Probably by now you will have had time to see Fallout on Amazon Prime and will have least had some time to absorb the submerged lore of the series. If not... aw well.
The short summary of the Fallout universe is that a company called Vault-Tec sold a series of bunker spaces, that people could retreat to in the event of a nuclear war. What they did not tell people though, is that in reality the various vaults of which there were more than a hundred scattered around the United States, were actually in reality a series of designed social experiments to keep various kinds of people in confined spaces, to see what would happen in preparation for interstellar travel.
Of course the problem is that it is doubtful whether any interstellar expeditions were ever going to happen; so to keep the business profitable, there had to be the perpetual threat that a nuclear war would take place.
The lore across various video games and even the television series is so unreliable and tortured at this point, that the only really consistent thing is that either there was a nuclear war between China and the United States which actually did kill millions upon millions of people and the Vaults actually proved to be useful; or there was never a nuclear war and Vault-Tec themselves dropped a series of nuclear devices to ensure that the usefulness and the utility of the narrative that they had told everyone was justified.
Say what you like about the aesthetics of the series and about the likelihood of the world being diverted into some kind of perpetual 1960s dieselspacepunk future, it just seems to me that the whole business model of Vault-Tec and therefore the premise of the entire Fallout franchise itself, is nonsensical.
In World War II, which was the first time that mechanised warfare properly reached the skies, the level of cover that people has as the bombs began to fall was minimal. During the blitz on London, or bomber raids on Dresden and Berlin, or aerial bombardment of Singapore, or the firestorming of Kyoto, Kawasaki and Tokyo, people really had nowhere to hide except for the few Civil Defence Shelters which had been hastily dug, of places like the Underground, U-Bahn, of in sheds, barns, and churches that were of little strategic value to bomb. Although having said that, the indiscriminate bombing of Pottery Factories in Dresden, or even incendiary devices on Tokyo, were of little strategic value anyway but morality is often functionally non-existent in times of war.
After World War II when it became apparent that nuclear devices were a viable option after the United States dropped two of them (and likely would dropped four more by the end of 1945 had the war gone on), it also became apparent that existing civil defence against nuclear devices were useless. Central Hiroshima was levelled and flattened to no more than two feet thick, after the flash of a nuclear fire and shockwave thereafter, reduced everything to elements and in some cases people were vapourised to the point where the only thing that they left behind were shadows. No existing civil defence shelters could stand up to that.
Even instructions on how people could make their own civil defence shelters were woefully inadequate. Anderson shelters from World War II would likely be flattened, but given that at very least, the kind of thing that one would need to build in order to even stand up against the flash of nuclear fire would at the very least be made of steel, it is not the kind of thing that can or would be built by individuals. From that standpoint, the idea that Vault-Tec should target high net-worth individuals is in principle sensible but here's the rub: it is a bad business model.
Presumably the way that Vault-Tec would derive revenue, is by selling a subscription service to a place within a Vault, as an insurance hedge against a nuclear war from happening. That's fine but as soon as such a nuclear war starts happening, the revenue stream will be cut off. In order to maintain the revenue stream, whilst there does need to be a contingent risk, that is a very real and present threat of the worst happening, the idea that that risk should be no longer contingent but realised, is bad.
The thing about other kinds of insurance policies, of which public health is also an insurance question, is that the same experiment can and does get performed over and over and over again. Billy Brown from Banana Town in his JMC Trucko XLT might not actually wipe himself out in a motor accident, but another 26 year old in a similar truck might do. Dorothy Dix from West Apple will eventually die of one of a dozen things that might go wrong with her, but she is equally one of several hundred thousand old ladies in similar circumstances. While Reg Sledge from Galah Heights, who is a roofer and framer, might not fall off the roof of a house that it being built, there are many other tradies who are just like him. In the aggregate, we can add all of these risks together, work out what the chance of an individual thing happening is; then adjust insurance premiums accordingly. Rememeber, an insurance premium is essentially a bet against the house where the person making the gamble does not want to win and the house has nigh on perfect information to hold up their end of the bet.
This is why Vault-Tec's business model and therefore the premise of the entire Fallout franchise itself, is nonsensical. At the core of the series, is an insurance question which the subscribers desperately hope and pray will never happen, and which Vault-Tec has no interest in happened for if it does, the goose that lays golden eggs will die.
The other side of the lore is also nonsensical. If Vault-Tec leases out the vaults for a series of social experiments, presumably in the advancement of some hitherto imagined interstellar space program, then that's fine I suppose except for the fact that there is no evidence anywhere that any kind of space program exists. Now I do not have a problem with the idea of an unreliable narrator but the Fallout series just doesn't do a particularly good job of convincing the player/watcher that this is the case. The whole franchise in every aspect, whether it is due to the soundtrack, or that making evil choices will actively hurt your game, or even the way that the protagonist Lucy in the TV series is portrayed as naïve, leads the player/watcher to a place of sincerity.
There's what is just so nonsensical about Fallout. Sincerity as narrative unfolding device is excellent if you then want to go for the massive plot twist and the big reveal. The problem is that Vault-Tec as villain, which is in control of the environment under which the narrative is being told, can not both be innocent and evil, can not both be duplicitous and sincere; internally the logic can not be true. Perhaps which is worst of all, is that Vault-Tec has no commercial reason to bring down itself. So while the games and the TV series might be fun, the business logic at their centre, is total nonsense.
Addenda:
Fallout's currency across most games is Nuka-Cola bottle caps. If you are going to use a readily available token in a post-apocalyptic world, then bottle caps from a self-confessed high sugar soft drink is as good as anything else I suppose. The question which I was asked to calculate is what the exchange rate of one Nuka-Cola bottle cap to the US Dollar is. This is also a nonsensical exercise.
If you want to work out the effective exchange rate, then you need to look at what the effective buying power of various currencies are. Pokemon is in fact an excellent case study for determining effective exchange rates because if you look at the price of Poke Balls, various potions, gums, gems, items, hotel stays, park entrance fees, et cetera, then prices in game remain remarkably stable across three decades. The going rate of 150P for a Poke Ball is pretty common in all areas; within all games. There is likely a deliberate effort on the part of Pokemon video game designers, to peg prices at 1₽ = 10¥ and/or 1₽ = $0.10
Fallout has no such price stability. Various medical packs and anti-radiation packs, price that you pay for passage to somewhere else, hotel stays for recovery, et cetera, have no sensible basis for prices. Furthermore, even though the games are open world, the reason why you would even need money at all at times is not obvious and prices are pretty arbitrary.
Yet strangely that somehow feels appropriate. In a post-apocalyptic world, the very meaning of money comes into sharp focus. Money is a token system which only derives value from the level of acceptance that people are prepared to place in it. When there is no state with the ability to claim their tokens back through taxation, then the value of the token must by inference be arbitrary.
A common feature among early American tokens before the issue of the Currency Act 1792, is that they sometimes were overtly self-aware of this fact. "Value Me As You Will - I Am Good Copper" is a slogan that appears on quite a number of New England tokens, for tokens that were nominally a penny? a cent? who knew? Nobody did.
The best way to describe the value of one Nuka-Cola bottle cap in Fallout is: 1N = 1N
No comments:
Post a Comment