Show me the money, baby
Senator McCaskill asks a series of very important questions:
Indignant Desert Birds
Class Warfare and Video Games
Senator McCaskill asks a series of very important questions:
War. War never changes. Those are the first spoken words in all of the canonical Fallout games. Which is a bit odd seeming. The war is over. The nuclear apocalypse came and went, taking humanity down to the basic survival level– in many cases below it. Even in the story presented by the narrator, the war for the Hoover dam ended about 4 years previously.
The government was– all governments were– smashed to atomic rubble. In the absence of government, Hobbes tells us that we are left with “A war of all against all”. There are those who take this as a good thing, and those who take this as a warning. The inevitable, bloody war between those philosophies is the focus of the Fallout games.
As alluded to in the introduction cutscene above, your character is a courier. You’re not sure what you were carrying, nor it’s importance, nor why you were shot for possessing it. The main quest of the game is trying to track down the person who stole it from you, though your motivations for this are entirely dependent upon what sort of character you wish to play.
One of the interesting things the game does mechanically is to give players a reputation ranking with various factions. Do nice things for a town, and that town will like you. If the New California Republic (NCR) sees you as an ally, they will give you a radio with which you can call for help. When the NCR representative told my character “you are not alone out here”, I was moved; the Mojave Wilderness is a lonely place. Alternately, if you go on a killing spree, your reputation will greatly diminish and factions will be ordered to shoot on sight.
One way or another, a player will choose a faction. The game pushes players towards the democratic New California Republic. If you don’t like the NCR, but want to go the “good” rout, the humanistic Followers of the Apocalypse offer another alternative. Players who want to be rewarded for slaughter, yet align with a government can play nice with Caesar’s Legion– an organization which sees physical dominance as the just reward of the strong over the weak. And anyone who wishes to devolve into simple thuggery makes a de facto declaration that they are a raider.
It’s an interesting way of meshing game mechanics with an overarching philosophy. As a player, I only spend a small fraction of my time thinking about this in mechanical terms. As I gaze into the wilderness, seeing people with problems that need solving, I ask myself what kind of world I want to build. This has lead me to siding with the New California Republic. They’re doing their best to create an orderly society– but one grounded in some principles of justice and self determination. They can be a bit heavy handed and tone deaf, but where the NCR has control, people are free to live lives, trade, and be fear from slavery.
Naturally, because I side with the NCR, I’ve been trying to clean up their mess with the escaped convicts known as the “Powder Gangers”. My policy is simple: shoot on sight.
After seeing Powder Gangers storm into several towns, killing the innocent, I decided to get more proactive. My friend Boone and I wandered into their base and started shooting. Some of them tried to flee, but we chased them down and coldly murdered them where they hid. We were methodical, we were quick, we were merciless. Every last one of them died at our hands.
As I started looting their hovels, the game informed me that I had lost Karma. As the blood-fury left me and I finally looked around at the bodies of those I’d slaughtered, the full gravity of what I had done hit me.
How was I any different than them? For all my vaunted morality, for every notion of fair play, for all that I wanted to build up a society… I walked into these people’s homes and destroyed their society. I offered not peace, but the gun.
Is that all I am? Am I just a bulldozer hoping that someone will come along behind me to build a better future after I knock down the rotted old infrastructure? Must I become a monster in order to protect people from evil?
I’ve got dozens of hours left to go in this game; I don’t have answers. I do know that I won’t consider this game over until I get an answer to those questions that I like. War never changes, but I cannot believe that the memes that push us towards armed conflict are the strongest ones.
So…
The Israelis are terrified that the Arab world wants to “drive the Jews into the sea”. Inflaming their fears is the fact that the above quote is real.
The Palestinians are terrified that the Israelis want to slaughter them all and steal their land. Their fears are inflamed by the fact that, well, they used to own all of what is now Israel, parts of what are now Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Naturally, there is going to be tension. The awful, tragic, asinine, terrible thing is that since both sides are terrified of extinction, leaders cannot gain prominence unless they are willing to spill blood. A failure to respond in kind to the “aggression” of the “other side” is an unacceptable weakness.
And so within a few weeks we’ll see a ceasefire. And 6 months or a year from now, the whole sorry cycle will start up again. Where are the underlying conflicts, and how can they be solved? Until we answer those questions– until one side understands why the other side is terrified– we’re going to keep seeing death.
Bah. Happy Friday, everyone.
Simple law of averages suggests that a few of the people currently withering in Gitmo are innocent of all but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now that we’re allowing them trials, they should be found “not guilty”, and presumably sent back where they came from.
How many of those people are going to go Rambo style and start looking for vengeance? Fear of that sort of retribution is certainly not a bad argument for indefinite detention.
In the book “World war Z”, Max Brooks has the US come up with the “resource to kill ratio”; basically “how much of what resources do you need to kill one zombie?” In this world, the Airforce was basically grounded.
Obviously, in the real world you don’t have targets and enemies with nearly the sameness as zombies. How many infantry soldiers, exactly, are worth a tank? Yet there is much to the idea that we should have a military capable of carrying out the missions we assign them, yet scaled so that we can afford other national priories.
Towards that end, I have been reading a good many stories recently about the nature of the Air Force’s mission, specifically calling into question its raison d’etre as an independent branch of the military. here is a good one, it almost has me convinced: if we fold the Air Force into the Navy and Army, how much more effective might our military be?
I do kind of wish it went without saying that the War in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. Even if the country turns into the Eden which the Christian Bible hints might once has been there, the cost in lives and money will have been too high. Where America was once seen as a fearsome, slumbering colossus; our blundering about the middle east has caused actual fear among the nations of the world. Where once we were the good guys, the fact that we employ torture, indefinite detention, secret tribunals, and are moving toward permanent occupation of a nation that wants us gone.
Perhaps most damning, we stand in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Our country is being run by criminals who are demonstrably guilty of the same crime for which we tried, convicted, and hung many of the people who stood at Nuremberg.
But there will never be a trial.
This post started out light-hearted. Have a funny chart:
more graph humor and song chart memes