I could make you care!

Care.

Game developers want to make you care.

They want you to feel a connection with the world and the characters in it, so that you’ll feel that you are part of the world they have created.

They suck at this.

Whether it is because of laziness or just gross incompetence can be debated, but what is evident is that developers tend to display an impressive lack of knowledge of what makes us care. As is my way, I shall be tearing down a game that perfectly exemplifies this. My victim tonight? Fallout 4!

Mind you, I regard Fallout 4 as one of the best games in the world. This is not a (conscious) attempt at trashing the game, it’s just a case of it having the most egregious example of this nonsense I could think of.

They use a baby. It’s that cheap. At the start, you tickle the baby, your spouse dies when the baby is kidnapped, and you spend most of the game looking for the baby. But there is no reason whatsoever to care. I understand what Bethesda are trying to do here; they can’t be bothered to get into what makes people tick, so they intend to hitch a ride on the human instinct to protect infants. It doesn’t work, and here’s why.

Firstly, the so called “baby” looks like a creepy loaf of play-dough. What you have to realize about the automatic human affection for infants is that it actually requires an infant, and that abomination certainly isn’t it. There’s always the issue of the uncanny valley when depicting humans in media, and infants aren’t easier in this regard, they are more difficult! We regard them as more adorable and lovely, but that only makes it worse when they’re all wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that movies and games that want to scare you always tend to contain demonic or zombified children. Letting us see that useless piece of clay won’t endear us to it in any way.

Secondly, they let the next step rely completely on the first one. In it, your spouse, a person you’ve interacted with for all of 58 seconds, is shot and your play-dough “baby” is stolen. It’s inevitable; since nr. 1 fails, nr. 2 goes down the drain, as it well might. We walk through the game with the character constantly whining about how he/she is searching for their child. But you don’t actually do much to find him. Fallout 4 is just a terrible environment for this particular type of story. “Woe is me, my son is lost, I need to find him! But first, I’m off to find some paint for the inside wall of Diamond city.”. In open-world games, the developers tend to tailor the game to that setting; you might run around gathering allies for a war or trying to find clues to ancient mysteries. These stories allow for you to go around doing various tasks, meeting people, uncovering secrets. But it doesn’t allow for hurriedly searching for your infant son!

But number 3 is the one that shows up to completely kneecap the whole thing. It’s when you get to the Institute and find out that your son was actually abducted some 60 years ago, and is now an aging man. Add to that the fact that said aging man is dying from cancer and wants you to succeed him as the head of the organization that kidnapped him from the beginning. There’s a lot to unpack here. You’re suddenly face to face with someone who is your son but is a complete stranger who has no actual connection to the infant you were looking for. How is a human being supposed to feel an emotional bond with this old man you’ve never met before? Fact of the matter is, the Shaun you were looking for, the infant who was kidnapped and needed to be saved, hasn’t existed for many years. Instead you’re faced with the leader of the faction that has clear as day been presented as the bad guys thus far in the game.

Bethesda are just so comically bad at this. First they try to pluck your heart strings with the cheap trick of using a “baby”, then they drop that in favour of ordering you to care about an old man in charge of the evil faction! You’ve been trying to find and rescue him from his kidnappers, all the while he was sitting pretty in the Institute, grateful to his kidnappers for having “rescued” him, as he puts it. Okay, so the main character was robbed of experiencing their only child’s whole lifetime, but the Institute were nice to his son, so there’s no need for the main character to be upset.

“Ah”, you comment, forgetting that I’ve told you to shut up numerous times, “I see you’re upset, doesn’t that mean you care?”

I’m not upset at the Institute, or Shaun for that matter. I’m pissed at Bethesda for creating a story that is absolute bullshit, especially in this type of game. It’s like it’s carefully tailored to make us give no shit whatsoever about the main story. Heck, the Institute, their methods, and their goals are nuanced and interesting. The dynamics between the different factions and what they want to achieve is complex and doesn’t just make it a clear-cut “good or bad” plot.

Oh, you think it works as a sort of depressing revelation? Come on, this is Fallout; the series where there’s a vault entirely populated by clones of a guy named Gary, all capable only of attacking you and screaming “GAAAAAARRRRYYYY!”. This isn’t some Greek tragedy, it’s too silly for that. There’s a time and place for such a story. Fallout ain’t it.

In the end, there just isn’t a single reason to give half a fuck about the Shaun-angle. It’s pointless. The game could not only make do without it, the game would actually be a lot better without it.

Don’t try to fuck up my favourite game, Bethesda.