundreds of such simplifications and abstractions in the game. They also removed the need for keeping track of your own food supplies etc. They chose to show communities as being smaller than what they actually represented. Those are choices game devs make, you simply can't make a game overly complex or large.

People laud FO2 for allowing homosexual marriage. For me, the fact you can have gay marriage means nothing to me. What's fun about that whole thing is that it's a shotgun wedding you can get forced into.

To talk about race, gender, and so on in a consistent & meaningful way throughout a game requires a lot of focus on this. Focus arguably better spent at making gameplay worthwhile or evolving the story. It's rather meaningless to have a blurt out of nowhere about black slavery by someone in Vault City if nothing is done with it further.

It's a question of trade offs and priorities. If you invest too much time in one thing, you won't be able to do other stuff.

Are racial & gender issues relevant to the FO games? In my eyes, not a must in any game. I mean, it would be a nice to have to explore further in a post-apoc setting, but so would dozens of other real world issues. I'd rather that the devs make a selection of things they want to explore and ignore the rest.

 

[Gsonderling]

Slavery is international phenomena and african countries had legal slavery well into 20th century. In Mauretania you could own slaves in 2006!!
When do people stop blaming whites for what was issue in most of the world.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was very different in quality and quantity from slavery throughout most of world history. It also created a slave society, which is distinct from a society with slavery. It created a system of racial discrimination that still has a significant impact on today's societies. It displaced millions of black Africans.
[/QUOTE]

There is no difference between society practicing slavery and slave society. Slavery in Muslim world or in Asia had same features as slavery in America. When author talks about:

What do we mean when we use that phrase 'slave society'? Essentially, it means any society where slave labor -- where the definition of labor, where the definition of the relationship between ownership and labor -- is defined by slavery. By a cradle to grave -- and some would've even said a cradle to grave and beyond -- human bondage. Where slavery affected everything about society. Where whites and blacks, in this case -- in America in a racialized slavery system -- grew up, were socialized by, married, reared children, worked, invested in, and conceived of the idea of property, and honed their most basic habits and values under the influence of a system that said it was just to own people as property.

This is exactly what slavery everywhere was about. This is not strictly European invention or American one. And my point still stands slavery was practiced in Africa century after it was abolished in America and on increadible scale.

It should also interest you who sold the slaves into America. Pilgrims didn't raid Africa for slaves. Most slaves were sold to America by locals (Africans).

As for number of slaves Brittanica has this to say:

notable Islamic slave society was that of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in sub-Saharan Africa (northern Nigeria and Cameroon) in the 19th century. At least half the population was enslaved. That was only the most notable of the Fulani jihad states of the western and central Sudan, where between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population consisted of slaves. In Islamic Ghana, between 1076 and 1600, about a third of the population were slaves. The same was true among other early states of the western Sudan, including Mali (1200–1500), Segou (1720–1861), and Songhai (1464–1720). It should be noted that slavery was prominent in Ghana and Mali, and presumably elsewhere in Africa in areas for which information is not available, long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The population of the notorious slave-trading state of the central Sudan, Ouidah (Whydah), was half-slave in the 19th century. It was about a third in Kanem (1600–1800) and perhaps 40 percent in Bornu (1580–1890). Most slaves probably were acquired by raiding neighbouring peoples, but others entered slavery because of criminal convictions or defaulting on debts (often not their own); subsequently, many of those people were sold into the international slave trade. After the limiting and then abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, a number of these African societies put slaves to work in activities such as mining gold and raising peanuts, coconuts (palm oil), sesame, and millet for the market.

If we want to acknowledge the world history we need to acknowledge that whites were not only slavers. In fact your view is Euro and Amero-centric. The entire world had slavery for most of it's history and others should apologize too not just americans who were extremely progressive when it came to abolition compared to Asian and African countries.

 

[naossano]

*snip*

In Fallout they chose to largely remove -human- racial tensions and focus on Ghoul & supermutant tensions, as well as the "tribes" in FO2.

Not only that but also Enclave agains't mutation, Vault City agains't anything beyond their walls (except some other vault dwellers). The racism is there. Just need to look the big picture. Beside that, it creates cause. It doesn't bring it out of the blue, which wouldn't make any sense.

 

[SuAside]

In Fallout they chose to largely remove -human- racial tensions and focus on Ghoul & supermutant tensions, as well as the "tribes" in FO2.

Not only that but also Enclave agains't mutation, Vault City agains't anything beyond their walls (except some other vault dwellers). The racism is there. Just need to look the big picture. Beside that, it creates cause. It doesn't bring it out of the blue, which wouldn't make any sense.

I wouldn't call the Enclave or VC racist, since it has nothing do do with race. It has to do with purity & heritage. Obviously closely related to racism, but not quite it.

 

[Sander]

@SuAside: Yes, it's a defensible choice the developers made and the Fallout games are still very strong games. Obviously. I wouldn't have been an Admin here for 10 years if I didn't think that was the case. The problem isn't necessarily with Fallout, although I do think it's very questionable to remove any reference to race anywhere in a game that actually deals with a lot of those themes. The problem is that this happen in almost every game, not just Fallout. You can shrug and go "Hey I'll just play another game that deals with this subject"...except you can't.

Also, I wasn't asking for the game to talk about race and gender "in a consistent & meaningful way throughout a game". I was asking for the game not to erase a significant part of American history that is very relevant to its setting and history, and a part of American history that is often erased in games. Small nods and background acknowledgements do matter, because that's how a complete view of any world is ultimately built. It's fine if the games are set in a world where racism has disappeared, but that history should still be acknowledged.

@Gsonderling: The way the 'Western' world implemented a racially divisive, extremely strict slave society is very different from the way the Sokoto caliphate implemented slavery, or the function of pawnship in Igbo societies, or the way the Yoruba built their societies around slavery. Those forms of slavery were much more ethnically inclusive (which means no form of racial supremacy built on slavery in those societies), the state of slavery for an individual tended to be temporary rather than permanent, much closer to one of many forms of labor exchange, and the demands on and rights of slaves tended to be more humane -- exactly because the state of being a slave was temporary. Paul Lovejoy has written a ton on the Sokoto caliphate, if you want more in-depth coverage of one form of West-African slavery. David Blight, as linked above, has also talked about the unique way in which the Southern slave society worked. We could also talk about the disparate impact that the Atlantic slave trade had on the world compared to every other instance of societies with slavery, but that's getting waaaaay off topic.

It's also a bit odd that you barge into a conversation that didn't demand any apologies, that didn't blame anyone for slavery, only to say that we shouldn't do such things.

But, most importantly, none of this ultimately matters. 'We' (as in: the 'Western' world) ran a system of slavery that, for centuries, murdered, violated and exploited people on an unprecedented scale. This system of slavery combined with colonial exploitation and domination to produce a system of racial discrimination that has wreaked incredible havoc around the world. And both of those things have had a massive impact on nearly every society in the world today. This was and continues to be wrong, regardless of whatever else other people did or didn't do.

 

[naossano]

In Fallout they chose to largely remove -human- racial tensions and focus on Ghoul & supermutant tensions, as well as the "tribes" in FO2.

Not only that but also Enclave agains't mutation, Vault City agains't anything beyond their walls (except some other vault dwellers). The racism is there. Just need to look the big picture. Beside that, it creates cause. It doesn't bring it out of the blue, which wouldn't make any sense.

I wouldn't call the Enclave or VC racist, since it has nothing do do with race. It has to do with purity & heritage. Obviously closely related to racism, but not quite it.

Race is a matter of people who believe in it. For anti-racism organizations, there is no such thing as races in humanity. I would say it is even worse than racism as Enclave don't even consider "mutants" (everyone who suffered radiations) as no longer humans.

 

[Gsonderling]

I talked about blame because white people get blame despite many decades, societal changes between today and last time white people owned slaves. As for western slavery wrecking the world, this is exactly what Im talking about, western slavery hardly wrecked the world and for you information, eastern and southern Europe was wrecked by mongol, ottoman and crimean slave trade for many centuries. Even in american south slaves were sometimes freed and some became slave owners themselves so the whole racial element was not as hot as many think it was.

As for scale I doubt that matters, being slave sucks wheather there are milions or thousands of you.

The fallout games wouldn't be improved by references to things that happen several centuries ago. I don't talk about 1700s I see no reason the slavers should discuss slavery in 1800 america. It breaks immersion and I think it would decrease quality of the games substantialy. If you had that you could also have people in Arroyo talking about Trail of tears or people in Gecko talking about Chernobyl disaster. It makes NO sense for people in post apocalyptic wasteland discuss and reference these things because their world already sucks much more and frankly not even we talk about these things a lot or at all.