Amazon's Fallout, the Simulacrum of a Lets Play: An Aurini Rant.
So they released it a day early, just to mess with my intro. I plan to enjoy watching the cultural vandalism of one of the best RPGs of all time completely unironically.
Sorry about the late timing, but I had to see a woman about a horse.
My article on D&D's realism: https://staresattheworld.com/2018/03/realistic-dd-comes-strength-iq/
My LinkTree; bookmark it so you can find me if I suddenly disappear from YouTube again: https://linktr.ee/SatW_Aurini
Tomorrow is the release date for Fallout Season 2, Episode 1.
May God have mercy on our souls, and Merry fucking Christmas.
Fallout Season 1 is literally worse than Fallout 76, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 all put together.
Because at least those post-apocalyptic funhouse games could be ignored since they're happening on the East Coast.
Before I get into the meat of this video, I just gotta complain about something.
Could we please stop bringing back super mutants?
let alone the Brotherhood of Steel, in the three good Fallout games.
Honorable mention for Fallout Tactics.
In the three good Fallout games, the first one, the Super Mutants, were a core story element.
In the second one, they were relevant.
They were part of the story, but mostly they were just the leftovers from the conflict in the first game.
And by Fallout New Vegas, you could actually complete the entire story without encountering a single super mutant.
Like, they weren't relevant to the story.
They were, there's an old folks home full of super mutants.
They were past history, man.
They weren't relevant anymore.
Fallout is not the Brotherhood of Steel and Super Mutants.
Oh, God, don't get me started.
The freaking ghouls.
Stop treating ghouls like an oppressed class.
The ghouls were walking-talking reminders of the horrors of nuclear war.
They were people cursed to look like permanent burn victims.
And they were, 99% of them were produced from, what was it, Vault 7?
In Necropolis.
You don't need ghouls in every single fallout.
Stop doing super mutants.
Do something else.
You can do something else.
There were lots of evil experiments going on back pre-war.
It doesn't need to be Super Mutants versus Brotherhood of Steel every single time.
Make something new.
Never should have been Super Mutants on the East Coast.
It should have been something else.
They definitely, even if it was the FEV virus making super mutants, it should have been something else.
Call them the Super Soldier Program or something.
This is not a video about Bethesda being terrible in general.
This is a video about Bethesda being terrible in particular.
This is about simulation simulacrum and writers that have never been in a fist fight once in their entire lives.
Simulation simulacrum.
Baudrillard.
Baudrillard was talking about the media obsessed society.
The oversaturated society, the entertaining ourselves to death society, where media becomes more real than reality.
more real than real.
And that is exactly what we are seeing with the Fallout TV series.
Now if you like this, like honest to God, what the hell is wrong with you?
Were you drunk?
Were you playing Sudoku while it was playing in the background or something?
Can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
Confused Matthew was right about that.
The set design, the costume design, the, like, that part is amazing.
It's fantastic.
The special effects, they're great.
I really wish I could like this series.
I wish it was, like, okay.
But no, it's absolutely terrible.
And one of the reasons it's terrible is because the series is based upon game mechanics.
I wrote an article many moons ago.
I'll link it below.
Asking the question, how realistic is Dungeons and Dragons?
The rule system of Dungeon and Dragons.
How realistic is it?
And it turns out very.
Even though it has displacer beasts and magic spells.
Turns out that Dungeons & Dragons is not a bad human simulator.
But one of the problems, anytime you come up with a rule set for a human simulator, that's what RPGs are.
Any an RPG is a character-focused strategy game.
Now, on the one end, you have completely abstract strategy games like chess.
You know, bishops don't actually move at 45-degree angles.
They mostly try and cover up for what happened to little boys.
Chess names all the pieces, king, queen, pawn, rook, but they're all abstract concepts.
Then you get things like JRPGs.
And the Wasteland series, it leans very heavily JRPG, where, you know, you have the different combat skills.
You have the unarmed combat skill.
You have the big guns combat skill.
So the labels are based upon real life, but the skills themselves are abstract.
It's like one to ten points in them, and you have these different perks that go along with each one.
So it's actually just a chess-like strategy game where we have real-world labels applied to the different skills, and then individual characters connected to having these skills.
But the combat itself is very abstract.
And then you have the Western RPG, which is Dungeon ⁇ Dragons, which is the Fallout series, where it's trying to imitate real life.
Dungeon ⁇ Dragons does it on a probability curve, a bell curve.
You know, you roll 3 die 6, you get 3 to 18 is your score.
Produces a perfect bell curve.
And then those scores are correlated to real-life statistics, which also form a bell curve, of how much you can bench press.
Fallout, based upon the GURP system, same thing.
It's a reality simulator.
But the problem with reality simulators is that when you're a game designer in a reality simulator, you often start mistaking the trees for the forest.
And I'll give you an example from a Ravenloft campaign that I ran.
So in this Ravenloft campaign, the secret, actually based upon the sorrows of Young Werther, I'm That Much of a Nerd.
Where the plot of this horror Dungeons and Dragons game was that a woman had been murdered by her unrequited lover.
And she'd been murdered with a gunshot, which does piercing damage in the D ⁇ D system.
And so her marble statue Revenant could only be harmed by piercing damage.
And my players did eventually figure this out.
It was pretty good.
It was a creepy, creepy story with her severed head spinning at a different rate from the dancing marble statue.
It was a lot of fun.
But after that, I reflected that, you know, they were using rapiers, which also do piercing damage.
And now that doesn't actually make sense.
Like, that makes sense in the game rules universe.
But the game rules universe, that's an approximation.
D ⁇ D is supposed to be a story about real people encountering fairies and dragons and drow and engaged in real combat.
And sometimes, as a game designer, you get too focused on the rules.
Well, technically, it's piercing damage.
Actually, and that ruins things.
The rules are there to create the illusion that it's a real world.
The real world, the physics are too complex for us to decide with 20-sided dice.
So it's a simplified rule set that's very, very close to reality.
So is Fallout.
And yet, one of the things that I read that made, it helped make the first season of Fallout make a lot more sense.
It's that these characters, you've got the ghoul, and you've got Lucy, and you've got, I don't know, the Brotherhood of Steel guy.
They're not designed around real characters experiencing reality.
They're designed around RPG characters.
Karma was one of the original game mechanics introduced in the first Fallout game.
As to whether you were playing a good character or a bad character.
Which is, it's universal now in video games, okay?
It was a new concept when the first Fallout came out.
The more good things you did, the more that people would respond to you positively.
And bad things vice versa.
By the time of Fallout New Vegas, you got not just your karma system, but also your reputation system in individual communities.
Fallout spearheaded these concepts, which when you're playing D&D, the DM knows what you've been doing and how you've been acting, and he doesn't need a karma system to keep track of it.
But a video game does.
And this has resulted in a problem.
Particularly in games like Fallout 3.
In Fallout 3, I just acted like a decent, honest person for the first 35 minutes of gameplay.
And so a group of bounty hunters came after me to murder the do-gooder when I just complimented people.
Fallout 3 tried to do this like moral ambivalence, where if you were a good person, the evil bounty hunters came after you.
If you're an evil person, the good bounty hunters came after you.
Which is absurd.
Everybody likes an honest person.
The evil people, if they see an honest person, they might try and scam him, but they're not going to murder him for being honest.
Not until he's done something to betray them.
And in the Fallout TV series, the three primary characters are deliberately following karmic routes.
Lucy is deliberately being karmically positive the whole time.
The ghoul is deliberately being karmically negative the whole time.
And Brotherhood of Steel retard is trying to stay neutral.
Again, Fallout 3, there are some companions that would only be your companion if you had neutral karma.
Which is ridiculous.
Karma is a metric to track, To indirectly track what your attitude to people is.
Like, if you're genuinely, generally helpful, you can't quite track that through dialogue options.
Right?
Like, the new person, like, how you speak, how you carry yourself.
That's what the karma system is.
It's not, like, a literal part of reality.
It's a game mechanic.
And it's not just limited to that either.
Early on, Lucy shoots the ghoul with a tranquilizer dart, and he pulls it out, unaffected, commenting, do you have any idea how many drugs I'm on?
Because the ghoul has the day tripper perk.
The day tripper perk is meant to imitate, emulate somebody with a very high alcohol tolerance, Somebody that has experience with different drugs and can keep their wits about them, even when they're stoned or high?
It's emulating the real world.
When you take the day tripper perk in Fallout New Vegas, you are saying, oh, my character's done a lot of drugs and he knows how to handle himself.
He knows when to stop drinking so he doesn't get a drunk driving ticket.
He's not a noob.
The Fallout TV series treats these game mechanics as if the game mechanics are reality.
This is why you get so many absurdities in the series.
You get the one guy.
He gets his foot crushed and then walks 10 miles on a compound fracture of his foot bones.
Then injects a stim pack or something and gets immediately healed from it.
Yeah, in video games, you can be crippled and you can still move your character around.
They're called game mechanics.
And the people writing this series are so divorced from reality that they actually don't know what it's like to get punched in a fistfight, to get your bell rung, to pass out drunk.
They don't know any of this stuff.
And so they write game mechanics as if it was reality.
And then call us the crazy people for finding it uncompelling.
Simulation, simulacrum.
This has been a growing problem in Hollywood, by the way.
The Fallout TV series is like the high watermark of mistaking artificial reality for reality.
But we've been on this path for a while.
Look at the Marvel movies.
The reason I cannot take the Marvel movies seriously.
Even though I recognize they've got some themes in them, yes, yes, and then hell, if you enjoy them, then you go enjoy the shit out of them, okay?
Not trying to tell you what you can and can't enjoy aside from the Fallout series.
You should not enjoy that.
It's terrible.
But you know, just call me a stickler.
But there's certain characters that have invulnerability.
Right?
Like the Hulk, he's got some sort of gamma radiation, alpha male, invulnerability, muscle shit going on.
So if you throw the Hulk into a brick wall, and there's an imprint of the Hulk's body on the brick wall, it's like, okay, I get it.
He's the Hulk.
But then you do the exact same thing with Spider-Man.
And hey, maybe I didn't get the memo, but he's got spidey senses, he's got spidey reflexes.
He doesn't have Spidey smash a brick wall.
Or take Iron Man.
Now I will buy that his whatever it's made out of suit.
It's obviously not iron because iron can't do this, but whatever it's made out of, I'll buy that it can deflect bullets.
But I've read too much on motorcycle helmet technology to believe that Iron Man can fly face first into an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Boom!
And not have his brain splattered within his own skull.
I don't see any fucking crumple zones in that Iron Man suit.
Bullets, okay.
Getting punched by King Zod?
No, I don't buy that.
These modern Hollywood writers are so divorced from reality that they mistake game mechanics for the real world.
Not just physically.
Okay?
Maybe I'm being kind of a prick when it comes to Iron Man catching an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Maybe I'm being the jerk and I should just enjoy the overall narrative of the Iron Man movies.
Maybe you got a point when it comes to that.
Iron Man is actually about Tony Stark real.
Okay, fair enough.
Fair enough.
I'm a prick.
But the Fallout series doesn't just apply, doesn't just abuse game mechanics.
Well, the ghoul is high level.
That's why he could get shot in the back and not die.
It doesn't merely abuse game mechanics in the combat scenes.
It also abuses them morally.
Where instead of having real characters that grow and change and learn and have desires and goals and challenges they overcome, It has players metagaming.
Metagaming to be a high karma or a low karma or a neutral karma character.
Because these idiot writers know absolutely nothing about the human soul.
All they know is how to min-max a character in a video game.