Ryan Carlson
Ryan is a passionate gamer who is conflicted about whether he should become the Ubermensch or a Ghost In the Machine. Maybe his answer will be found in the Golden Mean.
Lately we have seen social justice warriors campaign to get certain violent video games banned. For instance, they campaigned to get Grand Theft Auto 5 banned from Target and K-Mart stores in Australia because of its violent content. Also, these same social justice warriors campaigned to get the video game Hatred banned from being sold on Steam for its violent contents. When I think about Hatred and Grand Theft Auto 5, the violent content is mild when compared to the violent content in Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 is an open world action role-playing game that was created by Bethesda Game Studios. The events of the game take place in a nuclear war ravaged Washington, D.C. It was released in 2008 and during that time the social justice warrior cause did not exist like it does today. This game was published with ease and there was no social justice warrior backlash for the contents in this game. If Fallout 3 were to come out today in the kind of social justice warrior environment we have now, I do think there would be a serious backlash.
To this day I remember three cruel things a player could do in this game which ultimately made this game extremely politically incorrect. There will be minor spoilers below, but nothing major related to the story.
1. Megaton
Looks like junk.
Megaton is a city you can visit when you first start out in the game. The reason why the city is called Megaton is because there is an undetonated atomic bomb located directly in the middle of the city in a large pond. To say the least, this is a health hazard for the citizens living in the city. As the player, you have option of disarming the bomb (who would ever do that?) or you can detonate it yourself from a faraway location.
I was skeptical that you could actually detonate the bomb so I went to faraway location to find the trigger. To my utter shock, it actually worked. You got to see the whole city light up in one massive fireball explosion that reached into the sky. Your character was miles away and you could feel the shock wave of the bomb along with the deafening sound. After the town explodes, you can go back to look at the massive black crater that was left behind.
Even if you role-play an evil character and blow up the town, it is still a very hard thing to do because it is so cruel. I have never seen anything like it before in a video game where you had the power to blow up an entire town with a nuclear bomb. When you complete this quest and find out the true reason why someone would want the town blown up, you will see that it is very politically incorrect.
2. Slavery
That is the face of a man going through an existentialist crisis.
In this game there is a side quest where you can become a slaver. Your job is to go around and put slave collars on random people and bring them back to the slave pen. The collar on their neck contains a beeper device. If your slave decides to run away, the collar will slowly begin to beep. Once the beeping speeds up it will trigger the collar to explode, thus decapitating the slave.
As the slaver you explain this to your newly acquired slave and their facial reaction will be similar to the old man pictured above. The slaves realize their fate and they are at the utter mercy of the player or other slavers if you decide to sell your slave. When I was role-playing an evil character, it was extremely difficult to try and round up slaves. This is because the game does a good job at showing just how inhumane the whole process was.
I was first shocked that I could nuke a town and then I was shocked again when I could round up slaves. I never imagined these two options would be available for a player to perform in a video game. I think social justice warriors miss these options when they go after newer games like Grand Theft Auto 5. Over the years, the Grand Theft Auto video game series has not changed much in regards to the kinds of violent actions you could perform in a video game.
3. Rampage
V.A.T.S. Combat System that allows a player to slow down combat so that individual body parts can be selected.
If you ever get bored with this game you can simply go on a rampage. You can become the scourge of the wasteland and kill anyone in the game. You can go on massive killing sprees and wipe out entire cities of innocent people. As far as I can see, this is the same thing that you can do in Hatred. But social justices warriors protest Hatred instead of protesting Fallout 3. They pick and choose what games to go after. Often times they go after video games that are objectively less violent than many video games in the past.
I had a lot of fun playing Fallout 3 and I have to say that I like it better than the newer sequel Fallout: New Vegas. I thought Fallout 3‘s story was better and the game was more immersive overall when compared to New Vegas. At the end of the day I think you should play this game and check out all of the available “features” for your character in this game.
Read Next: The Mindset Of A Social Justice Warrior Gamer
