Fallout 2 - 9/20 hours

I made a mistake. Over the weekend, I played a different game, Saints Row: Gat Outta Hell. I don't regret it, it was kind of awesome, but that does mean that I lost contact with the central thread of urgency that is so vital to the experience of any open world game.

When you're knee-deep in this rpg stuff, it seems like it matters. I have to follow Laddie the dog so he can lead me to the missing Johnny (who was, by the way, not down a well, despite what the cliche would have you believe). And Cornelius will be so disappointed if I don't retrieve his gold pocket watch by blowing up an outhouse. And, of course, the village of Arroyo needs the G.E.C.K. (so much so that the shaman has contacted me via the astral plane - which feels genre-breaking to me, but whatever, without that message, you could easily be under the impression that you had all the time in the world).

It's an illusion that all the great games are able to pull off to one degree or another, and an excellent way to devour time one "minor" sidequest at a time. However, it is somewhat fragile. If your brain gets diverted into another track, it's possible that you may come to see the artifice that underlies the game's presentation - why, the complex and often acrimonious politics of Vault City are really just an excuse to run between the same two locations a half dozen times.

And when you get to that level of abstraction, you have to take a step back, otherwise you start convincing yourself that Tetris is the only game worth playing because nothing else is quite so pure, and that sort of thinking doesn't lead anywhere good.

Fallout 2 is more than just a game, it is a story. Sure, from a purely plot perspective, that story doesn't a whole lot of sense - a village sends its brightest scion out into the post apocalyptic wasteland to find a technological relic, and then that chosen one spends weeks killing wild dogs, reconciling a father with his daughter, and otherwise running miscellaneous errands for people, sometimes in the hope of finding information, but mostly just because people give vague promises of reward (like, I'm sure finding that kid's doll in the slums of Vault City was a profitable use of my time) - but I don't think plot is quite so important when it comes to video game storytelling.

Much has been made of games' place in contemporary culture. Debate has raged over whether they can be considered art. And much of that debate focuses on the medium's intrinsic storytelling weaknesses - in particular the huge disconnect that often lies between a game's ostensible plot and the emergent story that arises out of actually playing the game. Usually, this weakness is brought up in the context of violence (your character is supposed to be a war-weary veteran or idealistic reporter or something, but always winds up killing enough people to be ranked as one of history's greatest mass murderers), but Fallout 2 is an example of the same problem from a different angle. Story-wise, you're supposed to be driven relentlessly forward, but the gameplay is most rewarding when you move off the beaten path and just randomly explore (seriously, without the internet to tell you where things are, the only way to solve some of these quests is through brute force scouring the map).

However, I honestly think too much is made of this weakness. Every medium has its strengths. Nothing is ever going to be as good as the psychological novel when it comes to exploring the nuance of a single character, but the novel can't do visual spectacle or fast-paced plot nearly as well as movies can. For all their other storytelling weaknesses, I think games excel above all other mediums when it comes to the creation of setting. Nothing else is quite so good at taking you out of your ordinary life and putting you into a new situation, at transporting you to a new time and place, and getting you to think in terms of this new world instead of your own.

Fallout 2 is not quite as good at this as Fallout: New Vegas, but it's still pretty great. When you stroll into Vault City, you can feel the texture of the place. The contrast between the dirty scrapped together sheds of the outer slums and the neat and pretty houses of the city proper, contrasted still further with the severe and high-tech industrial look of the vault door that juts out of the side of the nearby mountain - nothing much needs to be said about the history or the future of this place in order to get the point across. You can practically feel the privilege of the residents, the desperation of the squatters, and the mad, brilliant hubris of the ancients just by looking at the scenery.

And unlike a painting or a movie, you are not just a passive witness to some other person's amazing set design. If you want to take a peek into this building or see what's going on with that extra, you can. Granted, due to technological limitations, there usually isn't much depth there, but that doesn't do much to diminish the magic. Even with your highly constrained autonomy, there is a certain amount of automatic buy-in. You decide where to go. You can make decisions that ultimately affect these communities. You can talk to, steal from, and/or kill every one of these characters. You are a part of this world.

Which kind of makes the game's hidden deadline a double bummer. Having bypassed Lynette, the xenophobic head councilor of Vault City in order to broker a deal between her second in command and the newly repaired (thanks to yours truly) power plant of the ghoul city of Gecko (which features a welcome cameo from Harold, a minor, but memorable npc from the first game), I now have information that points me to Vault 15 (an important location in the first game), and possibly a G.E.C.K. Which is great, but unfortunately there are two cities - Redding and New Reno - between me and my destination. I am now put in an awkward position regarding the game's plot. I could easily bypass both, seeing as how they are completely irrelevant to my ostensible quest, but if I do, I will have no reason at all to go back. Do I explore for the sake of exploration or do I roleplay as my character?

This is the sort of choice that keeps Fallout 2 from reaching perfection.