Press the button: The Fallout series is a true gamer’s creation in both appearance and gameplay | Games

I I've been watching the last few episodes of the Fallout series on Prime Video. It's funny and gory, sometimes sentimental, and sometimes silly. In other words, it's exactly the kind of game that oscillates between quiet, tragic moments in which you explore traces of America and scenes in which you run out of ammunition and are chased down a hill by an irradiated scorpion.

Fallout's ensemble cast – highlighted by Walton Goggins' near-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell's wide-eyed vault-dweller – deftly compartmentalize the different facets of the game's personality. As director Jonathan Nolan pointed out in an interview last week with Bethesda's Todd Howard, game director, this is a common device in television storytelling, but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it well. Each of the three main characters represents a different part of his DNA in GTA (Trevor of violent chaos, Michael of authoritative crime drama, and Franklin of Compton realism).But in most games we play One Or we shape the character so that it becomes unique to us.

It makes it difficult to adapt the game to the screen. But instead of trying to convey the experience of playing a game, Fallout takes a step back to let the broken yet strangely optimistic world of Fallout take center stage, with each character exploring different aspects of that world. is showing.

“Even if you say you're adapting Fallout 3, whose Fallout 3 are you talking about? Because the way you play that game is very different from the way I play it. Because it could have been different,” Nolan told me. “That's the beauty of this kind of game.” [Bethesda] I'm drawn to the types of games that make the most of the medium and decide who your character will be within that world. Obviously, it doesn't lead directly to the series. ”

I was interested: how did Will Nolan play Fallout 3? “I always play as a Boy Scout first because I think my parents are watching,” he said. “So I'm going to make the smart decision and try again and play as a complete heel. But then I get weird, I get uncomfortable, I end up falling into a morally compromised middle ground.” It's a little pitiful.

I can relate. chaotic good In most games where it's allowed, I'm willing to cause chaos wherever I go, and happily align myself with characters and factions in power, but I’d never do anything to hurt people. I know it’s a game, but Assumption I want it to be a no-consequences place where I can experiment with morality, but I can’t bring myself to play the villain. This is in contrast to many players I know. They immediately start causing chaos in the game world just to see what happens. The kind of person who shoots horses in Red Dead Redemption.

“Every time I get a game and test it, I immediately think, “What will this game be able to do?” No matter what we do, every time we hand the player a weapon, the first thing they see is I’m going to shoot anyone who does,” Todd Howard said with a laugh. “It could be their mother. They’ll shoot whoever it is. Then they’ll be like, ‘Well, I’ll reload.’ ”

Trying to design a choice-based game based on the random whims of the players must be a nightmare, but Howard and Bethesda have decades of experience with it. When I interviewed him over the years, he talked about how players and systems interact to create new stories, and how games make what they do in-game real and meaningful. He spoke eloquently about the unique mechanism that makes you feel as though you are in the dark. You can’t do that with TV or movies. But as the Fallout show proves, if it’s made by people who really understand it, can We tell unique stories that still capture the essence of the games people love.

Fallout is great because, while this is also true of other successful game-to-movie adaptations in recent years, Appearance Yes, the sets are perfect, and they nail the game’s retro-future, nostalgic aesthetic. That’s because Nolan and screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner actually played Fallout, understood it, and felt the power of its storytelling for themselves. Rather than trying to clumsily adapt the game’s story into a TV script, they wrote an amazing game expansion fan fiction on a very high budget. I’m all for this approach. Now that we have a generation of TV producers and filmmakers who grew up with games and truly understand them, I would like to see more of them.