Time to get a little mindfucked by Fallout : New Vegas
Remember how New Vegas begins with the Courier getting shot in the head? Of course you remember.
Well, there’s something particularly interesting about that.
The Courier is getting shot in a particular area of the brain : the frontal lobe. Through history, there are numerous accounts of people getting their frontal lobe damaged and surviving it. (One of them being Phineas Gage, for example.)
Sad thing is, people with their frontal lobe messed up often suffers from a wide range of mental disorders, going from social disinhibition to loss of muscle movement.
What interests us here, is that these kind of mental disorders often correspond to the typical player behaviour in a Bethesda Openworld RPG. You know, those kind of behaviour we have as players in a game and that we would never dare to have in another real-life context?
Symptom : short attention span
In Game Manifestation : the tendency to wander around, abandoning a quest and going off the road to investigate that elusive map marker, and then proceeding to do totally unrelated things for another two hours.
Symptom : tendency to miscalulate risk
IGM : Courier’s constant habit of getting in danger, because the player don’t give a damn.
“I can always reload, right?”
Symptom : Utilization Behaviour pathology
IGM : The player’s obsession with picking up/opening/activating items.
Symptom : Language Impairment
IGM : The Courier can’t speak more than 100 characters-long sentence : it’s an in-game technical limitation.
Symptom : impairment of moral cognition
IGM : The Courier’s (possible) change of moral behaviour during the game, switching Karma from Good to Bad, or Bad to Good.
Symptom : difficulty in inhibiting violent emotions and reactions
IGM : Courier’s violent behaviour, going on a rampage.
Symptom : loss of muscle movement and coordination
IGM : Courier’s low skill stats at the beginning of the game.
Symptom : Loss of sexual inhibition
So, seen that way, it seems that the player herself/himself is little more than the sum of all the pathological disorders that make the Courier act during the game, all due to the head wound Benny inflicted.
So, everytime you make the Courier do something weird, something rash, something crazy, well, it might be because of the state of its frontal lobe, and because you, player, are the vile affliction that holds the reins to his/her brain.
NB : Doc Mitchell actually refers to the consequences of frontal lobe damage during the introduction, so all this might very well be intended by Obsidian’s writers. Those guys. <3
NB : You bet I’m using this angle in Autumn Leaves.
NB : Of course, this is all fun and light-spirited, since it’s a game. In real life, people suffering from frontal lobe traumas have to go through all these symptoms in far less-than-ideal conditions. Of course, on top of that, there’s plenty of ethical, human and philosophical issues with this topic
(http://www.dana.org/Publications/ReportDetails.aspx?id=44153)
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