Road To Anywhere - Nice Guys Finish Last

Welcome to the latest edition of Road To Anywhere: The weekly blog post about anything but movies! This week, Gabe waxes rhapsodic about life after the end of the world.

NICE GUYS FINISH LAST

There’s something about post-apocalyptic life on Earth that calls to me. I don’t know what it is; the scavenging for food and supplies with which to scrape out a meager existence; the constant state of alert one must maintain so as not to be taken unawares by ravening scumbags; the chance to shine as a beacon of hope in a land darkened by misery and greed; or maybe it’s just the knowledge that my propensity for hoarding bottlecaps could make me a very, very wealthy man.

As is obvious to anybody who enjoys video games, I’ve been playing (or, rather, replaying) a lot of Fallout 3 lately. The game had been safely stowed in my trusty old-game egg crate for the past couple of years – every since my Playstation CPU got fried and all my saves got wiped during the repair – but as I said before, I just can’t seem to resist the siren song of the wasteland.

There are many different ways to play Fallout 3, and I know most gamers don’t have this problem, but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t bring myself to play as a bad guy. I steal anything and everything whenever I can (this is in the game, mind you – not in real life), I always choose the sarcastic or aggressive dialogue options, and I never once felt bad about taking a reward for my efforts, but even with all that I can’t get my “karma” level below “Very Good”. I guess it all comes down to the fact that – even though I know it’s only a video game – I just can’t bring myself to kill someone unless they really deserve it.

The truth is, I wouldn’t even be able to steal stuff within the game if I didn’t employ a complicated logical process to justify it to myself. The process goes something like this: Even though, according to the rules of the game, that object “belongs to” such-and-such character within the game world, and even though – again, according to the game rules – it is considered a “bad act”, the character I'm stealing it from will never actually use that object, and in fact will never even notice that the object is missing unless they catch me stealing it, so in a very real sense – since the entire universe of this game revolves around my character – for me to take the object and for it to aid me on my quest not only doesn’t hurt the character I’m taking it from, but ultimately contributes to the overarching goal of the game universe, which is for my character to succeed!

So I steal it.

But I can’t kill people. Or, rather, I can’t kill people unless they’re actively working to make the world of Fallout 3 a worse place. Raiders I can kill, guilt-free. Supermutants kidnapping people to eat or dump into vats of mutagenic toxic-waste in order to swell their beastly ranks I can slaughter by the hundreds and not lose a minute of sleep. Slavers? Please. But no matter how I steel myself, no matter how much I tell myself it’s just a game, I can’t bring myself to draw down on an NPC who doesn’t pose a threat to me, or at least to some other (presumedly) innocent bystander.

So I guess I’ll never get the “Harbinger of War” trophy, or even the “Paradigm of Humanity” trophy (which one attains by reaching level 20 with “neutral karma”). Evil and (as it requires a roughly equal Evil to Good ratio) neutrality will always lie beyond my grasp. I suppose I’m cursed to be the Last, Best Hope of Humanity.

I can live with that.

-GABE


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