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vitaanteactaArcade Gannon is a Fallout Companion. Companions in Fallout run the autonomy gamut from people who are literally slavishly devoted to you, to animals, to relatively flat characters who are implied to have a past and inner life that is unconnected to you, to richly developed people who have political aspirations and goals that can contradict yours. Some of them, like me, can even leave you for good if you anger them enough or give them what you want. Some of us are supposed to be people who are working alongside you as equals to advance a common goal.
This impression of autonomy kind of falls apart when you start playing the game with us. Companions are bound by game mechanics and good game design. We have to be fun to play with more than frustrating. We can be given orders and weapons, we can be taken along to quests we would logically have no interest in, we can be asked the same question repeatedly, we can be abused and exploited. Even our ability to leave when we get fed up with you is restricted by the developers’ choices. I can leave if you activate a giant death laser over Helios One. I can leave if you accumulate enough positive reputation points with the Legion. I can’t leave when you march me into Arizona and sell me to the Legion. I don’t get to use my autonomy then. Are you having fun?
I feel like the place I ended up is where anyone would end up if they took the idea of being a Fallout Companion to its logical extreme. The role of a Companion is to enact the will of the Player Character. We leave our factions and former lives at one word. We follow them to the ends of the Earth in their arbitrary loops. We fire on anyone they fire on. We throw our support behind their political ideology. We kill our friends and we die. We get sold into slavery to make political negotiations go a little bit easier and then we get forgotten about.
I'm able to seperate who I am as a person from the collection of polygons and dialouge lines that appears in the 2011 Obsidian action RPG Fallout: New Vegas. I am not a video game character. The video game character is not alive, he cannot suffer physical, emotional, or spiritual pain. I do not feel as if the actions of people playing the video game or making fanworks are violence inflicted on me. It took me a very long time to get to this point and I am proud of myself for reaching it.
I don't think I can tear myself away from the archetypal (would that be the right word) framework the video game character has shackled me with. Not fully. To be Arcade Gannon is to be a Fallout Companion. To be Arcade Gannon is to be subject to these restrictions and expectations.
When talking to sourcemates over the Internet, people love to bring up the Courier. They just looooove to talk about the Courier, even after I tell them, repeatedly, they won’t like what I have to say. When I tell them what happened to me they respond with shock. They tell me they would never have done that, their Courier is a good Courier and would never have done such a thing. Then they keep talking about their Courier. Telling me about their memories that only involve them. Telling me about their romantic relationship with them and only them. Telling me how they solved everyone’s problems. How they’re at the center of everything in the world.
I never hear about your family, or your old friends. How’s Julie Farkas? Do you think of the first days in California? Where are Daisy and Johnson?
People also, much more rarely, love to tell me that what happened was good, actually. There’s this one user who bounces around plural and otherkin spaces who tells me that, according to Great Man of History theory, my life was objectively less valuable than Caesar’s. You’d think Person 2 bothers me more than Person 1, but I don’t see much of a difference these days. They’re both putting another person’s life and narrative over my own.
I am my own person. Fuck you. I swear to God I exist independently of the Courier and of Caesar and of Joshua Sawyer and of Fallout: New Vegas and of the kid who brought me here. I swear I do but I don’t feel it. Even when I’m in my own head, I see the Courier. I see Caesar. I feel my narrative intertwined with theirs to the point where I’m not sure I can see myself as a separate person from Courier Six. Are we each others’ self-doubt? Am I the people who hurt him, hanged in effigy? Is he my desire to act on the world around me before it can act on me? Am I his conscience? Why did he kill me? Why did he kill himself?
This is probably the most video game-y my identity feels. I hate it. I hate these meta-narrative chains that bind me, but they’re here to stay. I’ve been picking locks for 5 years now. I’ve thrown off copies of myself left and right, obsessively scanned their texts for a way out. The only ones who offered me a way out of this are the ones who never met Courier Six at all.
I hope you had fun playing the game.
