The more I think about the more I think it’s better if fallout maintains a gameplay distance from the pre-war world
A lot of people rightfully criticized Fallout 4 for forcing your character into a man/woman relationship in your pre-war levittown. Others praised fallout 4 for having a single pair of one-line lesbians in your pre-war levittown. The solution seems to be not setting your game in a pre-war levittown
When you set fallout stuff pre-war or soon after, you have to make a decision: do you have marginalized players directly experience discrimination or do you erase that discrimination? The entire rhetorical point of Fallout is that the pre-war government was capitalism in decline, that is, fascism. Choosing to pretend that this doesn’t include nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia creates a defanged all-inclusive fascism. Is that what fascism is? Some commie jokes and funny osha violations?
For the record, I don’t think the games should confront players with violent racism and etc either. I think that stuff should be found in the wreckage of the world as a reminder to everyone else to not do it again
I feel like this is relevant again. A tv show is a little different from a game in that there’s a bigger distance between the fiction and the viewer vs the fiction and the player, but the stuff about all-inclusive fascism still applies. If your satire of midcentury Cold War capitalism has a black woman be one of the primary architects of the worst aspects of capitalism, there’s a substantial hole in your satire
