Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens by Gerald A. Voorhees;Joshua Call;Katie Whitlock;

Author:Gerald A. Voorhees;Joshua Call;Katie Whitlock; [Whitlock;, Gerald A. Voorhees;Joshua Call;Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441138927
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-12-18T06:00:00+00:00

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

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