Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?
Silver-Tongued Devil Ends World
I'm not well-versed in Western role-playing games, so I came to Fallout 3 with some baggage. The promise of an open world with immersive locales and powerful character interactions was what I had always wanted from a game. I wanted to collect my gear, travel across the countryside, get to know others, integrate myself into a community, behave basically like myself, and see the results. Unfortunately, the only game that has ever let me to do this is Animal Crossing. What I could ultimately do in Fallout 3 was travel.
I traveled far, and I'm still traveling. More than a year after starting the game, I still haven't explored every site in the Capital Wasteland. Of course, I haven't been playing consistently; I put my game on extended hold when I realized I was getting eyestrain from trying to read my Pip-Boy on my old cathode-ray tube TV. But this isn't a world whose breadth anyone could expect to cover in even a month of consistent play. It's meant to be consumed over time, bit by bit, so that places and names can settle like words in a book, a series of meaningful nodes connected by your sight. I have wanted to get away from gaming anecdotes, but it matters to me a lot to have had this one: leaving my house in Megaton, fleeing through city ruins, getting briefly lost and consulting my map, keeping out of sight of vigilant Super Mutants by crawling along the river bank, spotting the Rivet City sign, watching its iron bridge swing out before me, crossing it, and turning around to look back across the water. Bethesda is good at creating spaces.
It's also good at ruining their believability, or so I thought when I gave up on the Elder Scrolls games, and when I walked into the Rivet City market. You have an image of puppeteers trying to put on a puppet show in pitch darkness, while intoxicated, for a crowd of one. A man says hello. We have a strange, tentative chat. Next time I pass him, he's walking into a small table in the hallway. How come nobody ever uses the bathroom? How can people be oblivious to the dead bodies everywhere? Why do they keep looking at me? You'd have to be a paranoid schizophrenic to feel at home in this world.
For a time, I couldn't simply play and enjoy Fallout 3. I had to become a willing participant, which is usually my cue to move on to another game. Playing Fallout 3 meant playing the idea of Fallout 3. "What can you tell me about this town?" I ask all the townspeople this question, because I genuinely want to know, for some reason -- and I smile and nod when everyone gives the same answer. I try to act like a person among people. I picture myself haggling with a shopkeeper as I sift through my inventory screen. I imagine I'm sitting at the bar with a drink in hand, even though I can't make my avatar sit at the bar or put a drink in his hand. I imagine I'm really who I am supposed to be in this world.
I learn to stop imagining, when these uncanny acts freeze and the cold foundation of the world rises fully to its surface, and its laws are made impeccably clear. I gain a level, and I'm looking at a screen full of numbers. They show me who I am: a person with Strength, and Perception, and Speech, and Energy Weapons. I start thinking about the choices I have to make, and the consequences they might have. Through these numbers, I find my way back into the world. I see stats and skills and perks, not bugs and inconsistencies and empty bathrooms.
I see why this works. Why I can enter a woman's house in the middle of the night and wake her out of bed to ask her something. Why people can repeat the same lines until the end of time and not lose their humanity. How days can seemingly pass in-between sentences, depending on my quest status or what items I'm holding. Although I can watch the sun rise and set in the Capital Wasteland, time isn't measured by hours, but by actions. The whole world changes the instant I say or take or kill the right thing. This seems like a terribly flat worldview, and it is. Only by checking certain boxes can I make myself a known quantity. But this makes perfect sense when I'm a person made of data; I see that the world is like a spreadsheet. I understand that its people can only relate to me by giving me things like weapons and caps. I know it's an RPG cliche for rewards to mean gold and gear, but I also find it moving to carry a special suit of armor back to my home in Megaton and stash it in my bedside locker, as a memento by which to remember the soul that gave it to me.
So I traveled far enough into Fallout 3 to glimpse its outline, the peaks and valleys of good and evil and neutral conditions between which I could write myself a story. It's immersion inside-out, learning to navigate a game through its rules first and its spaces second. When you eat and sleep according to a number set, you can see your hollow motives grow -- literally point by point -- into a character sketch.
And then it was my turn to ruin the story. In one lonely town, I came across a man like Leonard Shelby in Memento: He couldn't remember the one thing that I kept telling him. It was a Speech challenge that I had a 100% chance of winning. The dialogue option never went away, and so I sucked the man dry for experience points. I hit the A button over and over. I wasn't playing the game anymore; I was playing the designer. I'd finally found a way to snatch the carrot that had been dangling out of reach. Within a few minutes, 20G: Silver-Tongued Devil popped onto the screen. I'd won 50 Speech challenges. Shortly thereafter, I received 10G: Protector for reaching level 8 with good karma.
I was 30 achievement points and several hundred experience points richer, and all the poorer. I'd found a loophole in the delicate lattice of numbers and unraveled part of the creation, like pulling a loose thread from a sweater and ending up with a tattered sleeve. My cheating unmade the achievements, too -- made them totally fake. It's not that the achievements were exposed as meaningless acts with a value attached, but that these acts and values lost their meaning. For what does an RPG do but give meaningless acts a value and a tale?
Achievements earned: 2
Points gained: 30
Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.