When I wake in the blinding light of my new beginning I reach out for something solid and real to pull me down and let me know what I am. A voice speaks out, and I know I am Darkman's child. I realize my error almost instantly when the menu pops up asking me about myself and informs me that, yes, I am a sorry-sack alone on Saturday night playing a video game, and that my "father" is nothing more than a video game character voiced by Liam Neeson (which further informs me that he will be dying before the end of the story). The more I play, the less immersed I feel, going through a thinly veiled tutorial in the form of childhood and its trappings (picture books, birthday parties, school). As my character reaches maturation, the inevitable upheaval of my cozy-yet-boring vault life comes to fruition, thrusting me out on a quest to find my father and into a wasteland filled with...nothing.
I turn right, rocks, I turn left, rocks, I go straight, dirt. Alone, for as far as I can comprehend, I continue forward, the wind whistling and my boots crunching the barren ground beneath me. While immersion is still a ways off, there is a definite uneasiness creeping over me. I come upon my first building, a school, which I know I can probably enter but choose to ignore for now. I make a right, and notice a run down fuel station littered with broken-down automothings that are right out of the worst-interpretation-of-what-people-in-the-1950s-thought-future-cars-would-look-like-you-have-ever-seen. I am suddenly a guy playing a video game again, shocked by how poorly designed these things are. I quickly make my way past the gas station, and hear a voice rapidly approaching. An authoritative figure addresses me through a PA robot literally flying down the road. This is what people in the '50s thought the future would be, and I am Darkman's son again. A house is to my right, and, figuring that there can be at most 3 bogeymen inside, I enter. I am met by a woman who appears strung out, but I suppose it is all relative. She has been living in this world for who knows how long; maybe that's just how people are. After interrogating her through the tried and true art of menus, I learn that she is a former drug addict (although the Jet vials littering her home say otherwise) who stole money from a bar owner named Moriarty. I assure her I won't tell on her and set out for the town she fled, Megaton.
Upon approaching the pile of scrap metal that is Megaton, I am beseeched upon by a desperate drifter for clean drinking water. Although I have none to give him, I lift his spirits with promises of some as soon as it is in my possession. We'll see. Another robot, this one with legs and arms and (maybe) a gun, greets me at the gates, and I enter. After the informative load screen (I have completed zero paralyzing palms!), I find myself staring down the barrel of a black sheriff's gun. Despite my yearning to make the obvious Blazing Saddles reference (which I doubt he would even get since the world he inhabits is an alternate to ours and is--quite probably--rife with black sheriffs), I keep things civil and, after vowing to disarm the undetonated atomic bomb in the center of town, am allowed to explore the humble hamlet at my leisure. Climbing down the stairs into the heart of Megaton, I pass a two-headed cow (how novel!) and some Megaton settlers that are too busy walking up and down the steps to talk to me. At the bottom of the crater is the aforementioned atomic bomb, surrounded by worshippers called the Children of Atom. After talking to their loony leader about the beliefs of his strange cult, I head to Moriarty's saloon. From Moriarty, I learn that he has spoken to my father and knows where he is, but won't tell me for free. Lacking funds, I leave, searching for a way to make money.
An hour (in real-time) later, I give up looking for an honest way to make money, and head back to the reformed addict's house in the Wasteland to collect the money she stole from Moriarty. Unable to think of any other way to persuade her to hand it over (my menu lacks the proper options!), I beat her with a bat, which is surprisingly disturbing. I return to Moriarty with my blood money only to learn that his price is 3 times as much now. Beside myself, I contemplate giving up on the game, certain I have played it wrong. This is when I find Moriarty's relatively unsecure computer terminal, and thus the answer to my (current) life's quest.
And this is when Fallout 3 grabs me, when I finally get it. There is no right way to play, so therefore there is no wrong way to play, either. Everything I did leading up to that point was exactly what my character was supposed to do, because I decided that's what he's supposed to do. If I had chosen to just live my days out in hiding with the drug addict, that would have been fine with the game (if a bit boring for me). Later on, in an attempt to find an orphan a proper home, I accidentally stumble across a colleague of my father's who has seen him. Even though her part of the story hasn't officially been introduced to me yet, the game adjusts, eliminating the need for me to go to where my father was before meeting the colleague and accelerating the story to catch up to where I am. Also, by completing tasks such as helping the orphan find a home, I gained renown as a "good" character, communicated mostly through the singing of my praises by a renegade radio DJ. Despite this, I never felt truly pure. The choices I have made matter, sometimes even when the game doesn't acknowledge them.
Even now, about one month since it happened, I'm still haunted by my bludgeoning of the drug addict. Although it was done in secret and the game never punished me for it, I still feel twangs of guilt about what I had done. Fallout 3 has, in a small way, made me feel like I've gotten away with murder, and that there is nothing good about it, which, even if an unintended consequence, is a possibility that only exists in video games, and even then only in video games as well-crafted and, yes, immersive, as this one.
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