I’ve lately had a borderline unhealthy obsession with post-apocalyptic settings. Or I guess I always have, just never to the degree that I have in the last couple months. I don’t know what it is about places devoid of people, hostile and unforgiving. The elements of discovery, survival, and perseverance that are endemic to the stories they tell, I think.

This whole idea was brought to my attention when I started reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller. The novel opens to a world 600 years after a 20th century global thermonuclear holocaust which destroyed nearly all of civilization. We meet a monk on a vigil for his church in the desert who runs across a rock chamber. Inside this chamber is a doorway to a nuclear fallout shelter, along with some remnants of the past. Handwritten notes, a toolbox and tools, some cryptic messages, and even skeletal remains. What follows is elaboration upon the church’s goals and ideals: they collect, memorize, copy, and preserve ancient text, much of it completely mundane and useless (like a grocery list), but mysterious and unknown to future mankind.

Being thrust into a world like this is a wonderful feeling for me as a reader. At the beginning, I have no idea where we are, when we are, or who the people are in the story. I’m simply thrust into a landscape devoid of life, with vague references to a “Flame Deluge,” “simpletons,” and a whole lot of religion. I eventually discover that the story is set in the western United States, and that some sort of nuclear disaster has happened, but it is all described through the perceptions of characters ignorant of technology and what once was. All they know is their church (the Catholic Church has survived in some form) and their “relics,” pieces of history from before the “Flame Deluge.” Reading on, I also find out that following the Deluge, there was a “simplification,” an event which saw a backlash against science and technology on the part of mobs of the less-educated in response to the development of nuclear weapons. The mobs rampaged through the country destroying technology and murdering any learned people, eventually illiteracy became rampant. This sent the world into the “dark age” in which the story begins (loosely resembling the “age of faith”). Part two ventures into an “age of enlightenment” and part three into an “age of science.” The novel eventually becomes a commentary on the cyclical nature of human history, with mankind returning to the Dark Ages, enlightening itself once again in a Renaissance, and continuing into self-destruction.

Another fabulous (that doesn’t sound right) post-apocalyptic setting is portrayed in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read The Road about a year ago and it’s one of the most haunting, yet inspiring stories I’ve ever experienced. It tells the tale of a man and his young son traveling on a road to the ocean several years after an unspecified cataclysm. As the story unfolds, we discover more and more about their characters as a result of their actions, and just how bad a place they’re in. Along the road they encounter slavers, cannibals, thieves, murderers, all while combating their own health and hunger. This survival tale overwhelms you with fear for the desperate father and son, father toting a revolver with two bullets to use in the event of their capture. One for him, one for the child. The desolate and treacherous landscape through which they travel sort of serves as a vehicle to put this man into the worst of situations so as to discover his innermost character, and the true depth of the love for his son. Without these stark circumstances, the story would not be nearly so profound.

McCarthy doesn’t let on to the severity of the characters’ situations right away. As you read, little snippets of story and situations the father and son get into gradually reveal the complete horror in which they’re trying to survive. They scrounge for food and supplies at every building or ransacked house they discover. They fear everyone they see, and are constantly vigilant of any forms of life around them. In this world, everyone is desperate for survival; any stranger could be a thief, murderer, or even a cannibal out for food. There’s a certain sense of discovery, albeit discovery of terrible things, associated with reading The Road. As the father/son duo scrape across the wasteland in an attempt to survive, I as the reader am venturing through the unknown with them, hoping just as they are that they’ll find some salvation at the end of the road.

Games are a fantastic medium for post-apocalyptic environs. In 1997, the Black Isle game Fallout made it’s post-apocalyptic setting a titular element (or, rather, “post-nuclear”). The world that the protagonist emerges into from Vault 13 is harsh, unknown, and unforgiving. Immediately outside the hermetically sealed Vault, I’m completely unarmed, helpless, and ignorant of what I’m supposed to do. I’m given a single task: find a water chip to save the Vault’s water supply.

Even such a simple task as a glorified “fetch quest” can become a nearly insurmountable problem in the world of Fallout. Everywhere I turn there are mutants, bandits, scorpions, highwaymen, all out to maim and kill. I’m left to explore the wastes of Southern California, along the way running across small towns and their citizens, either helping them in exchange for goods or services, or plying my craft of schemes and tricks to cheat my way to my Vault’s rescue. The radiated desert in this game serves as an excellent backdrop for exploration, discovery, and survival. I must scrounge and explore in order to provision myself for travels, looking for my water chip. The technologies and machines that remain in the world are mere shadows of what they once were, pieced together from chunks of metal or other machines in shoddy, barely-working states. I simply love this survival-at-any-cost aesthetic. And Fallout comes with a snarky sense of humor to boot.

The three separate examples I’ve laid out here all happen to be specifically “post-nuclear war apocalypses” (not a definite in The Road, but probable). Really any setting that features “civilization lost” or “cities that are no longer” could be considered in the same vein. The world of Rapture in BioShock is similar, having suffered a catastrophic devolution into drug-fueled anarchy. As is the “The Zone” in STALKER, haven for desperate or greedy treasure hunters braving psychic anomalies to find artifacts. There are also settings involving disease or some other epidemic. In I Am Legend it’s a vampiric virus. In Children of Men it’s global infertility. In The Mist it’s the opening of a portal to a dimension of horrendous monsters. In The Stand it’s a man-made superflu virus.

All of these different types of stories produce similar settings and environments. As a result we end up with similar storytelling elements: discovery, survival, struggle, perseverance, and sometimes even rebirth, in a sense, of either self or civilization.

Wow, I’ve been playing some serious variety during the last week:

I got into GTA San Andreas Multiplayer, a mod created for the PC version that turns SA into a multiplayer game (SA:MP as it’s known in the community). After listening to last weeks 1UP Yours podcast (podtrac beware!), Shawn Elliott’s recommendation to check it out led me to do just that. SA:MP is the most impressive 3rd-party mod I’ve ever seen. It’s got pretty impressive network performance, on nearly every server I joined. You can get anywhere up to 200 people in a game at once. During my hundreds of hours with the past GTA titles, I’ve always wondered what this looks like… now I know. And just like any typical online PC game, there are hundreds of servers run by admins with a pool of thousands of players at any given time. Servers contain an enormous range of game types, including deathmatch, racing, stunts, minigames, and the most ridiculous: role playing. People run entire RPG servers, and they’re some of the most popular ones. The admins are the cops, people role play taxi drivers, prostitutes, ANYTHING. Pretty insane. Rockstar could definitely learn something from what’s going on with SA:MP. Just go watch some Youtube clips of gameplay to get a good picture of what this is all about.

After my previous post, I was inspired to reinstall the original Fallout. Not much to be said here, as I’m only about an hour in. I’ve recruited Dogmeat to hang out with me and completed a few minor quests in Shady Sands and Junktown.

Burnout Paradise has been in my 360 for over a week now (except for a brief stint with Bully: Scholarship edition, which I’ll get to in a minute). This game has so much potential it’s ridiculous. With Criterion’s upcoming updates, this game seriously will become the “driving MMO.” I mean, if they added a couple more islands, Crash mode, more cars, bikes and planes, new game types, car customization, this game would be the only place you need to go to get an arcade-style driving experience. Period. There’d still be room for the technical sim driving games like Forza and Gran Turismo, but the arcade driving game market would belong to Criterion. They’ll become the Blizzard of online racing.

Now Bully is a game I need to spend some quality time with. I only played an hour or so into it, but I feel like I want to give it a real commitment this weekend. I hadn’t played anything by Rockstar since San Andreas, and the maturation of their open-world game design from that to Bully is incredible. Bodes well for GTA IV next week.

In a recent post over at Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott has asked for reader input as to what RPGs really define the genre, and would be best to use as study pieces for his new course on the history of role-playing games. Abbott currently serves as a liberal arts professor at Wabash College in Indiana.

His list is a compilation of many games, divided by year, that he’s already culled from reader submissions over the last week. And it’s quite a difficult bunch to pare down to the essentials. From the late-70s text adventures, to JRPGs, to the latest western RPGs from the likes of BioWare and Bethesda, his list is vast and chock full of revolutionary titles.

After perusing his possibilities, and selecting from games I’ve actually played to completion, a few really stand out as absolute requirements: Space Quest, Ultima VII, Fallout, and Deus Ex (I’m biased toward the western RPGs I’m more familiar with, obviously). I love the idea of tackling a single subset of games in order to study them more in-depth, as opposed to having a course titled “The History of Games” where all the class would get to do is read little snippets about each. I’d like to break down, in short snippets, the reasoning behind my selections:

Space Quest — The quintessential Sierra adventure title. Being one of the first computer games I ever played, the original text-based Space Quest (and it’s VGA remake) is a must-play for anyone interested in the history of American games. The Sierra adventure games (and the Space Quest series, in particular) really introduced a level of humor to games that’s woefully underused in modern games. Double Fine and Telltale Games are about the only ones who continues to carry the comedy torch. Tim Schafer was a contributor to some of those old LucasArts titles. Most of the other Sierra games are noteworthy as well, though not all are truly RPGs: King’s Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, etc.

Ultima VII — Ultima VII may have been the first PC game that really roped me in and consumed some serious time. It consisted of two main games: The Black Gate and Serpent Isle, and a couple expansions: The Forge of Virtue and The Silver Seed. Dating from ‘92, Ultima VII was the first game I can remember playing that truly let the player have access to a huge open world right out of the gate (The Black Gate! har har). You had multiple party members, could perform dubious actions whenever you pleased (sometimes provoking an opinion from one of your party members) , and could move or pick up damn near any item that wasn’t too heavy to lift. I remember finding some empty building and adopting it as my “house,” where I’d bring and store all my goods for later use. This was an incredibly forward-thinking game, and when I think back on it, RPGs haven’t really advanced from a gameplay perspective much farther than where Ultima VII was 15 years ago. Out of the whole Ultima series, VII seems to have attracted the most interest. People today are still promoting, following, and playing Ultima VII, with tools like DOSBox and the Exult project.

Fallout — The original Fallout was one of the first games I’d ever played with a truly flexible and dynamic story line, where the player’s decisions and actions fleshed out the events of the game differently to everyone who played it. The idea of “karma” introduced in Fallout made it so fun to go into a new city to see how the NPCs would react to your child-slaying, thieving, conniving jerk of a “vault-dweller,” which usually elicited entertaining responses and could send you down a hilarious conversational rat-hole. Of course you could also try to be an angel, and help any ghoulish mutant inhabitant that asked you. This was the first game where I could enter a city, kill any number of citizens, and they were gone forever, quest characters or not (the Ultima games had some of that, but it was limited). I specifically remember entering Shady Sands on an early playthrough, pissing someone off on accident, wiping out everyone in town, and returning later to find a ghost town. Pretty stunning to see in that era of game development. I’d like to play through Fallout 1 and 2 again in preparation for this Fall’s Fallout 3 release. Hopefully Bethesda will keep it real.

Deus Ex — In the same vein as Fallout, Deus Ex put a lot of weight onto the dynamic, choose-your-own-adventure gameplay style. As a first-person “shooter” as opposed to isometric turn-based combat game, it was still drastically different than most games that precluded it. There were a few first-person “RPGs” that had already done this (Thief, System Shocks, etc.), but none as well as Deus Ex. The “get to the bottom of the conspiracy” plot line was also crazily compelling and kept me interested until the end. There are numerous other reasons why Deus Ex is so loved amongst me and my friends, mostly centering around inside jokes and the goofy looking animations in the game, but still to this day Deus Ex remains one of my favorite games of all time. I recently reinstalled it and started to play through again, but my computer pissed me off and I reformatted since then. I’ll have to try it again. Anyone thinking about getting in another playthrough should check out the Shifter mod from ModDB, which “removes the suck from Deus Ex,” as they say.

Go play these games. They can all be had for next-to-nothing at various outlets online, and each of them is a stellar game. Obviously, there are too many worthwhile RPGs to list to get the best sense of the progression of the medium from a single semester of coursework, but Mike Abbott’s list is an excellent start.

Here are a few other notable ones, some of which he doesn’t have on his list (and may not be true “RPGs”): Thief, System Shock 2, Final Fantasy VII, Syndicate, Zeldas, Diablo, Oblivion, Metal Gear Solid.