Fallout 3: The Wasteland of Forking Paths

Bethesda’s Fallout 3 provides an experience different from many other role-playing games. It gives the player the ability to create their own path through its world without a pressing main quest.

In Borges’ short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the author describes a book that attempts to contain the infinite labyrinth of possible realities. The book, which the story is named for, is explained: “In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others . . . [but in this one] the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, ’several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.” The ever forking potential paths through life suggest realities closely nestled beside our personal experience—the possibilities we’ve left behind are lost to us, but still exist. Fallout 3 attempts a simulacra of the labyrinth on a smaller, interactive scale, allowing players to experiment with these paths without the true fear of lost potential—in a world that doesn’t pressure a character down a pre-determined path with only the illusion of choice.

In games like Mass Effect and Bioshock, as well as traditional Japanese role-playing games, players are confronted with choices that appear to define their character, but the choices are an illusion. If the characters could look in a mirror, another of Borges’ favorite symbols, they would expect to see themselves altered by their choices, but they would not. Fallout 3 does not provide a revolutionary leap in the potential of role-playing, but the way the narrative is structured removes responsibility from the player regarding the central quest. This allows the player to pick a path for their character that truly forks, though each character’s story may not end with credits.

The central narrative thread in the game beings with the character’s abandonment by his or her father. Though this narrative expands fairly late in the story arc, the player is free to rebel against the father’s abandonment and explore their own self-created story.

Does Fallout 3 create truly developed choice? No, of course not. After all, even Borges’ fictional book mapping the labyrinth wasn’t able to capture the intricacies of infinite reality. The game does, however, succeed in creating a world where the player’s choices have an impact on the interactive space that confines the character’s development. Early in the game, or more appropriately, close to the player’s starting point, the player has an array of choices to make regarding the town of Megaton.

The town is built around an undetonated nuclear warhead that defines the town and also serves as a sort of metaphor about Fallout’s gameplay—the ever present threat of danger. The player, through the role he or she plays, can choose many paths: detonate the bomb, disarm the bomb, ignore the town completely, use the town for its potential and then destroy it. The impact of these choices results in the loss of playable space for the player, but also, the destruction of people in a world that has already seen so much loss. These choices may have been unbearable in real life, but the player does not destroy the potential of another choice for themselves, only for the character they play. And truthfully not even the character, since loading a saved game permits the character to make another.

The idea of choices in a role-playing game, their weight and their ability to fool the player into believing the loss of potential is interesting. The ability to experience all possible paths is the great strength and pleasure of role-playing games, but without the significance of choice, the genre would be meaningless.

Fallout 3 gives weight to player choice using loss and benefit. Choices will always gain the player something, whether experience points, wealth, or a more subtle in-game benefit (like finding a certain Stradivarius), but also a corresponding loss, if only the loss of another choice. Since the game doesn’t weight the choices from the start by placing the character on a world-saving quest, the player feels the freedom to truly explore the gameworld, making choices based on the role they want to play.