chapter 8

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, ‘THE SECOND COMING’

War… War Never Changes

NARRATOR, FALLOUT

The award-winning Fallout DRPG series casts the player into a post-apocalyptic future filled with mutants, bandits, destruction, and decay. Released in 1997, Fallout: A Post Nuclear Roleplaying Game (Interplay 1997) spawned a series of sequels: Fallout 2 (Interplay 1998), Fallout 3 (Bethesda 2008), and Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda 2010)². The Fallout series of games seem to be inspired from an earlier game, entitled Wasteland (Electronic Arts 1987) (Barton 2007), rekindling Wasteland’s journey of survival and salvation in the remains of civilization after nuclear war. Although Wasteland is not considered to be part of the Fallout series, many of the narrative elements are similar, allowing for it to be read as part of a series that actually originated ten years before the first Fallout game arose. These underlying narrative elements can be seen to engage multiple generations of gamers with the structure of the post-apocalyptic DRPG. Borrowing heavily from 1960s’ nuclear scare propaganda, as well as many of the thematic elements from Wasteland, Fallout (especially Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas) brings these elements together in a kind of ‘future past’ – a temporal dislocation that is both a future beyond our time, and also a nostalgic throwback to a time which many players never experienced outside of other narratives. As seen in Figure 8.1, this strange conglomeration of temporal characteristics creates a landscape that is both familiar and alien at the same time; the wasteland remains an uncanny environment that is both future and past.

Figure 8.1 The Landscape of Washington DC is both familiar and impossibly marred by catastrophe (Bethesda 2008).

Like most DRPGs, both the Fallout series and Wasteland place the player in control of avatars that, while not always apparent to the player at the beginning of the game, are key to the preservation of the human race (or at least fighting off some element that promises imminent dystopia). A few of the Fallout series even refer to the main character as the ‘Chosen One’. A common thread among these post-apocalyptic RPGs is that all of them take place in an environment apparently ravaged by a massive, world-changing, cataclysmic nuclear war in which the future relies upon the avatar(s) the player controls; put simply, the gameworld depends on the player’s actions.

On the surface, the post-apocalyptic journey is one of survival in a temporally ‘post’-cataclysmic environment. Whether it is a brutal human, a vicious creature, or the hostile environment, at every turn something attempts to end the avatar’s existence. These games are violent by design in more ways than one, often placing the avatar in situations where they must not only kill, but also make decisions that pit the lives of different groups impossibly against each other. However, these games engage survival and cataclysm only on the surface, and remaining mired in a shallow reading of a rich and complex environment risks missing the underlying structures that compose the post-apocalyptic journey. There is a subtler journey that must begin beforehand for any narrative of human survival to commence: the journey of the player. The journey is not one of desert raiders, of sentient computers, or of nuclear holocaust, but the communicative subject in dialogue with herself. In the immersive and expansive post-apocalyptic gameworld, the communicative subject must engage herself in playing the game. This essay illustrates how, through these games, the player does not just face the aftermath of war, but also a process of communication where the player engages herself in a post-apocalyptic structure. This engagement is primarily one of communication, and therefore the ‘game’ becomes not one of entertainment but the space of communication. Rather than the commonplace thinking of communication as the exchange of messages, I would like to emphasize the original flavor of the concept, from the Latin communicare: sharing, as sharing implies a distance. If the journey is not one of sharing, then there would be no journey at all – nothing could be engaged. Something must be shared, whether it is the player and the game, the player and the avatar, or something else entirely. There must be something that brings the two together for a journey to take place at all. However, as with all journeys, there must always be something dividing the two – there must be space for movement. This essay will illustrate, through reconsidering the common-sense terms implied in the ‘post-apocalyptic RPG’, how the structure of the game refuses the ‘end times’ and instead makes space for the possibility of communication.

Apocalypse Where?

The apocalypse is big business these days. Millions of dollars are spent on various media every year³. Television shows, films, and videogames offering representations of post-apocalyptic existence are more popular than ever before. However, the common-sense consideration of post-apocalypse still relies both on the understanding of apocalypse through the Christian-vernacular ‘end times’ and the temporal consideration of post as ‘after’ an event. Although Fallout and Wasteland seem to mime these understandings, both of these terms remain less helpful when reconsidering the significance of the post-apocalyptic tale. It is useful to identify that the apocalypse does not simply imply ‘the end’, of course, but, as Derrida reminds us, revelation. From the Greek apokálypsis, to uncover or reveal, ‘apocalypse means revelation, of truth, un-veiling’ (Derrida 1984, 24), a final destruction, a final revelation. There is no locating a history past this point, as all of history has been foreclosed upon. The truth must be absolute and total, or, as Derrida continues, ‘no truth, no apocalypse’. However, what Derrida plainly states remains surprisingly complex (as most Derridian statements often are). Apocalypse refers to totality, and therefore revelation, truth, and unveiling of apocalypse all refer to totalities. These totalities are transcendental, not just a simple reading of words, but complete knowledge. Without bounds, totality renders mute any movement outside of ‘Truth’. Apocalypse therefore must remain impossible against the horizon of history (insofar as the absolute unveiling ends all understanding, all history, and therefore all potentiality), as its very existence wipes out all other possibilities – all history, all time. However, the reverse is also true: the impossibility of apocalypse, of revelation, is that which is the foundation for which knowledge and history are possible – the impossibility of the totality of unveiling allows for an infinite horizon to unfold. Playing in a post-apocalyptic environment, in a projected atemporality, refuses the ‘end’ its due, and opens up possibility for play itself.

This is not simply a pedantic move to obfuscate the notion of apocalypse, but to make clear that simply playing a game that takes place after a so-called apocalypse is, in fact, not by itself apocalyptic. There is, as Derrida clearly states, ‘no apocalypse’ (1984, 24). Not that a disaster did not happen, that billions of virtual lives might have been lost or turned into ghouls, super mutants, or taken refuge in a town built around an undetonated nuclear bomb, but that revelation is not complete. The unveiling is only yet in process. Yet in the face of apocalypse, immersed within a world shaped by a cataclysmic event, the player gains a perspective with what has begun to have been revealed – terrible things have happened, and the player inhabits a ‘time’ that carries these facts, whatever they may be, or whatever ‘truths’ they may lead toward.

As for the consideration of post, the post-apocalypse therefore cannot be simply temporal. The joining of ‘post’ to ‘apocalypse’ through the simple use of a hyphen, as in the post-apocalyptic tales of Fallout, can not be seen as after the apocalypse, as temporally nothing remains after an event that reveals fully. Rather than referring to the root of the prefix meaning ‘after’, thinking of ‘post’ as the Latin positum, the etymological root for the ‘post’ in ‘the postal system’ refers to placing something spatially, rather than temporally. As spatial, the post becomes a place for movement: spatial displacement, rather than temporal displacement. The post-apocalyptic adventure is that which places the subject – in this case the player – at a distance from the fulfillment of apocalypse, of revelation, and of truth, and allows for perspective. In this manner we can never actually be apocalyptic, only post. When the player approaches the apocalypse as post (already in a virtual temporal projection from their current situation), she is not approaching it simply as after an event, then, of revelation of that event, but instead she is simply approaching revelation, allowing for the possibility of revelation to come. This is a key distinction between an apocalypse and a post-apocalypse – the former remains impossible to speak of after, while the latter simply makes space for the impossibility to be in arrival. It can never arrive fully, yet its very position – that of the messianic, of the not-arrived, of the always-in-arrival – allows for play, for movement of truth, so that it is always unveiling. Rather than signifying the prefix meaning ‘after’, the semantic move of the ‘post’ hyphenation can simply represent the signification of spatial placing outside the term joined: the very possibility for the term to be understood (a place for perspective). The post-apocalypse then can be seen as nothing but the ability for revelation to actively reveal itself, for it to be seen.

Think of it this way: if revelation is ever fulfilled, if it ever is complete, then there would be nothing to unveil, nothing to learn and no truth left. The abundance, the totality, of truth is also its opposite: the end, the totalization of all understanding. Insofar as there is ever time, that there is a witness to time, there is history – therefore no apocalypse. The post collapses under the weight of totality – senders and receivers are rendered mute, as understanding (the very goal of communication) can no longer take place. However, in the spatially post-apocalyptic tale, the horizon remains open and unfolds for the possibility of understanding, the possibility of play. The post emerges as a node, a spatial place of location that heralds the emergence of revelation, giving space for growth, and therefore space to communicate.

Postal Communication

At least in part due to Shannon and Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon and Weaver 1949), the persistent manner (at least among the general public) of thinking about communication relies on what is often referred to as the ‘sender receiver’ model. Originally theorized for understanding telecommunication transmissions, this model considers messages between a sender and receiver, often with some notion of noise source in between. This is, of course, most often applied to a communicative system with more than one human involved. On a basic level, this model approaches communication as that which happens between two or more independent systems, the systems interacting with other systems by transmitting and receiving messages. These systems either ‘understand’ each other or, due to some noise within the process of transmission, mis-understand each other. Whatever the outcome, the two systems remain in direct contact with each other. This model presupposes something directly shared, like a Venn diagram with two circles overlapping. This something might have noise interjected within, which accounts for mis-understanding, but the de facto standard for this model is that the intended message is always shared. This thinking is, of course, over a half century old, and communication scholars have come a long way since then. However, it is still often the case that the term ‘communication’ implies that the message itself is being shared, and that the goal of ‘understanding’ may, eventually, be realized.

More recently, Briankle Chang argues there is something else that gets in between the two systems, something other than just noise. To begin, he complicates the matter by rethinking the common notion of a communicative exchange as one between subject and other through the exchange of messages. Communication, for Chang, is an ‘interplay between self and other, between that which stays the same and which appears to the former as different’ (Chang 1996, 44), effectively defining communication as the exchange between two or more elements that are attempting to make sense of something other than themselves. In this perspective, the subject considers itself as a self (and therefore familiar), and considers the other as different and not understood. Communication therefore does not simply send and receive messages, but attempts to domesticate ‘the alien into the customary’ (47); it brings things closer and helps make them familiar.

This point is not revolutionary on its own, and indeed does not directly confront traditional ways of thinking about communication, as it posits a subject who still attempts to communicate to the other in order to bring around understanding. However, as Chang continues:

[A]s long as the subject of communication is predefined as a self-enclosed, unconnected source of meaning and intention, communication […] must be viewed essentially as a sending (envoi), an event of giving oneself over, during which a representative of subject, something representing or standing for the subject, is dispatched to another party, another subject. (46)

Commonplace narratives of communicative exchange presuppose that the subject directly sends a message to the other. Although symbolic representation encourages translation, the actual exchanges of messages are carried through a separate system. Messages are not simply sent from person to person – this conceptualization of messaging makes sense for telecommunication, but not for people. This system is outside of us, rather than in us, and therefore we must instead give our communicative tasks over to something in between us and other. The sharing does not happen between the two ‘in communication’, but instead is exchanged within a separate system. To put it another way, there is a mediator, a medium, by which communication operates. This medium we have given ourselves over to is communication itself. Communication does not happen between two, as the common-sense narrative supposes, but instead communication communicates: communication is a medium by which we exchange messages.

Like the model which Shannon and Weaver conceptualized (two independent systems transmitting messages), the system must always already exist, transmitting pre-constituted signs within to another node in the system. However, signals are always displaced from our own understanding – they always go through an impossible translation. Therefore with or without computers, we have essentially been talking to ourselves all along. This does not mean, of course, that we do not speak, or affect each other’s actions, but it means that the system of communication is one that is already there. The nodes are in place. Chang calls this delivery system a ‘postal system’, a term he borrows from Derrida (1987), and the principle governing this communicative system the ‘postal principle’, as the message is involved in a system where the senders and receivers are already pre-constituted – they have addresses, and the message already has an identity that follows syntactic, semantic, and other rules that make it identifiable (47). This post is, of course, the same post as in positum – there is a spatial distancing that is assumed within the postal exchange. This spatial distancing not only assumes the system remains outside of ourselves, but also that this system existed before we sent a message through it. Nodes are not constructed, they instead have only yet to be discovered⁴.

What is crucial about the postal principle is that it places the communicative subject always (at least) one step removed from any other. There is no misconception about ‘total’ communication. Rather than expecting a realization of the goal of understanding, the postal principle assumes that understanding, in its totality, must remain impossible for communicative exchange to take place at all. We can never fully understand each other because we are always removed from that with which we are communicating. We send and receive messages, but we can never access the totality of the other. Applying this postal principle to RPGs, we may conceptualize the player’s journey through the game as one of interaction with multiple layers of mediums. The communicative subject, when communicating with the world, remains mediated by the postal system – the subject finds an addressee, construes a message, and then sends it in hopes (maybe) of receiving something in return. The purpose of communication, even between mediums, still remains to approach understanding; communication still continues to communicate, even if it must always fall short of its ultimate goal.

The interaction that takes place in Fallout could be investigated here in a multitude of ways. The typical manner of conceptualizing human-computer interaction in game studies is often situated as an interaction between player and game (for example, see Galloway). In this essay I would like to situate a slightly different option, complicating the player-game relationship through a rethinking of the connection between avatar and player. As I mentioned before, the journey of the post-apocalyptic tale is that of the communicative subject in dialogue with herself. The player, through the digital medium (the interaction is between the player and him or herself) communicates through the mediation of the postal system. Although the post-apocalyptic tale that is played in Fallout is one that, essentially, the player must tell herself, the communicative event that takes place to allow this is slightly more complicated than ‘simply’ talking to oneself.

The Postal Avatar

RPGs have always required an extraordinary investment in time compared with other types of game. Pen and paper games, often played around a table for hours among a group of players, can last for months, even years, of multiple-hour-long sessions. DRPGs also require a massive time investment, often requiring from forty to over eighty hours (or more) of game-time to complete the basic story (and much more to complete all of the other content). This provides a unique situation where RPGs become more than just a simple story. This story takes up an incredible amount of the player’s time and therefore a large percentage of the narratives that the player participates in. The game becomes an adventure that the player inhabits – lives through, not just digitally, but corporeally as well.

The avatar here becomes not just an embodiment of the player, following the Hindu conceptualization of a deity descended onto Earth, but as a node within a communicative structure, a sort of extension that situates the player in a different manner⁵. To do this, we need to think otherwise about the role that the mediation of the game can play by situating the player-avatar relationship differently. Computers, and therefore games, are often seen as the place between, as a medium that mitigates messages (Gunkel 2009). However, it is problematic to situate the computer as simply a medium; as David Gunkel reminds us, ‘the computer […] substantively resists being exclusively defined as a medium and instrument through which human users exchange messages’ (Gunkel 2009, 64). As we would not, for example, exclusively define ‘the world’ as a medium, the possibilities allowed by the computer cannot be reduced to simply a medium or a source of noise, as it has the ability to fundamentally shift the way we communicate. For example, ELIZA, the software developed in 1966 to mimic rudimentary psychotherapy, was incredibly effective at engaging humans. While it (arguably) could not pass the famous Turing test (see Turing 1950) because it did not exemplify intelligence, it elicited emotional response from many of its users, who either knew they were interacting with a computer, had only limited exposure to it, or both (Weizenbaum 1984). Over fifty years later, the programs that we interface with consistently are far more complicated than a simple textual feedback, allowing for optical and aural feedback, as well as feedback to our physical movements. In DRPGs the player is immersed within a digital environment, absorbing information from every aspect of the game. The extreme investment of play-time, if nothing else, requires focus on the environment. Players stare into a digital world that occupies them both visually and aurally, their body movements (in this case, their hands) control the avatar through their journey. Quests become trials for the avatar, progressing slowly through the chosen storyline.

The gamespace becomes similar to our ‘meatspace’ (Gibson 1984), a term often used since Gibson’s Neuromancer to describe the bodily space occupied by the corporeal player as complex rules must be comprehended and followed to gain access to different content. The player must educate herself about the ways the world operates and obey proper etiquette around other digital denizens or else be threatened in a myriad of ways – from social outcasting to execution. There are rules, but there are rules in the corporeal world as well. The difference is only that of flesh. Players learn the rules through experience, or from reading a manual, or both. The avatar’s life is – at least socially – much like life in the corporeal world. Material aspects have vanished, pain is irrelevant, and death is never final, but the social aspects are still forefront. Contrary to Burn and Schott’s conceptualization of the ‘heavy hero’, the avatar in Fallout is completely a ‘digital dummy’ (similar to the type that ventriloquists make talk), without personality and fully ready to control (Burn and Schott 2004). The player must experience knowing what will come next in the game, just as in ‘meatspace’, but it can never be complete: ‘the complex nature of simulations is such that a result can’t be predicted beforehand; it can vary greatly depending on the player’s luck, skill and creativity’ (Aarseth 2001). As Barthes predicted, the reader (player) is now the producer; the player tells the story they want to tell (Barthes 1975), as games are a ‘radically different alternative to narratives as a cognitive and communicative structure’ (Aarseth 2001). Each action the player chooses shapes future interactions, relying on complex systems of rules to govern the reaction by the game. However, recent games have far surpassed simply what the player wishes to tell, as the player becomes a co-producer in the story: the game takes an active role in its own telling. There are complex systems in place to mitigate the reactions to the actions that take place in the game environment. The player’s avatar is ‘co-present’ to ‘gameworld’. Gameworld and avatar interact. This goes beyond simple action-reaction, and links the avatar within a system that accounts not only for combat and other ‘physical’ reactions, but socially as well. In the Fallout series, for example, one of the gameplay elements is ‘karma’⁶. Karma within the Fallout series governs not only how major plot lines unfold, but also how individual NPCs react to you. The 2010 release Fallout: New Vegas also sets up a complex series of factions, each with their own reputation systems – one action might benefit the avatar with one faction, but diminish their standing with another (See Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2 Your choices, reputation, and karma will have an impact on whether this character will end up as friend or foe. (Bethesda 2010).

There are (at least) two different styles of gameplay in these games, one being a turn-based top-down system⁷ in Wasteland, Fallout, and Fallout 2, and a first-person perspective (FPP) in Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas ⁸. Although not as immersive visually, the top-down environments in the first two games were still massive and interactive. The more recent Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are mostly played in style where the player’s view mirrors the view of the avatar⁹. As James Newman remarks, it seems like the ‘primary-player-character relationship is one of vehicular embodiment’ (Newman 2002). The camera follows the movement, often bouncing up and down with the terrain and immersing the player into the gameworld. Buildings may be entered, NPCs may be spoken to pleasantly (or murdered brutally), and everything has consequences. However, Alec Charles argues that this type of gameplay ‘constructs an alternative but real subjectivity, and, insofar as the gamer increasingly experiences the virtual world as her primary reality, then that alternative subjectivity may come to represent the player’s dominant sense of self’ (Charles 2009, 7). Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen (1997) seems to agree, revealing gaming as an exploration of the player’s identity multiplicity. However, spending such an extended time focusing on such an environment or, as Peter Bayliss calls it, ‘being-in-the-game-world’ (Bayliss 2007), is not necessarily what Turkle refers to as ‘suspend[ing] disbelief’ (1997, 103) but simply that the player experiences ‘a communicatively mediated sense of being present in the gameworld’. The player knows that they are playing the game, but consciously they realize that their avatar is ‘a separately embodied character’ (Bayliss 2007). Slavoj Žižek complicates this notion of subjectivity in gamespace a bit further:

[W]hen I construct a ‘false’ image of myself which stands for me in a virtual community in which I participate […] the emotions I feel and ‘feign’ as part of my onscreen persona are not simply false. Although what I experience as my ‘true self’ does not feel them, they are none the less in a sense ‘true’. (Žižek 2008, 97)

This separately embodied character is an other that the player communicatively engages with, one that communicates their emotions, which we engage with and empathize with. The other brings its experience to the postal exchange: it communicates and simulates its worldview.

The game becomes something more than just an environment to explore for the player. The game becomes the place where the player communicates, and the computer (consoles are computers as well), as David Gunkel remarks, ‘actively participates in communicative exchanges as a kind of additional agent and/or (inter)active co-conspirator’ (Gunkel 2009, 54). The game’s avatar (insofar as this computer is actively participating in communicative exchanges) acts not just as a medium through which the player is actively communicating but as an other that the player communicates with. However, the player does not just look at the avatar, but also through the avatar. The player is both conscious of the avatar’s surroundings and their own – a double perspective. The player neither is just the avatar and is just simply the observer of the screen – it is, as Žižek says, a ‘false’ image that has been constructed, but it is also one that the player sees through, experiences interactivity with. In a manner of speaking, the player ‘loses’ herself in the game. Not that the player forgets who they are, or that they think that their corporeal body is now in a digital wasteland, but that they forget, or are not actively remembering, that they are and are not the avatar – it is not merely a ‘false’ representation of them. While they are still conscious of their own corporeal body, they also, as Žižek mentions, ‘feel’ through this digital representation in a way that is nonetheless ‘true’. The digital ‘other’ that explores the screen is only other insofar as the player becomes divided – both self and other.

Although the avatar and the player are both the ‘same’, the avatar remains other insofar as it is not the player. Outside of the self, existing in the temporal and spatial projections of the post-apocalyptic gameworld, the other that inhabits the gameworld in the player’s stead remains alien to the corporeal player. An alien avatar in an alien world. As the avatar is the true ‘player’ of the game (the subject immersed within the world and engaged within the narrative of the gameworld) the game communicates to the corporeal player through the player’s other, the avatar. The ‘journey’ of the avatar is mediated through this postal exchange, from avatar to player. The avatar becomes the post for which the player might explore the boundaries of the avatar’s perception – a postal node in the network of self with which the player corresponds.

Postal Correspondence

The post is, on one hand, spatial positioning that both allows movement and requests from beyond itself to be recognized. However, on the other hand, the post already implies the structure of a postal system that carries messages between two systems that can never meet. The player and postal extension (the avatar) exchange letters, yet they can never meet. As the letters are never able to fulfill the communicative revelation, there is always a call for more letters. The revelation is that of the player communicating to the avatar, to herself, through the game; the postal node of the avatar-self becomes a spatial distancing of self to resituate the possibility horizons. The avatar is both the mediator and representation of the player, but also neither. The representative is not merely the descent, the arrival, of the player into the game. The avatar is instead an agent of the player – one who communicates through a postal exchange. The avatar is both, and not: a postal agent that the player can never fully meet. Understood in this way, a post-apocalyptic RPG is less about the end of the world as about the transmission of revelation: the always-arriving of understanding.

Through the gamespace, each of these mediations separates the player from herself while allowing the player to explore the potentiality that exists between a series of systems that can never be complete, never be fulfilled, and never be truly unveiled. The journey of the player’s messages back to herself is never complete. This is why a ‘post-apocalypse’ is such a fitting setting for this type of journey, as it allows the player ample room to navigate her own path, to explore new horizons. Separated from the player through a double mediation, the avatar can explore the gamespace through the player unhinged by the player’s own perspective. The exploration of the wasteland is (somewhat) open, limiting the avatar only by the constraints of the digital parameters (even the corporeal world is finite, after all). Through this exploration, the interaction between avatar and game, whether NPC or environment, communication begins to unfold. The process of understanding for the player, of course, is not as simple as the sharing of messages. Understanding is what unfolds through the engagement of this complex system of exchanges that happen between avatar and player, mediated through the postal system. The postal node of the avatar, and the exchanges between it and the player, slowly domesticate the ‘alien’ existence of the avatar.

Postal Anxiety

The Fallout series and Wasteland are excellent examples of this system (of which, undeniably, there are likely other games and systems to apply this consideration to, and will be many more) for a few reasons. First of all, unlike ‘traditional’ understandings of apocalypse as end-times (where there is quite literally no future) the Fallout series and Wasteland leave the player with a more open future – one that, in effect, allows for a future to come. These games do this not only through the game’s major plotlines, in which the player’s character helps herald the possibility a future in the game narrative, but (most specifically in the Fallout series) through the openness of the narrative itself – as there always seems to remain a place for movement available for the character. Rather than the typical good-versus-evil narrative that emerges in conventional apocalyptical rhetoric, the post-apocalypse becomes a place to reinvent, or at least rebuild, the socius and allows for the possibility of new modes of interaction to take place. Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), for example, not only usually define a specific representation of the avatar (partially what Burn and Schott refer to as a ‘heavy hero’) but also usually reflect a linear plotline. Some recent games, such as Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins, allow a more customizable experience in a non-linear setting, but they do not situate the player themselves after the so-called ‘end times’. The temporally ‘post’ apocalyptic worlds of Fallout and Wasteland allow a postal reorientation as well, situating the player within a foreign setting that is vaguely familiar, yet ultimately alien. It is spatially ‘post’ as this environment opens up a place for the avatar to locate itself as a postal node that looks back at the player’s environment.

Secondly, Fallout and Wasteland offer something in their postal exchange to the player other than just their open gameplay style and narrative elements. The spatial distancing of the avatar, referred to earlier, is also a temporal projection into the (fictional) ‘future’ of the temporally ‘post’ apocalypse. However, as discussed before, there is ‘no apocalypse’, as the fulfillment of revelation can never be complete. So what, then, does a journey through the ‘post-apocalyptic’ wastelands reveal?

As I mentioned before, ‘the apocalypse’ is big business. Not only is it obvious, through the hundreds of millions of dollars per year spent on films, television shows, fictional books, and (obviously) DRPGs, that an apocalyptical event remains prevalent in cultural narratives, but the anxiety induced by the apocalyptical fear and paranoia from contemporary rhetoric has become a daily experience in contemporary culture, the world of the player. This is, of course, nothing new. Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, originally published in 1964, highlights a trend of fearmongering and constant paranoia in American political rhetoric since the foundation of the country. More recently, Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things highlights more current constructions of fear and paranoia. However, it is not necessary to look on a bookshelf for overwhelming evidence of this style, as fear is cultivated daily in nearly every newspaper and every television news report (Romer et al. 2003). The Mayan ‘prophecy’ regarding the destruction of the world in 2012 is only the most popular and recent in a series of anxiety-producing predictions regarding the so-called apocalypse¹⁰.

As the player inhabits this anxious time, facing numerous possibilities of destruction, this anxiety has become a defining characteristic of contemporary culture, since the ‘meatspace’ of the player’s world is populated by fearful, paranoid, and apocalyptic rhetoric. In contrast to the anxiety of the ‘real’ world, the post-apocalyptic RPG places the avatar, and thus the agent of and postal correspondent of the player, in an impossible temporal projection where all the apocalyptic narratives have come to pass. Everything that is most terrifying, fear-inducing, and anxiety-producing has already come to pass. In a world ravaged by death and destruction emerges a journey after ‘the end’, one that, through the correspondence between the player and her avatar, communicates the very possibility of future, and the negation of finality.

Ironically enough, the post-apocalypse expands rather than contracts horizons; openness to the future is restored. The gameworlds of Wasteland and the Fallout series open up the most extreme of possibilities of human kindness and monstrosity, allowing the player to engage and escape their own anxious times, finding relief in the wasteland. It is the player’s postal engagement that allows them to tell their own tale, to engage the semantic play that emerges. The player/avatar can choose to become a slaver or savior, a destroyer of humanity, or the mender of great wounds. This is the revelation of the post-apocalyptic RPG – the possibility of future, of what Derrida refers to as l’avenir (to come), can emerge. The journey of the post-apocalyptic RPG here can be seen not as a temporal post-apocalypse, but the relief of anxiety in the face of the current ethos of spatially ‘post’ (ongoing) revelation regarding ‘the end’. Wasteland and Fallout may most effectively explore, for better or worse, that the possibility of both infinite terror and beauty arises from humanity, and how both of them may come to situate terror as beauty and beauty as terror. Or, more simply, as repeated in the beginning and end of every Fallout game, voiced by Ron Perlman: ‘War …War never changes.’

1 This essay would not have been possible without the encouragement and editorial advice of Professor Stephen Olbrys Gencarella. His insight and critique has helped a seed of an idea sprout into something more vibrant than it was before. The author would also like to thank Professor Briankle G. Chang as the original seed for this essay was wrought through countless conversations held over endless cups of tea.

2 It is worth mentioning there are additional games within the Fallout universe, including Fallout: Tactics (2001) a strategy game, and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004) a dungeon crawler. As these were not RPGs, they are not included in this essay.

3 There are too many to list here, but the same year that Fallout: New Vegas was released, just four of the top apocalyptic movies (The Road, Legion, The Book of Eli, and Daybreakers) resulted in over $300 million in gross revenues.

4 Also see ‘Going Postal to Deliver Subjects: Remarks on a German Postal A Priori’ by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.

5 Also see articles by Baerge, Moran, Travis, and Voorhees in this volume concerning alternative readings of the relationship between player and character

6 Originally called ‘reputation’ in Fallout, then called ‘karma’ in Fallout 2 and future games.

7 Wasteland used a top-down system for exploring the environment and a windowed portrait and text mode for combat, whereas Fallout and Fallout 2 used an isometric view with turn-based isometric combat.

8 Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were released by Bethesda Game Studios after they licensed Fallout from Interplay in 2004.

9 There is an option to play in third person, but the game defaults to First Person Perspective and the alternate perspective offers less control and feedback.

10 There are numerous accounts of failed apocalyptic predictions through the years; for some examples, see ‘A Brief History of the Apocalypse’, http://www.abhota.info/end1.htm

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