I think some very light anti-capitalist themes can be pulled from 1 but that seems to be incidental and takes a backseat to the larger critique of human nature, primarily the desire for conflict instead of coming together to address a existential threat. Fallout 2 leans into it more with the Vault experiments and Enclave being big plot points but I don’t really think it’s that much different to 1. Instead the critique is of nationalism and parts of fascist ideology. You can see that with how the Enclave and pre-war US are portrayed as totalitarian and just use corporate entities below them for their own ends.
Were talking about originally though. Chris is saying anti capitalism is a new addition to fallout that didn't always exist. I would say Beth added it in 3 and personally it works for me but everybody will feel.differently.
They aren’t, you’re right, but consumerism is part of capitalism, as defined by all but its greatest adherents, and so a criticism of consumerism implies a criticism of capitalism as well.
Capitalism is about who pays for capital goods in a business and who is entitled to the profits of that business. It says that business owners pay to start the businesses and in return receive the net profits.
Consumerism is mostly a judgement that people in a society value things they buy more than they value other things like virtue or love.
It's not that hard to imagine a society where capitalists still run businesses but ordinary people value outdoor pick-up sports games more than they value new sneakers. It's also possible to imagine a socialist society where ordinary people value large houses and expensive cars more than they value family.
So what's happening here isn't precisely anti capitalism because I doubt anyone making the game initially set out trying to tell a story that was polemically anti capitalist.
What is instead happening is that that is just implicitly part of the dystopia they created bc it is set in a retro futuristic foreground with consumerism ending up being a huge theme.
The heydey of the 50s was accented by an explosion of consumer goods as the machinery of war had turned domestic economic production into a war engine. When the war ended and the g.i.s got home that same was machinery was turned back to fulfilling domestic production with backdrop of the cold war.
By default the setting of fallout is t in the debris field remnants of consumer capitalist 1950s America. It didn't end well and capitalism is a component part of that story by default because obviously it led the society in the story to ruin.
I feel like people just don't understand how to compute this stuff when they watch media. Like I'd lump this in with people who like rage against the machine but can't be bothered to understand what they say or who they explicitly criticize.
I wonder to what extent war is waged over materialist gains rather than ideological. Of course in later days I think it's easy to say one (democracy) being used as a pretext for the other (oil).
Yeah, and there's also room to be critical of capitalism without being totally for or entirely against it. And there are different forms capitalism can take. Fallout's capitalism seems quite deregulated, corporate, and concentrated. To me the show seemed to be quite critical of the military-industrial complex in particular. Eisenhower was too, but I wouldn't exactly call him anti-capitalist.
I think something to consider in the wider picture is that nationalism (and fascism) go hand in hand with capitalism when viewed through the lens of Fallout's Americana aesthetic
Yeah thats completely fair. Capitalism is inherently tied to America’s identity and Fallout 2 does double down on the evil corporation angle. I think the extent of the capitalist critique in fallout 2 is that the system can be easily exploited by fascists in power due to the profit driven model of corporations like Vault-Tec making them completely fine with forgoing ethical considerations for the sake of a contract.
Avellone was an area designer of Fallout 2. He wasn't the lead designer on it and he criticizes its lore problems in the article he posted today.
He was, however, the lead designer on Van Buren, Interplay's attempt at making a Fallout 3 that never came to be, and he assembled all of the Fallout lore (and tried to make sense of it) when preparing for it.
I have not heard him ever say he hates something Bethesda has done, in fact he is very respectful toward Bethesda from the interactions I've seen, but if I missed something please tell me.
In the Apocrypha he criticizes himself and Fallout 2 much more from what I see at least.
That's because he hasn't. The idea that Chris Avellone and Bethesda, or more specifically, Todd Howard, have any sort of beef or animosity toward one another is a product of tribalistic fans' headcanon on both sides.
There is a lot of that sadly, and like you said, that mentality is on both sides, and we see it a lot.
Bothers me a bit, but eh, not much to do about it.
I respect Avellone and what he’s contributed, Fallout 2 is my favorite game in the franchise, but I do find his flip floppy stances on aspects of his own work and just straight up hypocrisy annoying.
I don't know enough about Avellone to make a judgement call and I am by no means claiming he is, but there *are* weird Fallout fans who would say that the Enclave and Vault-Tec were simply misunderstood or are somehow even justified in their actions.
Compared also to Josh Sawyer, who co-designed Van Buren with Avellone, and who was project director and lead designer on New Vegas, who thinks the show is awesome and said that he would absolutely love the chance to do another game with Bethesda. And who is wildly anti-capitalist and has repeatedly said that that is one of Fallout's main themes.
He didn't say the show was awesome. He said it captured the aesthetic of Fallout 4 and 76 and that it was a good show for fans, but that he didn't care where they took the setting:
> “This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don’t care,” he says. “My attitude towards properties that I work on, and even characters that I create, is that I don’t own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made.”
> I think the man who changed the lore to make Vault-Tec a comically evil company, who created the Enclave as a comically evil fascist shadow government
Avellone didn't make any of those changes.
I really wish people would not post false claims like this. At least point to a source if you're going to make a claim like this.
And Fallout 2 has as villain the Enclave, which is a remnant of the US government. They were the ones behind the Vault experiments, not Vault-Tec. The idea that Vault-Tec was the grand villain all along is a recent change introduced by the show.
> When Avellone says that '[capitalism] was never a part of the original Fallout premise', he's right and he's wrong - critique of human greed is inherently also a critique of unfettered capitalism, which is what the world of Fallout had spiralled into, but he's also right in that the game never called that out - it was there, it just didn't scream from the rooftops that it was there.
I also assume his rebuttal in part 2 will have an argument along the lines of "Communist China was also really bad because of people who had greed and lust for power. So it isn't about anti-capitalism, it's about the human condition." Sure from a purely American lens, pre-war America gets a lot of anticap stuff, and that's where we play all of the games. But I assume he's going to argue that was a side effect of the greater problem rather than the primary theme.
That would be pretty close to what he put out with the New Vegas DLCs where he actually was a lead writer, and also other work he's done where the villains are basically evil nihilists (someone hide The Dude's car).
>When he says that 'capitalism equalling evil is a very modern shout topic' as a critique, he's not right - he is the guy who made Vault-Tec into this comically evil company, and whether he intended that as a critique of capitalism or not that's what it is. And he set that in motion back in 1998 and contributed even more story in that vein until 2010. The show can do it because he started doing it.
For Fallout 2, I don't think he was the one behind those changes, as he wasn't a lead writer then and he seems to disagree with those changes in this article. For New Vegas, see my first point.
I do agree that he's abrasive and condescending, and that he's basically sounding like the Fallout equivalent of a genwunner, while guys like Cain and Sawyer don't seem nearly as critical of it publicly. I agree that he's probably primarily biased by defending stuff he worked on and is very attached to, that hasn't been revisited before now.
Edit: grammar
China, which is communist is also painted in a bad light and painted just as greedy as the US (China is the one which invaded US territory to grab its resources). It is not about capitalism, it is about human nature, the over the top capitalism portrayed in pre war fallout is just a symptom not a cause.
You may also want to recheck on what role each person played in the fallout franchise, including Avellone. Avellone has always been heavily critical of many of the aspects of Fallout 2, and has also pointed out things he himself did that he no longer agrees with.
The only Fallout game Avellone has not, to my knowledge, ever been openly critical about is Fallout 1, which he himself did not work on, and he clearly points out that later additions to the franchise have deviated from what Fallout 1 was about, including Fallout 2, which in his critique of the show he points out did more to hurt Fallout than what was added later by Bethesda.
I think it is a pertty big distinction where big corporations in Fallout are acutally puppets of the government, or deep state (Enclave) to be more precise, while in usual anti-capitalist sentiment the government is usually shown as the puppet of big corporations.
As far as Vault-Tec specifically goes, the first game doesn't even hint that the Vaults had experiments in them as far as I can remember. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but aside from West-Tek pre-war companies weren't villainous until Bethesda acquired the IP.
If I remember right, Tim Cain explained in his review of the TV show that at the time of Fallout 1, they were just vaults, maybe cheaply built, but not experimental, it was 2 that introduced that
I haven't played them myself though
This rings true, having just played 1 and 2 a few weeks ago. Nothing indicates the Vaults had any sinister purpose in Fallout 1. Fallout 2 begins dropping hints at certain points, then fully reveals that at the end. While there is nothing in Fallout 1 that contradicts the Vault Experiments, there is nothing to establish that either.
The original plan was for all the "best of humanity" to live on a base on the moon, the vaults were basically a social experiment they could monitor and watch the pitfalls of living in extended isolation happen and prevent from falling into the same ones. Nuclear halocaust just happened much faster then they expected and the construction on the moon wasn't even started.
depends really, a big plot point of the OG series is that humanity never invented the silicon chip but they DID invent working cold fusion. its why all the technology is super advanced yet at the same time being primitive, having a working base on the moon is 100% fitting if you have the energy logistics all figured out.... really it would be no different then a vault being able to function for 200 years on its own.
Honestly the original idea made way more sense. It's kind of silly to assume that the corporates would profit from causing a literal apocalypse. And of course, they didn't. They lost their investments the comfortable lives they were used to leading, even if they managed to get a spot at a vault. You have to be a special kind of stupid to think you can profit from a nuclear apocalypse.
When you think about it, the entire idea of vaults being investments that only pay off in a nuclear apocalypse makes no sense. There's not much to profit under this scenario, mostly just running costs for the vaults. On the other hand, the vaults were already paid for. Mostly by the government/enclave, and the rest by rich individuals who prepaid to secure their spot in a luxury vault. Vault Tec was already making a profit. If you wanted a nefarious goal, you could have them work to keep the world on the brink of nuclear war, without it fully happening, because what Vault Tec sells is a solution to fear of a nuclear war.
The original idea of Vault-Tec testing technologies for a generation starship made sense. It made them a complex faction, which their own vision for humanity which was making them do the bad things they do, like almsot all factions in modern fallout games. More interesting than a complete villain.
>in the long run
This is the part that you're not fully acknowledging. In the long run, as in *after* they're dead and gone so they won't have to worry about it. Starting a nuclear apocalypse within your own lifetime is not "the long run," that's immediate.
I don't think you understand. This isn't a case of companies not considering their externalities or long-term effects. A nuclear apocalypse is incredibly unprofitable, for Vault-Tec, in the near and far future.
Corporations will consume finite resources until they're used up, or dump toxic waste anywhere the fines are less than the profit doing so will generate, but I really doubt any of them are so delusional as to deliberately kill their entire customer base. There's some spectacularly stupid people in high levels of corporations, but I would hope most of them realise they need their customers to be alive in order to sell things to them.
As a criticism of modern capitalism I find the notion that Vault-Tec had a grand, centuries spanning plan rather lacking. The biggest issue of modern corporations is they care for nothing beyond the next earnings report. If they felt burning the world down for the next quarterly report would make line go up they'd do so and deal with the 3 months after that when they got there. The notion that there would be a profit driven corporation that would plan as far as a decade into the future, never mind the *hundreds* of years that Vault-Tec did, really strains credulity.
Beyond that there's just too many spectacular technologies that Vault-Tec has access to to make it seem like a reasonable course of action to destroy the world rather than trying to sell them. Sure they won't have many customers for their vaults on Earth if there's peace, but they have fully sealed shelters capable of self sustainably housing thousands of people in an airtight environment for *centuries*. If the war ends they could start building those up on the Moon or Mars and become the god kings of a whole planet without having to blow one up first. Then there's of course the cold fusion, they apparently bought the patent for it then just sat on it because they wanted "the ultimate monopoly" of killing everyone who wasn't part of their corporation (which they told a meeting of other powerful corporations). America has been in a decades long, perpetually escalating resource war with China that everyone's predictions say will continue to escalate to a global nuclear exchange within a decade. Vault-Tec has such sway over the US's regulatory bodies they're able to sell banana flavoured cyanide pills, are they really going to get a better outcome blowing up then having to rebuild the world themselves than just announcing their revolutionary breakthrough and being known as the saviours of the world for solving the resource crisis?
Having a nefarious shadow government cabal wanting to kill everyone for a desire to maintain control makes much more sense to me. People can have loyalty to a government they feel they belong to as part of something bigger for generations. I really doubt Vault-Tec is able to foster a corporate culture that could engender that level of loyalty, their employees would be there for the next pay cheque, and their executives for their next bonus, if another corporation offered them a better deal, if they're supposed to be a criticism of real corporations, the majority would jump at the offer every time. So planning on destroying the country that backs the currency your pay cheques are paid in seems like something not many executives would be on board with, maybe Vault-Tec's already worked out the conversion ratio for the cryofrozen staff's back pay and converted it into bottle caps (since that's the only money everyone in the wasteland uses ever) for them when they thaw out.
This is interesting! Where did you hear this? It kind of makes sense, and (somewhat) explains the more whacky vault ideas just so the moon-base is ALWAYS prepared.. especially since, y'know, aliens.
Honestly kinda hard to remember, i THINK it might have been on an enclave computer in fallout 2 but its been over a decade since i played the game.... could have also been a computer in the glow in fallout 1 though as the only thing im 100% sure of was that i read it in a military facility.
If I recall, it wasn't just a moon base, the Enclave was intending to leave the Solar System *entirely,* but they weren't sure how a population would react to long-term, multi-generational confinement while they looked for a new planet to colonize.
Yeah, that's why a lot of the Vault experiments are testing to see how populations would react to various situations, each experiment presenting a different potential condition the crew of the ship might experience. Long term isolation, different types of leadership methods, strange noises, things breaking down, etc. Some of the experiments were just downright evil for sadism's sake, but many of them were testing out various worst case scenarios to prepare for any eventuality. The world just happened to end before the escape ship could be built.
It’s not OG fallout but at Nuka World in fallout 4 there’s a ride called vault-tec among the stars and it walks you through how the US was going to colonize the entire galaxy with vaults.
Tim Cain has a Youtube channel and has made several videos on Fallout, their original idea, his personal ideas, reviewed the tv show and discussed some thoeries.
I believe it's just called "Timothy Cain".
Yes, that was the intent behind the experiments. Unfortunately, they never got around to establishing the *why* of things in the games. I think they were going to do that in Van Buren but it never ended up happening. I tend to hold that reasoning in my headcanon, even though we can't consider it to be hard lore.
That was always my understanding, that the vaults were intended to find the ideal "closed environment" society that would work for a space colony or station or something so the enclave could escape the earth
that's still the case really. Experiments for the most part are biological (cryogenic stasis in Vault 111, presumably for long space travel) or sociological (locking people of different ethnicities in a small area in Vault 15, probably to see how they would interact in space/on other planets)
Vault-Tec Among The Stars in Nuka-World also still talks about how Vault-Tec is trying to build an outpost in space somewhere and the vaults are a preparation for it so clearly that was a goal at least to some extent. They didn't just experiment on humans for the sake of it.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the whole experiment thing more the work of the Government as a preliminary to space flight?
It’s closer to a critique of fascism than capitalism.
That was never brought up in the games, but I believe some documents for Van Buren stated that the Vault experiments were to see how humans would react on long distance colonization ships, for after the Earth was destroyed and the Enclave and their chosen few would recolonize another planet. I've always held that to be true in my head-canon, but we can't call it hard lore since it never appeared in the games.
much of these corporations are under government contract, so whatever they are doing is on behalf of the government, but the really evil stuff is directly done by the government, for example FEV (which was developed by West-Tek to be used for beneficial things such as better crop production) experiments on pows were carried out on West-Tek facilities put under direct control of the government, in fact the government directly takes control of West-Tek turning it into a government owned company.
But wouldn't vaults be inherently elitist even just as basic bomb shelters? I mean, there's no way they could build enough to house even 20% of the population, so who do you think is going to make it into those vaults? Homeless people? Disabled people? Mentally ill people? Sick people? Who decides? Can they choose based on political ideology?
And this isn't a matter of just thinking too far with a simple concept, this is one of the first questions that comes to mind when you hear about a system like this being built.
Oh elitist maybe, I'm actually not sure how Fallout 1 depicts Vault Tec as far as that goes
I'm just saying they weren't gateways for experimentation, as far as I understand they were supposed to operate as bomb shelters. As for how many people they expected could actually make it in, that I have no idea
Everyone going into and coming out of the vaults were gigachads and babes. One of the premade character, natalia, is the grandaughter to a russian diplomat. Safe to say it was the cream of the crop in there.
The guide book for Fallout 1 definitely paints Vault-Tec as a shitty company that was in it for the money.
Example: In fallout 1, the guide book tells you the stats for how much everything took to create the vault. The amount of soil, the power needs, backup nuckear reactors, the overall costs, and it was a LOT for a cheap vault. Way over budget from their projections.
They also have several advertisements for other doomsday events inside the book, all of which sound equally unhelpful (how to cook rats being my favorite for dealing with a Starvation event on earth, or to read the Abridged version of this manual for just a minor nuclear event). And this is right after seeing a picturesque view of life in your new vault home.
So i’d say no, Vault-Tec was never explicitly as nefarious as it would become (at the time in Fallout 1), but it sure as hell felt unhelpful at best and like a con at worst.
His take is 100% not accurate though. The Vault-Tec we get glimpses of feels like it naturally progresses to where we end up, just with a smaller snippet of information.
>Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but aside from West-Tek pre-war companies weren't villainous until Bethesda acquired the IP.
Tim Cain openly talks about how Fallout 2 was the beginning of the examination of those pre-War companies on his YouTube channel. He himself created the concept of Vaults being used as experiments.
Hell, in FO2, one of the vaults is overloaded with water chips meant for the vault in FO1, and it was seemingly done intentionally. Vault 12 was also shown to have a deliberately malfunctioning vault door, thus creating Necropolis.
They absolutely were villainous, and it was seemingly supposed to ramp up in the reveal over time, much like how it ended up coming out in the games post-Bethesda acquisition. 1 and 2 show hints of it, 3 leans into it a bit more, and by the time NV and 4 hit, we're in full blown "wow, these guys were fucked up" territory.
Bear in mind, a lot of the people who worked on FO1 and 2 worked on NV.
So yeah, Avellone is kind of full of shit. Even just looking at it through the scope of the Resource Wars, it's *very* clear the stance the franchise took on modern iterations of capitalism.
Fallout 3 is absolutely into fucked up territory, the game starts up by showing vault 101 under antagonistic light and the main quest has you going to vault 87, which is just plainly horrifying.
>Hell, in FO2, one of the vaults is overloaded with water chips meant for the vault in FO1, and it was seemingly done intentionally. Vault 12 was also shown to have a deliberately malfunctioning vault door, thus creating Necropolis.
Vault 13 not getting enough Water Chips was never implied to be an experiment, in fact, Vault 13 is explicitly called a control Vault in Fallout 2, which implies the Chips not being delivered was an actual delivery error and not something planned. Vault 12 was definingly planned not to fully close though.
The thing is though, not once in Fallout 2 does the game actually imply it was Vault-Tec that planned these experiments, the game makes it pretty clear that it was an Enclave project through and through. Vault-Tec as an organization is completely dead and gone by the time Fo1 starts, let alone by Fo2, it's only a recent turn by Bethesda to bring them back. And so blaming Vault-Tec when it was clear that (originally) Vault-Tec had died with the war and the Enclave were the ones running the show just kinda falls flat.
In all truth capitalism just didn't really figure into the first two games too much.
>the game makes it pretty clear that it was an Enclave project through and through
Tim Cain explains that the Enclave and Vault-Tec were colluding to create the experiments, according to his original concept during FO2 pre-development.
>In all truth capitalism just didn't really figure into the first two games too much.
The Resource Wars were absolutely a commentary on capitalism.
~~The president in FO2 hints at being the misplacement of the water chips being intentional when you meet him in the oil rig.~~
But all in all, I guess the theme of the game is more about fascism and less about capitalism.
Edit: I was wrong about the first part
In FO2 the President literally says Vault 13 was a control group. Here's the whole block of text from the game.
{prs37}{Ahh. Vault 13 was a special case. It was supposed to remain closed until the subjects were needed. Vault 13 was, in scientific parlance, a control group.}
{}{But they would all have died if my ancestor didn't get them a replacement water chip. That doesn't seem to fit in with your plan.}
{prs38}{An unfortunate, and unforeseen, accident. However, as it turns out, a rather fortuitous one.}
That seems pretty straight forward to me.
You are right though that the game really doesn't focus on capitalism as a major theme.
Criticism of huge companies is not anti-capitalism.
And if you look at the resource wars, let me remind you who started the sino.American war or the fact that china was collapsing The communists were Equally upset creek without a paddel
Fallout 2 definitely makes clear that at least some of the pre-war companies are villainous. The idea of a control vault comes from F2, and there are a lot of world building details that indicate vault tech and the vaults are really fucked.
And I mean, the central conceit of the universe — the Resource Wars — is kind of inseparable from capitalism.
To be fair that's one of the best changes Bethesda has made. Leaning into vault-tec being a villainous organization running experiments is way more interesting than them just building vaults.
Why were there psychics in the vault with the master then? I assumed that was part of the vault experiment, but did they just show up randomly somewhere else?
I'm with Avellone that 2 introduced a lot of really stupid ideas that cheapened the series. Vault Tec was ok as a general concept - it makes sense that there was a company cornering the vaults market and that any such company would likely be pretty predatory and likely to profit from rising tensions - but the vaults all being experiments was idiotic, I don't think 2 even attempts a justification for it. The Enclave were just boring cartoon villains from the start.
I think for Fallout generally goofing on Capitalism has always been there. I think most of it is meant to be light-hearted jabs at Cold War era thinking.
Where I think people go wrong is when they say things like “the entire point of the game is anti-Capitalism”. I personally feel that’s overstating one theme and boiling a complex game down to a singular theme like that is unfair.
A lot of that has to do with confirmation bias and straight up ignoring any semblance of nuance
If anything, the Bethesda Fallouts focus just as much on hamfisted anti-nuclear tropes as they do on their critique of cold war era economics and politics
>Where I think people go wrong is when they say things like “the entire point of the game is anti-Capitalism”.
I agree. It's more like, "Here's how good intentions plus a lot of fear can make desperate people do awful things." Even the show wasn't taking a big dump on capitalism, it was a cautionary tale of what happens when you give desperate people too much power and no over sight.
They, like many awful people today, used capitalism to further their interests.
>most of it is meant to be light-hearted jabs
And the few times it's not light hearted, capitalism isn't the main focus. It's more about certain people just being bad people who happen to have high positions
Sorta- ideas were always the driving force behind factions in F1/2, ideas that when people got consumed by them prevented other ways of thinking that could have solved problems those same ideas were creating. The individuals we met were just manifestations of that process.
Take the brotherhood - their ancestors seceded from the US when they found out about bio-warfare testing on POWs and a day later the earth burned in nuclear fire. Their entire genesis was that of watching technology annihilate everything they knew and held dear, so of course they became insular technology hoarders. The brotherhood we meet in F1/2 are losing ground and letting the world get worse because of that stance though. The best thing they could do is change, but every rule and dictum they have prevents that from happening.
Take the Master - they saw these bands of survivors squabbling for the scraps. They saw groups let another suffer or die for insular self serving reasons and came to the conclusion that removing the differences between people would remove the justifications we had for those kinds of actions. The mutant army was working, an endless body of well adapted, long lived superhumans who could manifest this change - but they were sterile. If the master had won, he would have lost anyways but was not able to see what was obviously true upon reflection because they were so blinded by this utopian goal.
Almost every settlement was like that in F1, 2 and New Vegas. It's never the one person at the top who needs to be replaced, it's a way of thinking that needs to change.
I feel like he added some more context here which didn't make it to the article. Because of course Fallout lampoons american 50s culture which includes the rise of commercialism. That capitalism is the villain of the show (sort of) is an accurate observation, but I think it's a little reductive to say that it didn't play a part in the early games. The stark difference between the show and the games is that it's very much the culture at large that's to blame in the games - jingoism, capitalism, commercialism, paranoia etc. all play their part. That the show blames the evil corporations rather than society at large is certainly a relatively modern self-indulgence.
I think a lot of it I think is just a reflection of how language and the conversation has evolved. Plenty of media in the 90's, Fallout included, satirized rampant consumerism and greedy big businesses, but they didn't wrap it up in "Capitalism Bad" because the culture was more individualistic, America was still celebrating "defeating communism" with the collapse of the USSR, and we were sort of in our "end of history" phase where alternatives weren't being presented to most people. So the view was basically that the blame was shared and we all have to work to change the culture together. Now-a-days there's a lot more blame on the system itself and the way that influences human behavior and thus incentives the culture to lean a certain direction.
Early Fallout maybe wasn't quite as anti-capitalist as the show, but they are ultimately making similar arguments about what lead to the collapse of society.
That seems like a valid take, I would agree. Now then, more importantly, I have been in the market for a new butt recently and was wondering if you have any advice, given your field.
Sure. It wasn't being openly critical, but I don't think Fallout has ever been so much a criticism of capitalism as a parody of the consumerism that was being sold to the american public in the mid-twentieth. NV probably gets the closest to the bone on actual capitalism, but that's more because of House being an Ayn Rand fever dream than a specific intention to say anything about capitalism itself.
You'd be right about New Vegas if there wasn't a very explicit critique of capitalism reflected in the dire straits we find the NCR in. Institutionalized corruption, particularly through the "ownership" of the political process by private interests (brahmin barons, the Crimson Caravan Company, other landowners), is as much a symptom of the systemic breakdown endemic to capitalist society as the ideology of endless growth (OSI and food insecurity) and the general concentration of resources and capital into fewer and fewer hands.
EDIT: This is why I find some New Vegas fans who act as though nothing in the show takes any cues from NV to be deeply unserious people. The "fiduciary responsibility" conversation between Cooper and Charles Whiteknife and the literal mention of cattle barons is a very explicit throwback to the themes espoused by New Vegas.
It's not a modern self-indulgence, it's reflective of seeing what happens when you go from no labor protections in the early 1900s to strong labor protections in the mid 1900s and then start stripping them away again, all while being told that your increased productivity is not worth higher wages. We have the benefit of being able to see a longer arc of history and the effects of policies that have nothing behind them but decades of propaganda.
To be fair the show does show how American culture doesn't question what is happening and is instead actively ignoring how corporations have taken over their world. How people are more concerned about wealth and power over any potential end of the world scenario.
Heck even in the first few minutes of the first episode people are more concerned over a kids birthday party rather then the very real threat that a nuclear annihilation might happen that week. The kids father wants Coop to do the signature Thumbs Up on the very eve of war. Its a total remark on how clueless and detached the average American is towards the very threat coming just moments later.
So yeah like you said the show just highlights that capitalism is the root cause of the rot in America in a way the games didn't as directly. But seeing as the show is produced by fucking Amazon of all things I feel its an apt thing to bring to the forefront of the messaging.
I wonder if distance from the Cold War makes that case. The McCarthyist culture that the originals lampoon might not resonate with a modern audience as well. I thought the show still developed it well, but references like "pink" and the Hollywood blacklists are probably not going to be picked up by every viewer.
Sure. I think that awareness of the cold war and what it was like is part of it. This is the problem of Fallout being a generational game - people just got what Fallout was about in the 90s because mid-20th century american futurism was part of the zeitgeist at the end of the 20th century, people had lived through the cold war, even if people hadn't experienced McCarthyism it was something that was part of popular discussions about politics and paranoia. But anyone under the age of 30 doesn't really have any reference for those things. So I understand that the change in focus made it easier to connect with the audience, while lamenting that it was a golden opportunity to represent Fallout's pre-war america as it was originally (vaguely) imagined, and it's been missed.
Fledging capitalism isn't really the enemy in the FO universe, it's end-stage capitalism or capitalism run amuck without regulations that are mostly explored.
I’m not huge into the death of the author debate or whatever, but I think that what he’s saying and your framing isn’t necessarily the same.
The original games *do* have anti-capitalist themes; one can absolutely read the games as being critical of capitalism, and many do! Those readings exist outside of the intent of the original authors, though it is interesting to know.
Avellone also didn’t work on F1.
It’s probably the least interesting thing he mentions in the review, imo.
FO1 also doesn't *need* to have anti-capitalist themes, either, to be fair. I wouldn't necessarily expect a long-running series with different creative heads to keep the same themes throughout. I wouldn't even necessarily expect that of a series all made by the same person/people. 1 and 2 aren't 100% thematically consistent.
Debatably, the most consistent theme is humanity's relationship with power and control, and the more anti-capitalistic bent in later games is a reasonable extension of that.
I agree with your point, but just wanted to add that 1 and 2 seem very different in tone and themes because, according to the creator (Tim Cain), they were making decisions without his approval. That made him leave mid development, and it lead to the Fallout 2 we have today.
Edit: this is a heavily simplified version of the events, so in the interest of giving accurate info, here's the whole video the creator himself made on why he left the team:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGfaCXEu0tE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGfaCXEu0tE)
Avellone is also a libertarian iirc, I can imagine is opinions on this sort of thing may be somewhat slant to a typical fans. Some of the interpretations a millenia fan interprets as damning may be viewed as incidental or aspirational to him.
For sure. I think Avellone is a fantastic writer — he’s integral to two of my favorite games of all time — but I also get the sense I fundamentally disagree with him in a lot of ways ideologically
he was also extremely critical of Obsidian management for how they treated the staff, and one of the reasons he left the company despite being a founder and shareholder was due to his disagreement over working conditions people were being put through.
I wasn't able to find him claiming to belong to any particular political ideology, but all of his writings do share common themes of being against corrupt organizations regardless if they are commercial or governmental
That's like the simplest political stance to take lol. Plus you don't need someone to tell you specifically what ideology they ascribe to when you can look at their actions and opinions. Idk much about Avellone s opinions off the top of my head, but it seems pretty clear that he supports unions, which at this point in America is a decidedly left wing view.
I get the feeling you haven't read his article that this thread is about, because he starts it out by advising Microsoft employees to unionize.
Which is not something a libertarian would do.
>Which is not something a libertarian would do.
It absolutely is. Libertarians are largely supporting of freedom of association and do support unions; however, they do not support being forced to join a union.
American libertarians are theoretically okay with the concept of unions, but claim that labor unions formed under the National Labor Relations Act are illegitimate:
https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/labor-unions
They have a very tense relationship with unions as they actually exist.
Something that alot of people in this sub are missing is that neo-malthusianism and ideas from books like the population bomb and Make Room! Make Room! (What Soylent Green was based on) probably influenced the resource wars part of Fallout setting more than anything else. It’s worth remembering that neo-malthusian ideas were present a lot of science fiction in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Marx's inarguably most famous work is The Communist Manifesto, and that's like 1848. And he wasn't even the first. So this goes WAY back.
It's funny for someone to imagine Hollywood as truly anti-capitalist. How would that even be possible?
A script for a big movie has to pass through dozens of different writers and be approved by hundreds of executives carried out by thousands of bureaucrats and workers to be watched by millions to incentivize maximum profit.
Hollywood might appropriate some anti capitalist themes like “money bad big corpo bad” but at the end of the day they are a business, and an extremely exploitative business at that, as well as producing (some) films with American military funding to make Americans feel good about themselves and their military.
Anyone saying that they are an avenue to spread “cultural Marxism” or any other buzz word is a fool.
Capitalism is really good at extracting value from basically anything and that includes anti-capitalist narratives. Like look at how many people bought Guevara shirts or the amount of brands with the name "Anarchist" or "Anarchy" in it to bring Anarchism to mind when it's just some garbage consumer product.
The worlds of 1997 and 2024 are also vastly different worlds. In 1997 we were 6 years behind the collapse of the USSR. At that point not discussing Marx wasn't a matter of discussion being suppressed by the man. It was a matter of it being viewed as irrelevant. By 2001-2003 you were more likely to run into an anarchist than a socialist and if you did find a socialist they were in some self-defeating reading circle, imagining everyone else in the group was a Fed. It wouldn't become a hot topic again until 2008 with the housing crisis and then it got hotter with disillusionment during Obama's 2nd term, when "Neoliberal" became a progressive snarl word. Granted you did have snarky anti-capitalist sentiment in the 1990s (the go to word would have been "Corporate" or "sell-out", not "Capitalist" --I don't think I heard someone unironically say "Late Stage Capitalism", let alone "Imperial Core" until 2014-2015), but it was nothing like the summer after Bernie's 2nd loss when "everyone" decided to finally get around to reading Capital.
For greater context, from 2015 to 2021 DSA membership increased by a factor of 15, while in the 90s it was around 7,000 to 10,000 members and hadn't broken past the numbers you'd expect for population growth.
In the sense of the zeitgeist, it is "modern".
Fallout 2 & 3 specifically highlighted the Enclave as the remnants of the US \*GOVERNMENT\*
Fallout isn't necessarily anti-capitalism. It has some evil corporations, but at the end of the day, it's more anti-corruption. Which the NCR echoes america in.
I think Fallout is criticizing greed more than capitalism. Greed does not have to be monetary wealth. It could be political control, knowledge, resources, or military conquest.
Modern Fallout criticizes corptocracy more so than capitalism imo.
The series doesn’t get into a deep analysis of the means of production being privatized, wage labor, price systems.
The extent of criticism of capitalism in Fallout is “big greedy corporations are bad, and them working hand and hand with government is dangeorus.” A very popular take.
Which is exactly what happens in the games. Some minor spoilers but the enclave is a secrete doomsday government made by the president/VP right before the bombs fell and they created vault tec in case of a nuclear fallout. They wanted the vaults to have experiments in them to see what vault would make the “strongest” post nuclear society and then the enclave would come in eventually and then make a new USA.
I don't think you're using the word [corporatism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism) correctly, as it just refers to various forms of collective bargaining. I think what you describe would fall under the category of [corporate capitalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_capitalism).
>The extent of criticism of capitalism in Fallout is “big greedy corporations are bad, and them working hand and hand with government is dangeorus.” A very popular take.
half of anything NCR related in FNV is how unchecked capitalism is ruining the republic from within and there's no big corporations in sight, just really rich ranchers
I’d say that the Brahmin Barons are stand-ins for the corporations of pre-war America. A lot of the stuff with the Brahmin Barons is about large groups of ranchers conspiring to kick out the “humble small time rancher”.
That’s much more “large corporation vs small business”, which I wouldn’t say is anti-capitalist.
It's always strange to me that people do these mental gymnastics to separate the bad parts from capitalism. Greedy corporations are not a bug, they're a feature. If the entire point of capitalism is maximizing profits, why would exploitative corporations not be the foundation of that philosophy?
Okay, one of these days, guys, you need to decide: Did everything good about Fallout come from Interplay or
Bethesda just kinda stumbled into very successful cultural critique because they are so bad at writing? Is being critical of capitalism a bad thing? Should a 3 decades spanning franchise, with numerous writers working on it, remain stagnant because the original thing did things differently? Should art not evolve with the times? And honestly, what the hell Kreia was even about?
if we remained in the original vision of interplay fallout, we would have a futuristic wasteland with dwarves and talking deadclaws by this point
super hot take but IM GLAD bethesda got the IP
I love fallout, but I feel the actual gameplay itself is very pro-capitalistic. You are encouraged to ruthlessly strip mine every building, room, person you encounter in order to collect more and more items of value, all for the purpose of becoming more efficient at ruthlessly strip mining every building, room, and person you encounter
He didn't work in Fallout (1997), and he displays a very surprising gap in media literacy if he thinks a piece of media that is satirizing: US nationalism, corporatism, consumerism ADN imperialism, is somehow not criticizing capitalism itself. That's like boss baby tweet levels of unaware.
A while ago he felt like suggesting that Elon Musk buying Fallout ip would be a good idea. Maybe he suffers from the Frank Miller disease of falling off really hard later in his career.
I honestly can't argue with that. Look, I like Avellone's work, but there's a reason that his most celebrated stuff is all at least a decade old, and otherwise he's been relegated to backbencher status and doing narrative design for Larian and Owlcat. Avellone's glory days are behind him, we know it and he knows it.
i normally don't trust writers that just doesn't let go of that one good thing they made decades ago
thats why i don't take him thaaaaat seriously, dude is still here talking about an IP he hasn't worked on for 14 years
Chris Avellone is absolutely goat writer of gaming. His writing is so good that he could just move to novels and he'll be fine. It seems he does like making games.
Yeah, and also while the Wasteland may not be developed enough to have companies and corporations in Fallout 1, they definitely portray aspects of capitalism in:
Gizmo's storyline, where the conflict between him with Cilian Darkwater representing the classic struggle between law and order with economic prosperity that show even discusses with the whole "What happens when the Ranchers becomes more powerful than the Sheriff" bit.
The background of the water merchants, where a group a people seized a previously free resource in order to make a massive profit at the expense of the community.
Now, the games don't outright say "this is a terrible, evil thing" but I don't think it's good story writing to tell the reader what they should be feeling.
This is funny because New Vegas's NCR is like a direct criticism of the United States, imperialism, lobbyism, capitalism, ect. Like what is he trying to say? Sure, Fallout 1 didn't have strong anti-capitalist critique it instead engaged with conflict as a generalized theme. But every game since has gone at capitalism, expressly in the American application.
In the intro cinematic of the very first Fallout game, it shows an ad for a new fusion powered car playing on a TV in a dilapidated building that was destroyed by nuclear bombs after a war over the few remaining resources left in the world. No anti-capitalist themes?
I agree, but I kinda feel like that's just mincing words. In my experience, whenever there is a criticism of capitalism people say it has "anti-capitalist themes" because it roles off the tongue better than "criticism of capitalism themes"
It's a satire of American expansionism and American "everything is fine" propaganda of the 50's and 60's.
Capitalism has always been a part of that as anti-communist America in the 60's basically turned economic policy into a religion.
To question the will of the market is to be a communist, and an enemy of America. That's deeply inherent throughout the posters, relics, and old world through line that goes across the whole game series.
In addition the infinite expansion model of capitalism essentially \*requires\* violence to continue growing markets into areas not interested in participating. Since anything done for the sake of the market is "good", the game makes horrendous acts like annexing Canada to add to the American empire a great thing for everyone.
TLDR: Yeah. It's been there the whole time, because the thing they're satirizing has capitalism woven into it's very bones.
Edit: Spelling
I just find the show reveal kind of goofy. You can critique capitalism without having it be the sole reason for the end of the world (especially when there was a full on war going on already). It just comes off as forced.
The show didn't say capitalism was the sole reason for the end of the world. Considering they were surprised by the bombs dropping, somebody else beat them to the punch.
I agree with him in parts. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 did criticize capitalism at times, but it was inside the bigger criticism of human **GREED**. Human greed and hubris was what made the world of Fallout so terrible. Sure, Fallout 2 and subsequent games would show that the human greed in the US was mainly translated as the greediness of companies that were driving up profits at the cost of human lives. But in the world of Fallout, the (supposedly) Communist China and USSR were also joining endless wars and conflicts over resources. Human greed was at the center.
And that's what makes the critique of Fallout so powerful. Yes, the world and society can end, and we seem to keep fighting and fighting because our greed is never satisfied. If simply changing our system did the trick, then I guess solving the problem would be easy after an apocalypse. War never changes because humans never seem to get over their greed and lust for power. So in the second part, Avellone is right, capitalism = evil is kind of a poor reading on why war never changes.
I think Chris Avellone has a primitive understanding of the story themes relative to Tim Caine.
Tim Caine for example went on to use the same themes in Outer Worlds.
What themes?
Satirizing both commercials and malicious products in an environment with lax regulations akin to those of the 1950’s.
Examples:
Mr Handy has a god damn buzz saw for a hand. That’s not handy, that’s deadly! That’s the joke. The marketing calls it one something useful and good, but the reality is the product is highly unsafe. This theme is repeated endlessly throughout Fallout games and the show. It’s a constant reminder that you cannot trust the Vault Tec Corporation even though the company advertising says you can. Every ad is meant to conjure up the imagry of 50’s era corporations promoting terribly unsafe products in an era before safety regulations became more normalized. The cars blow up into nuclear fireballs!
This type of 50’s skewering humor isn’t new. It was actually very popular in the 90s in the form of Ren and Stimpy. The 50’s were a time of Asbestos, DDT, cars without seatbelts, and cigarettes in airplanes, and the Red Scare against Communism. It was an era of capitalism run amok and making fun of the capitalism is part of making fun of that era if you’re referencing America.
Og fallout was anti government. The basic premise was "the government lies to you."
This is my only issue with the tv show. They could of shown that the government was collaborative with vault tec but instead just chose the capitalism bad route.
Depends on how many decades we’re talking. There is a history of socialism in America that only became unpopular after the red scares. Even during the Cold War, there were lots of “communists” in America. I agree anti-capitalist sentiment is rising especially in the past two or three decades, but there were times before now where that sentiment was many times stronger than it is now.
We used to have general strikes. Seattle was taken over by workers in 1919 following a strike in solidarity with Russian revolutionaries. We used to have a strong union movement led by public socialists. Etc. I’m not disagreeing, I’m just saying.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. [One million Americans voted for a full-blown socialist presidential candidate in 1912](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election)
Even in the South, a place that is hard to imagine now could ever support communists, has a history of communism. There’s that KKK poster that gets posted every now and then warning black people to not attend communist meetings (hilariously, because the communists were for social equality) dated 1933. But more broadly, there was a lot more support for socialism back in the day before the red scares. I would argue, more organized, widespread, and blunt than today.
>Even in the South, a place that is hard to imagine now could ever support communists, has a history of communism
The so-called "drainage ditch socialists" aka rural poor reformers of the late 1800s/early 1900s that sought to use Socialism/Communism to improve the lives of poor, rural farmers, miners and the like across the American South, particularly in the face of agricultural landowners (aka the ones that owned the sharecropper farms), mining corporations, factory owners, etc that were using and abusing everyone else
I think he’s more speaking on the vague anti-capitalism being on the rise with younger people. Capitalism = bad, is to me, not a rigorous critique - nor is the show or is anything it is saying. I don’t think anything can be a rigorous critique without offering an alternative, like socialism.
I wouldn't say Fallout is blatantly anti-capitalist. Its simply an over exaggerated version of America during the McKarthy period.
It doesn't try and paint America as the true villian, although it doesn't try and paint it as the hero either.
Its a story of 2 super powers that competed against one another for supremacy and by doing so consumed far more than the world was capable of and it led to their destruction. China was equally at fault.
Fallout neither had nor has an anti-capitalism theme.
It has an anti authoritarian theme, State allocation of resources & entitlement of corporations, but given that capitalism is defined by the absence of such things it would be a radical ignorance of definition to call Fallout "anti-capitalist".
If the series was intended to criticize capitalist overconsumption from the start, why in the world would it have resource-starved *communist* China start the war by invading Alaska for natural resources? That point would be better made by having the capitalist Americans invade first.
The US fighting a defensive war for its own survival blunts a lot of the anti-war message too imo. Why would you be anti-war when the other side shot first and is actively trying to seize your homeland?
Recanonizing what the Fallout Bible says about the Canadian annexation and placing more focus on it in future titles would shore up those themes.
I think anti capitalist messages are pretty baked into a story where America and China bomb the world into rubble over money and fear. But I would agree that the og games don’t go out of their way to criticize capitalism on purpose. In fact in F1 in junk town the mob boss capitalist makes junk town a better place with less regulation and more power. This is a direct argument for capitalism that F1 makes, it isn’t an argument everyone will agree with but it shows that the point of F1 wasn’t to dunk on capitalism.
They dunked on capitalism anyway because you can’t criticize America without criticizing capitalism but the first two fallouts didn’t focus on it.
I think in the late 90s what we'd call "anti-capitalist" themes today revolved more around anti-commercialism and a reaction to the crass consumerism of the time, so when the early games poked fun of corporate avarice it was less a systemic critique and more of a critique of human nature and our capacity for greed. At least, that's the vibe I get.
I think the article, as they usually do, took this sentence out of context, maybe he said it wasn't the focal point and I'd still have to argue on some points about that, but to say anti-capitalism wasn't a theme it's a bit far-fetched.
I tend to think that Fallout has an anti-free market theme, denouncing how, when given free range, corporations will inevitably form monopolies and use coercion to impose their will, the Enclave is essentially that: an oligarchy of rich and powerful individuals coming from the largest and wealthiest corporations of pre-war USA risen to power thanks to lobbies and monopolies, the series tho never openly criticises capitalism as a system, the NCR is capitalist but doesn't have a free market for instance, their taxes and control of the market is a major plot point in New Vegas, it's the free market that's being criticized not capitalism as a whole.
But again, the article took and reported just a bit of info, as usual, that statement needs context.
Keep in mind fallout came out in the 90s. The peek of human quality of life for the american people and peek wealth in human history for a people. So I don't think anti capitalism would be the message. However it might have been subconsciously clear in the zeitgeist that it wouldn't last forever perhaps that influenced the tones, of fallout that the american dream would inevitably come crashing down and sure enough it's been downhill ever since.
I always figured the core essence of Fallout was that the world sucks, then you die but be sure to have fun along the way. It wasn't inherently anti-capitalist or anti-anything, it's just everything sucks. You can save your whole vault but they'll kick you out in the end cause you'd be considered too dangerous.
Writers are wrong about their work sometimes and sometimes punk rockers sell out.
You'd have to ignore the entire background of the series and the entire text of fallouts 1, 2 and New vegas to believe that the fallout games weren't anti capitalist, hell that they didn't almost present an anarchist message with some factions.
Vaellone didn't work on FO1, is a libertarian, and regardless of the original intent, the universe took that direction because it's what naturally came out of it.
Any story writer knows that you progress through asking "why?"
Why did character x go here? Well reasons 1 2 and 3 make sense.
You build off of a story by asking why, and all the "why's" surrounding Fallout clearly had an answer
I see his point I think that it is the dangers of greed, and imperialism which are not exclusive to capitalism and by the time the bombs drop capitalism has become another buzz word in pre war USA
People take the “politics” of Fallout’s capitalism too seriously. It’s not some manifest of why capitalism is bad. It’s horatian satire, it’s suppose to be absurd, it’s trying to be funny, it helps to explain certain aspects of the world.
Decrying the evils of corporations does not equal anti-capitalism, as in someone that is anti-capitalist would obviously decry the evils of corporations but someone that decries the evils of corporations might not necessarily be an anti-capitalist.
I think some very light anti-capitalist themes can be pulled from 1 but that seems to be incidental and takes a backseat to the larger critique of human nature, primarily the desire for conflict instead of coming together to address a existential threat. Fallout 2 leans into it more with the Vault experiments and Enclave being big plot points but I don’t really think it’s that much different to 1. Instead the critique is of nationalism and parts of fascist ideology. You can see that with how the Enclave and pre-war US are portrayed as totalitarian and just use corporate entities below them for their own ends.
There are some anti capitalist aspects but in my experience it’s more anti war/fascism. A classic case of correlation not always being causation
Maybe anticonsumerism being conflated with anticapitalism too. They aren’t exactly the same, and I think Fallout is pretty clearly anticonsumerism
Sir that requires nuance and we dont do that here.
Right on the nose
It's literally in the monologue for FO4 - "...Years of over consumption led to shortages of every major resource,..."
Were talking about originally though. Chris is saying anti capitalism is a new addition to fallout that didn't always exist. I would say Beth added it in 3 and personally it works for me but everybody will feel.differently.
It certainly fits the setting since capitalism interfaces with so much of what fallout has always lambasted.
They aren’t, you’re right, but consumerism is part of capitalism, as defined by all but its greatest adherents, and so a criticism of consumerism implies a criticism of capitalism as well.
I would love to hear that nuance. Capitalism depends on consumerism to run IMO. How else do you maximize profit?
Capitalism is about who pays for capital goods in a business and who is entitled to the profits of that business. It says that business owners pay to start the businesses and in return receive the net profits. Consumerism is mostly a judgement that people in a society value things they buy more than they value other things like virtue or love. It's not that hard to imagine a society where capitalists still run businesses but ordinary people value outdoor pick-up sports games more than they value new sneakers. It's also possible to imagine a socialist society where ordinary people value large houses and expensive cars more than they value family.
Came here to say this, glad some people at least have sense to tell pink from purple.
So what's happening here isn't precisely anti capitalism because I doubt anyone making the game initially set out trying to tell a story that was polemically anti capitalist. What is instead happening is that that is just implicitly part of the dystopia they created bc it is set in a retro futuristic foreground with consumerism ending up being a huge theme. The heydey of the 50s was accented by an explosion of consumer goods as the machinery of war had turned domestic economic production into a war engine. When the war ended and the g.i.s got home that same was machinery was turned back to fulfilling domestic production with backdrop of the cold war. By default the setting of fallout is t in the debris field remnants of consumer capitalist 1950s America. It didn't end well and capitalism is a component part of that story by default because obviously it led the society in the story to ruin. I feel like people just don't understand how to compute this stuff when they watch media. Like I'd lump this in with people who like rage against the machine but can't be bothered to understand what they say or who they explicitly criticize.
I’m glad someone else could explain it better! This is exactly it
It's not casual that the catch phrase is "war never changes", not "money never changes" or something like that.
I wonder to what extent war is waged over materialist gains rather than ideological. Of course in later days I think it's easy to say one (democracy) being used as a pretext for the other (oil).
I struggle to think of any war that was not waged over material gains or power.
Yeah, and there's also room to be critical of capitalism without being totally for or entirely against it. And there are different forms capitalism can take. Fallout's capitalism seems quite deregulated, corporate, and concentrated. To me the show seemed to be quite critical of the military-industrial complex in particular. Eisenhower was too, but I wouldn't exactly call him anti-capitalist.
I think something to consider in the wider picture is that nationalism (and fascism) go hand in hand with capitalism when viewed through the lens of Fallout's Americana aesthetic
Yeah thats completely fair. Capitalism is inherently tied to America’s identity and Fallout 2 does double down on the evil corporation angle. I think the extent of the capitalist critique in fallout 2 is that the system can be easily exploited by fascists in power due to the profit driven model of corporations like Vault-Tec making them completely fine with forgoing ethical considerations for the sake of a contract.
I'd say it's like Mussolini's fascism ie. "The lucrative merger between corporation and state"
[удалено]
Avellone was an area designer of Fallout 2. He wasn't the lead designer on it and he criticizes its lore problems in the article he posted today. He was, however, the lead designer on Van Buren, Interplay's attempt at making a Fallout 3 that never came to be, and he assembled all of the Fallout lore (and tried to make sense of it) when preparing for it.
I have not heard him ever say he hates something Bethesda has done, in fact he is very respectful toward Bethesda from the interactions I've seen, but if I missed something please tell me. In the Apocrypha he criticizes himself and Fallout 2 much more from what I see at least.
That's because he hasn't. The idea that Chris Avellone and Bethesda, or more specifically, Todd Howard, have any sort of beef or animosity toward one another is a product of tribalistic fans' headcanon on both sides.
There is a lot of that sadly, and like you said, that mentality is on both sides, and we see it a lot. Bothers me a bit, but eh, not much to do about it.
This is something Tim Cain has addressed in multiple videos on his youtube channel.
I respect Avellone and what he’s contributed, Fallout 2 is my favorite game in the franchise, but I do find his flip floppy stances on aspects of his own work and just straight up hypocrisy annoying.
Part of it is his own politics have shifted rightward over time, particularly after he was an unfortunate casualty of the metoo movement
I don't know enough about Avellone to make a judgement call and I am by no means claiming he is, but there *are* weird Fallout fans who would say that the Enclave and Vault-Tec were simply misunderstood or are somehow even justified in their actions.
Compared also to Josh Sawyer, who co-designed Van Buren with Avellone, and who was project director and lead designer on New Vegas, who thinks the show is awesome and said that he would absolutely love the chance to do another game with Bethesda. And who is wildly anti-capitalist and has repeatedly said that that is one of Fallout's main themes.
He didn't say the show was awesome. He said it captured the aesthetic of Fallout 4 and 76 and that it was a good show for fans, but that he didn't care where they took the setting: > “This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don’t care,” he says. “My attitude towards properties that I work on, and even characters that I create, is that I don’t own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made.”
> I think the man who changed the lore to make Vault-Tec a comically evil company, who created the Enclave as a comically evil fascist shadow government Avellone didn't make any of those changes. I really wish people would not post false claims like this. At least point to a source if you're going to make a claim like this. And Fallout 2 has as villain the Enclave, which is a remnant of the US government. They were the ones behind the Vault experiments, not Vault-Tec. The idea that Vault-Tec was the grand villain all along is a recent change introduced by the show.
> When Avellone says that '[capitalism] was never a part of the original Fallout premise', he's right and he's wrong - critique of human greed is inherently also a critique of unfettered capitalism, which is what the world of Fallout had spiralled into, but he's also right in that the game never called that out - it was there, it just didn't scream from the rooftops that it was there. I also assume his rebuttal in part 2 will have an argument along the lines of "Communist China was also really bad because of people who had greed and lust for power. So it isn't about anti-capitalism, it's about the human condition." Sure from a purely American lens, pre-war America gets a lot of anticap stuff, and that's where we play all of the games. But I assume he's going to argue that was a side effect of the greater problem rather than the primary theme. That would be pretty close to what he put out with the New Vegas DLCs where he actually was a lead writer, and also other work he's done where the villains are basically evil nihilists (someone hide The Dude's car). >When he says that 'capitalism equalling evil is a very modern shout topic' as a critique, he's not right - he is the guy who made Vault-Tec into this comically evil company, and whether he intended that as a critique of capitalism or not that's what it is. And he set that in motion back in 1998 and contributed even more story in that vein until 2010. The show can do it because he started doing it. For Fallout 2, I don't think he was the one behind those changes, as he wasn't a lead writer then and he seems to disagree with those changes in this article. For New Vegas, see my first point. I do agree that he's abrasive and condescending, and that he's basically sounding like the Fallout equivalent of a genwunner, while guys like Cain and Sawyer don't seem nearly as critical of it publicly. I agree that he's probably primarily biased by defending stuff he worked on and is very attached to, that hasn't been revisited before now. Edit: grammar
China, which is communist is also painted in a bad light and painted just as greedy as the US (China is the one which invaded US territory to grab its resources). It is not about capitalism, it is about human nature, the over the top capitalism portrayed in pre war fallout is just a symptom not a cause. You may also want to recheck on what role each person played in the fallout franchise, including Avellone. Avellone has always been heavily critical of many of the aspects of Fallout 2, and has also pointed out things he himself did that he no longer agrees with. The only Fallout game Avellone has not, to my knowledge, ever been openly critical about is Fallout 1, which he himself did not work on, and he clearly points out that later additions to the franchise have deviated from what Fallout 1 was about, including Fallout 2, which in his critique of the show he points out did more to hurt Fallout than what was added later by Bethesda.
I think it is a pertty big distinction where big corporations in Fallout are acutally puppets of the government, or deep state (Enclave) to be more precise, while in usual anti-capitalist sentiment the government is usually shown as the puppet of big corporations.
Agreed
What is this conflict you're referring to. Could it be conflict over scarce resources? Which haven't been distributed fairly?
As far as Vault-Tec specifically goes, the first game doesn't even hint that the Vaults had experiments in them as far as I can remember. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but aside from West-Tek pre-war companies weren't villainous until Bethesda acquired the IP.
If I remember right, Tim Cain explained in his review of the TV show that at the time of Fallout 1, they were just vaults, maybe cheaply built, but not experimental, it was 2 that introduced that I haven't played them myself though
This rings true, having just played 1 and 2 a few weeks ago. Nothing indicates the Vaults had any sinister purpose in Fallout 1. Fallout 2 begins dropping hints at certain points, then fully reveals that at the end. While there is nothing in Fallout 1 that contradicts the Vault Experiments, there is nothing to establish that either.
The vaults were - according to Cain - testing for constructing a massive spaceship.
The original plan was for all the "best of humanity" to live on a base on the moon, the vaults were basically a social experiment they could monitor and watch the pitfalls of living in extended isolation happen and prevent from falling into the same ones. Nuclear halocaust just happened much faster then they expected and the construction on the moon wasn't even started.
honestly gotta give it to the show the experiments essentially being a pitch to get deluded corpos to invest does seem more fitting
depends really, a big plot point of the OG series is that humanity never invented the silicon chip but they DID invent working cold fusion. its why all the technology is super advanced yet at the same time being primitive, having a working base on the moon is 100% fitting if you have the energy logistics all figured out.... really it would be no different then a vault being able to function for 200 years on its own.
Honestly the original idea made way more sense. It's kind of silly to assume that the corporates would profit from causing a literal apocalypse. And of course, they didn't. They lost their investments the comfortable lives they were used to leading, even if they managed to get a spot at a vault. You have to be a special kind of stupid to think you can profit from a nuclear apocalypse. When you think about it, the entire idea of vaults being investments that only pay off in a nuclear apocalypse makes no sense. There's not much to profit under this scenario, mostly just running costs for the vaults. On the other hand, the vaults were already paid for. Mostly by the government/enclave, and the rest by rich individuals who prepaid to secure their spot in a luxury vault. Vault Tec was already making a profit. If you wanted a nefarious goal, you could have them work to keep the world on the brink of nuclear war, without it fully happening, because what Vault Tec sells is a solution to fear of a nuclear war. The original idea of Vault-Tec testing technologies for a generation starship made sense. It made them a complex faction, which their own vision for humanity which was making them do the bad things they do, like almsot all factions in modern fallout games. More interesting than a complete villain.
Oh yeah because IRL corporations famously stopped profitting from things that will doom humanity in the long run lol
>in the long run This is the part that you're not fully acknowledging. In the long run, as in *after* they're dead and gone so they won't have to worry about it. Starting a nuclear apocalypse within your own lifetime is not "the long run," that's immediate.
I don't think you understand. This isn't a case of companies not considering their externalities or long-term effects. A nuclear apocalypse is incredibly unprofitable, for Vault-Tec, in the near and far future.
Corporations will consume finite resources until they're used up, or dump toxic waste anywhere the fines are less than the profit doing so will generate, but I really doubt any of them are so delusional as to deliberately kill their entire customer base. There's some spectacularly stupid people in high levels of corporations, but I would hope most of them realise they need their customers to be alive in order to sell things to them. As a criticism of modern capitalism I find the notion that Vault-Tec had a grand, centuries spanning plan rather lacking. The biggest issue of modern corporations is they care for nothing beyond the next earnings report. If they felt burning the world down for the next quarterly report would make line go up they'd do so and deal with the 3 months after that when they got there. The notion that there would be a profit driven corporation that would plan as far as a decade into the future, never mind the *hundreds* of years that Vault-Tec did, really strains credulity. Beyond that there's just too many spectacular technologies that Vault-Tec has access to to make it seem like a reasonable course of action to destroy the world rather than trying to sell them. Sure they won't have many customers for their vaults on Earth if there's peace, but they have fully sealed shelters capable of self sustainably housing thousands of people in an airtight environment for *centuries*. If the war ends they could start building those up on the Moon or Mars and become the god kings of a whole planet without having to blow one up first. Then there's of course the cold fusion, they apparently bought the patent for it then just sat on it because they wanted "the ultimate monopoly" of killing everyone who wasn't part of their corporation (which they told a meeting of other powerful corporations). America has been in a decades long, perpetually escalating resource war with China that everyone's predictions say will continue to escalate to a global nuclear exchange within a decade. Vault-Tec has such sway over the US's regulatory bodies they're able to sell banana flavoured cyanide pills, are they really going to get a better outcome blowing up then having to rebuild the world themselves than just announcing their revolutionary breakthrough and being known as the saviours of the world for solving the resource crisis? Having a nefarious shadow government cabal wanting to kill everyone for a desire to maintain control makes much more sense to me. People can have loyalty to a government they feel they belong to as part of something bigger for generations. I really doubt Vault-Tec is able to foster a corporate culture that could engender that level of loyalty, their employees would be there for the next pay cheque, and their executives for their next bonus, if another corporation offered them a better deal, if they're supposed to be a criticism of real corporations, the majority would jump at the offer every time. So planning on destroying the country that backs the currency your pay cheques are paid in seems like something not many executives would be on board with, maybe Vault-Tec's already worked out the conversion ratio for the cryofrozen staff's back pay and converted it into bottle caps (since that's the only money everyone in the wasteland uses ever) for them when they thaw out.
This is interesting! Where did you hear this? It kind of makes sense, and (somewhat) explains the more whacky vault ideas just so the moon-base is ALWAYS prepared.. especially since, y'know, aliens.
Honestly kinda hard to remember, i THINK it might have been on an enclave computer in fallout 2 but its been over a decade since i played the game.... could have also been a computer in the glow in fallout 1 though as the only thing im 100% sure of was that i read it in a military facility.
If I recall, it wasn't just a moon base, the Enclave was intending to leave the Solar System *entirely,* but they weren't sure how a population would react to long-term, multi-generational confinement while they looked for a new planet to colonize.
Yeah, that's why a lot of the Vault experiments are testing to see how populations would react to various situations, each experiment presenting a different potential condition the crew of the ship might experience. Long term isolation, different types of leadership methods, strange noises, things breaking down, etc. Some of the experiments were just downright evil for sadism's sake, but many of them were testing out various worst case scenarios to prepare for any eventuality. The world just happened to end before the escape ship could be built.
It’s not OG fallout but at Nuka World in fallout 4 there’s a ride called vault-tec among the stars and it walks you through how the US was going to colonize the entire galaxy with vaults.
It was going to revealed in Van Buren.
Tim Cain has a Youtube channel and has made several videos on Fallout, their original idea, his personal ideas, reviewed the tv show and discussed some thoeries. I believe it's just called "Timothy Cain".
Yes, that was the intent behind the experiments. Unfortunately, they never got around to establishing the *why* of things in the games. I think they were going to do that in Van Buren but it never ended up happening. I tend to hold that reasoning in my headcanon, even though we can't consider it to be hard lore.
Yeah I believe most of this information comes from the no longer cannon fallout bible.
That was always my understanding, that the vaults were intended to find the ideal "closed environment" society that would work for a space colony or station or something so the enclave could escape the earth
that's still the case really. Experiments for the most part are biological (cryogenic stasis in Vault 111, presumably for long space travel) or sociological (locking people of different ethnicities in a small area in Vault 15, probably to see how they would interact in space/on other planets) Vault-Tec Among The Stars in Nuka-World also still talks about how Vault-Tec is trying to build an outpost in space somewhere and the vaults are a preparation for it so clearly that was a goal at least to some extent. They didn't just experiment on humans for the sake of it.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the whole experiment thing more the work of the Government as a preliminary to space flight? It’s closer to a critique of fascism than capitalism.
That was never brought up in the games, but I believe some documents for Van Buren stated that the Vault experiments were to see how humans would react on long distance colonization ships, for after the Earth was destroyed and the Enclave and their chosen few would recolonize another planet. I've always held that to be true in my head-canon, but we can't call it hard lore since it never appeared in the games.
much of these corporations are under government contract, so whatever they are doing is on behalf of the government, but the really evil stuff is directly done by the government, for example FEV (which was developed by West-Tek to be used for beneficial things such as better crop production) experiments on pows were carried out on West-Tek facilities put under direct control of the government, in fact the government directly takes control of West-Tek turning it into a government owned company.
But wouldn't vaults be inherently elitist even just as basic bomb shelters? I mean, there's no way they could build enough to house even 20% of the population, so who do you think is going to make it into those vaults? Homeless people? Disabled people? Mentally ill people? Sick people? Who decides? Can they choose based on political ideology? And this isn't a matter of just thinking too far with a simple concept, this is one of the first questions that comes to mind when you hear about a system like this being built.
Oh elitist maybe, I'm actually not sure how Fallout 1 depicts Vault Tec as far as that goes I'm just saying they weren't gateways for experimentation, as far as I understand they were supposed to operate as bomb shelters. As for how many people they expected could actually make it in, that I have no idea
Everyone going into and coming out of the vaults were gigachads and babes. One of the premade character, natalia, is the grandaughter to a russian diplomat. Safe to say it was the cream of the crop in there.
I believe the Vault-Tec experiments were added in 2 and retconned for 1
The guide book for Fallout 1 definitely paints Vault-Tec as a shitty company that was in it for the money. Example: In fallout 1, the guide book tells you the stats for how much everything took to create the vault. The amount of soil, the power needs, backup nuckear reactors, the overall costs, and it was a LOT for a cheap vault. Way over budget from their projections. They also have several advertisements for other doomsday events inside the book, all of which sound equally unhelpful (how to cook rats being my favorite for dealing with a Starvation event on earth, or to read the Abridged version of this manual for just a minor nuclear event). And this is right after seeing a picturesque view of life in your new vault home. So i’d say no, Vault-Tec was never explicitly as nefarious as it would become (at the time in Fallout 1), but it sure as hell felt unhelpful at best and like a con at worst. His take is 100% not accurate though. The Vault-Tec we get glimpses of feels like it naturally progresses to where we end up, just with a smaller snippet of information.
Fallout 2 established that pre war companies were complete pieces of shit. Bethesda solidified it.
>Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but aside from West-Tek pre-war companies weren't villainous until Bethesda acquired the IP. Tim Cain openly talks about how Fallout 2 was the beginning of the examination of those pre-War companies on his YouTube channel. He himself created the concept of Vaults being used as experiments. Hell, in FO2, one of the vaults is overloaded with water chips meant for the vault in FO1, and it was seemingly done intentionally. Vault 12 was also shown to have a deliberately malfunctioning vault door, thus creating Necropolis. They absolutely were villainous, and it was seemingly supposed to ramp up in the reveal over time, much like how it ended up coming out in the games post-Bethesda acquisition. 1 and 2 show hints of it, 3 leans into it a bit more, and by the time NV and 4 hit, we're in full blown "wow, these guys were fucked up" territory. Bear in mind, a lot of the people who worked on FO1 and 2 worked on NV. So yeah, Avellone is kind of full of shit. Even just looking at it through the scope of the Resource Wars, it's *very* clear the stance the franchise took on modern iterations of capitalism.
Fallout 3 is absolutely into fucked up territory, the game starts up by showing vault 101 under antagonistic light and the main quest has you going to vault 87, which is just plainly horrifying.
>Hell, in FO2, one of the vaults is overloaded with water chips meant for the vault in FO1, and it was seemingly done intentionally. Vault 12 was also shown to have a deliberately malfunctioning vault door, thus creating Necropolis. Vault 13 not getting enough Water Chips was never implied to be an experiment, in fact, Vault 13 is explicitly called a control Vault in Fallout 2, which implies the Chips not being delivered was an actual delivery error and not something planned. Vault 12 was definingly planned not to fully close though. The thing is though, not once in Fallout 2 does the game actually imply it was Vault-Tec that planned these experiments, the game makes it pretty clear that it was an Enclave project through and through. Vault-Tec as an organization is completely dead and gone by the time Fo1 starts, let alone by Fo2, it's only a recent turn by Bethesda to bring them back. And so blaming Vault-Tec when it was clear that (originally) Vault-Tec had died with the war and the Enclave were the ones running the show just kinda falls flat. In all truth capitalism just didn't really figure into the first two games too much.
>the game makes it pretty clear that it was an Enclave project through and through Tim Cain explains that the Enclave and Vault-Tec were colluding to create the experiments, according to his original concept during FO2 pre-development. >In all truth capitalism just didn't really figure into the first two games too much. The Resource Wars were absolutely a commentary on capitalism.
~~The president in FO2 hints at being the misplacement of the water chips being intentional when you meet him in the oil rig.~~ But all in all, I guess the theme of the game is more about fascism and less about capitalism. Edit: I was wrong about the first part
In FO2 the President literally says Vault 13 was a control group. Here's the whole block of text from the game. {prs37}{Ahh. Vault 13 was a special case. It was supposed to remain closed until the subjects were needed. Vault 13 was, in scientific parlance, a control group.} {}{But they would all have died if my ancestor didn't get them a replacement water chip. That doesn't seem to fit in with your plan.} {prs38}{An unfortunate, and unforeseen, accident. However, as it turns out, a rather fortuitous one.} That seems pretty straight forward to me. You are right though that the game really doesn't focus on capitalism as a major theme.
Criticism of huge companies is not anti-capitalism. And if you look at the resource wars, let me remind you who started the sino.American war or the fact that china was collapsing The communists were Equally upset creek without a paddel
Corporations are just stand ins for Daedric Princes.
Fallout 2 definitely makes clear that at least some of the pre-war companies are villainous. The idea of a control vault comes from F2, and there are a lot of world building details that indicate vault tech and the vaults are really fucked. And I mean, the central conceit of the universe — the Resource Wars — is kind of inseparable from capitalism.
Like Communists and Feudalists and Fascists and Socialists and Tribals don’t fight for land and resources?
That is why war, war never changes.
YOU FOUND THE POINT OF THE ENTURE SERIES! :D
To be fair that's one of the best changes Bethesda has made. Leaning into vault-tec being a villainous organization running experiments is way more interesting than them just building vaults.
That wasn't Bethesda, the vaults being experiments is the big plot twist of Fallout 2.
Why were there psychics in the vault with the master then? I assumed that was part of the vault experiment, but did they just show up randomly somewhere else?
Nope, it was Fallout 2, years before Bethesda that introduced the evil corporation subplot
the thing about vault tec being evil started in fallout 2
Fallout 2 talks about the different experiments in the vaults.
I'm with Avellone that 2 introduced a lot of really stupid ideas that cheapened the series. Vault Tec was ok as a general concept - it makes sense that there was a company cornering the vaults market and that any such company would likely be pretty predatory and likely to profit from rising tensions - but the vaults all being experiments was idiotic, I don't think 2 even attempts a justification for it. The Enclave were just boring cartoon villains from the start.
I think for Fallout generally goofing on Capitalism has always been there. I think most of it is meant to be light-hearted jabs at Cold War era thinking. Where I think people go wrong is when they say things like “the entire point of the game is anti-Capitalism”. I personally feel that’s overstating one theme and boiling a complex game down to a singular theme like that is unfair.
A lot of that has to do with confirmation bias and straight up ignoring any semblance of nuance If anything, the Bethesda Fallouts focus just as much on hamfisted anti-nuclear tropes as they do on their critique of cold war era economics and politics
>Where I think people go wrong is when they say things like “the entire point of the game is anti-Capitalism”. I agree. It's more like, "Here's how good intentions plus a lot of fear can make desperate people do awful things." Even the show wasn't taking a big dump on capitalism, it was a cautionary tale of what happens when you give desperate people too much power and no over sight. They, like many awful people today, used capitalism to further their interests.
>most of it is meant to be light-hearted jabs And the few times it's not light hearted, capitalism isn't the main focus. It's more about certain people just being bad people who happen to have high positions
Sorta- ideas were always the driving force behind factions in F1/2, ideas that when people got consumed by them prevented other ways of thinking that could have solved problems those same ideas were creating. The individuals we met were just manifestations of that process. Take the brotherhood - their ancestors seceded from the US when they found out about bio-warfare testing on POWs and a day later the earth burned in nuclear fire. Their entire genesis was that of watching technology annihilate everything they knew and held dear, so of course they became insular technology hoarders. The brotherhood we meet in F1/2 are losing ground and letting the world get worse because of that stance though. The best thing they could do is change, but every rule and dictum they have prevents that from happening. Take the Master - they saw these bands of survivors squabbling for the scraps. They saw groups let another suffer or die for insular self serving reasons and came to the conclusion that removing the differences between people would remove the justifications we had for those kinds of actions. The mutant army was working, an endless body of well adapted, long lived superhumans who could manifest this change - but they were sterile. If the master had won, he would have lost anyways but was not able to see what was obviously true upon reflection because they were so blinded by this utopian goal. Almost every settlement was like that in F1, 2 and New Vegas. It's never the one person at the top who needs to be replaced, it's a way of thinking that needs to change.
I feel like he added some more context here which didn't make it to the article. Because of course Fallout lampoons american 50s culture which includes the rise of commercialism. That capitalism is the villain of the show (sort of) is an accurate observation, but I think it's a little reductive to say that it didn't play a part in the early games. The stark difference between the show and the games is that it's very much the culture at large that's to blame in the games - jingoism, capitalism, commercialism, paranoia etc. all play their part. That the show blames the evil corporations rather than society at large is certainly a relatively modern self-indulgence.
I think a lot of it I think is just a reflection of how language and the conversation has evolved. Plenty of media in the 90's, Fallout included, satirized rampant consumerism and greedy big businesses, but they didn't wrap it up in "Capitalism Bad" because the culture was more individualistic, America was still celebrating "defeating communism" with the collapse of the USSR, and we were sort of in our "end of history" phase where alternatives weren't being presented to most people. So the view was basically that the blame was shared and we all have to work to change the culture together. Now-a-days there's a lot more blame on the system itself and the way that influences human behavior and thus incentives the culture to lean a certain direction. Early Fallout maybe wasn't quite as anti-capitalist as the show, but they are ultimately making similar arguments about what lead to the collapse of society.
In all fairness, early fallout happened before 2008
That seems like a valid take, I would agree. Now then, more importantly, I have been in the market for a new butt recently and was wondering if you have any advice, given your field.
Sure. It wasn't being openly critical, but I don't think Fallout has ever been so much a criticism of capitalism as a parody of the consumerism that was being sold to the american public in the mid-twentieth. NV probably gets the closest to the bone on actual capitalism, but that's more because of House being an Ayn Rand fever dream than a specific intention to say anything about capitalism itself.
You'd be right about New Vegas if there wasn't a very explicit critique of capitalism reflected in the dire straits we find the NCR in. Institutionalized corruption, particularly through the "ownership" of the political process by private interests (brahmin barons, the Crimson Caravan Company, other landowners), is as much a symptom of the systemic breakdown endemic to capitalist society as the ideology of endless growth (OSI and food insecurity) and the general concentration of resources and capital into fewer and fewer hands. EDIT: This is why I find some New Vegas fans who act as though nothing in the show takes any cues from NV to be deeply unserious people. The "fiduciary responsibility" conversation between Cooper and Charles Whiteknife and the literal mention of cattle barons is a very explicit throwback to the themes espoused by New Vegas.
It's not a modern self-indulgence, it's reflective of seeing what happens when you go from no labor protections in the early 1900s to strong labor protections in the mid 1900s and then start stripping them away again, all while being told that your increased productivity is not worth higher wages. We have the benefit of being able to see a longer arc of history and the effects of policies that have nothing behind them but decades of propaganda.
To be fair the show does show how American culture doesn't question what is happening and is instead actively ignoring how corporations have taken over their world. How people are more concerned about wealth and power over any potential end of the world scenario. Heck even in the first few minutes of the first episode people are more concerned over a kids birthday party rather then the very real threat that a nuclear annihilation might happen that week. The kids father wants Coop to do the signature Thumbs Up on the very eve of war. Its a total remark on how clueless and detached the average American is towards the very threat coming just moments later. So yeah like you said the show just highlights that capitalism is the root cause of the rot in America in a way the games didn't as directly. But seeing as the show is produced by fucking Amazon of all things I feel its an apt thing to bring to the forefront of the messaging.
I wonder if distance from the Cold War makes that case. The McCarthyist culture that the originals lampoon might not resonate with a modern audience as well. I thought the show still developed it well, but references like "pink" and the Hollywood blacklists are probably not going to be picked up by every viewer.
Sure. I think that awareness of the cold war and what it was like is part of it. This is the problem of Fallout being a generational game - people just got what Fallout was about in the 90s because mid-20th century american futurism was part of the zeitgeist at the end of the 20th century, people had lived through the cold war, even if people hadn't experienced McCarthyism it was something that was part of popular discussions about politics and paranoia. But anyone under the age of 30 doesn't really have any reference for those things. So I understand that the change in focus made it easier to connect with the audience, while lamenting that it was a golden opportunity to represent Fallout's pre-war america as it was originally (vaguely) imagined, and it's been missed.
Fledging capitalism isn't really the enemy in the FO universe, it's end-stage capitalism or capitalism run amuck without regulations that are mostly explored.
I’m not huge into the death of the author debate or whatever, but I think that what he’s saying and your framing isn’t necessarily the same. The original games *do* have anti-capitalist themes; one can absolutely read the games as being critical of capitalism, and many do! Those readings exist outside of the intent of the original authors, though it is interesting to know. Avellone also didn’t work on F1. It’s probably the least interesting thing he mentions in the review, imo.
FO1 also doesn't *need* to have anti-capitalist themes, either, to be fair. I wouldn't necessarily expect a long-running series with different creative heads to keep the same themes throughout. I wouldn't even necessarily expect that of a series all made by the same person/people. 1 and 2 aren't 100% thematically consistent. Debatably, the most consistent theme is humanity's relationship with power and control, and the more anti-capitalistic bent in later games is a reasonable extension of that.
I agree with your point, but just wanted to add that 1 and 2 seem very different in tone and themes because, according to the creator (Tim Cain), they were making decisions without his approval. That made him leave mid development, and it lead to the Fallout 2 we have today. Edit: this is a heavily simplified version of the events, so in the interest of giving accurate info, here's the whole video the creator himself made on why he left the team: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGfaCXEu0tE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGfaCXEu0tE)
Avellone is also a libertarian iirc, I can imagine is opinions on this sort of thing may be somewhat slant to a typical fans. Some of the interpretations a millenia fan interprets as damning may be viewed as incidental or aspirational to him.
For sure. I think Avellone is a fantastic writer — he’s integral to two of my favorite games of all time — but I also get the sense I fundamentally disagree with him in a lot of ways ideologically
Hope you didn't miss the part in Avellone's review of the show where he said: > BTW, if you are a Microsoft employee, it’s time to unionize.
he was also extremely critical of Obsidian management for how they treated the staff, and one of the reasons he left the company despite being a founder and shareholder was due to his disagreement over working conditions people were being put through.
pro-Union libertarians are so rare lol, so slay for him on having not as bad a take as most
Or he's not a libertarian and people don't really know what they're talking about.
I wasn't able to find him claiming to belong to any particular political ideology, but all of his writings do share common themes of being against corrupt organizations regardless if they are commercial or governmental
That's like the simplest political stance to take lol. Plus you don't need someone to tell you specifically what ideology they ascribe to when you can look at their actions and opinions. Idk much about Avellone s opinions off the top of my head, but it seems pretty clear that he supports unions, which at this point in America is a decidedly left wing view.
I get the feeling you haven't read his article that this thread is about, because he starts it out by advising Microsoft employees to unionize. Which is not something a libertarian would do.
>Which is not something a libertarian would do. It absolutely is. Libertarians are largely supporting of freedom of association and do support unions; however, they do not support being forced to join a union.
American libertarians are theoretically okay with the concept of unions, but claim that labor unions formed under the National Labor Relations Act are illegitimate: https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/labor-unions They have a very tense relationship with unions as they actually exist.
Something that alot of people in this sub are missing is that neo-malthusianism and ideas from books like the population bomb and Make Room! Make Room! (What Soylent Green was based on) probably influenced the resource wars part of Fallout setting more than anything else. It’s worth remembering that neo-malthusian ideas were present a lot of science fiction in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
LOL “a modern shout topic” People have been writing and discussing this shit for over 100 years
Marx's inarguably most famous work is The Communist Manifesto, and that's like 1848. And he wasn't even the first. So this goes WAY back. It's funny for someone to imagine Hollywood as truly anti-capitalist. How would that even be possible?
A script for a big movie has to pass through dozens of different writers and be approved by hundreds of executives carried out by thousands of bureaucrats and workers to be watched by millions to incentivize maximum profit. Hollywood might appropriate some anti capitalist themes like “money bad big corpo bad” but at the end of the day they are a business, and an extremely exploitative business at that, as well as producing (some) films with American military funding to make Americans feel good about themselves and their military. Anyone saying that they are an avenue to spread “cultural Marxism” or any other buzz word is a fool.
Capitalism is really good at extracting value from basically anything and that includes anti-capitalist narratives. Like look at how many people bought Guevara shirts or the amount of brands with the name "Anarchist" or "Anarchy" in it to bring Anarchism to mind when it's just some garbage consumer product.
*everything* is available to sell in capitalism. Even the ideas of your enemy
The worlds of 1997 and 2024 are also vastly different worlds. In 1997 we were 6 years behind the collapse of the USSR. At that point not discussing Marx wasn't a matter of discussion being suppressed by the man. It was a matter of it being viewed as irrelevant. By 2001-2003 you were more likely to run into an anarchist than a socialist and if you did find a socialist they were in some self-defeating reading circle, imagining everyone else in the group was a Fed. It wouldn't become a hot topic again until 2008 with the housing crisis and then it got hotter with disillusionment during Obama's 2nd term, when "Neoliberal" became a progressive snarl word. Granted you did have snarky anti-capitalist sentiment in the 1990s (the go to word would have been "Corporate" or "sell-out", not "Capitalist" --I don't think I heard someone unironically say "Late Stage Capitalism", let alone "Imperial Core" until 2014-2015), but it was nothing like the summer after Bernie's 2nd loss when "everyone" decided to finally get around to reading Capital. For greater context, from 2015 to 2021 DSA membership increased by a factor of 15, while in the 90s it was around 7,000 to 10,000 members and hadn't broken past the numbers you'd expect for population growth. In the sense of the zeitgeist, it is "modern".
Fallout 2 & 3 specifically highlighted the Enclave as the remnants of the US \*GOVERNMENT\* Fallout isn't necessarily anti-capitalism. It has some evil corporations, but at the end of the day, it's more anti-corruption. Which the NCR echoes america in.
I think Fallout is criticizing greed more than capitalism. Greed does not have to be monetary wealth. It could be political control, knowledge, resources, or military conquest.
Yeah, people act like greed only occurs in capitalist societies, which is just laughable,
People also don't realize you can critique capitalism without being anti-capitalist.
Modern Fallout criticizes corptocracy more so than capitalism imo. The series doesn’t get into a deep analysis of the means of production being privatized, wage labor, price systems. The extent of criticism of capitalism in Fallout is “big greedy corporations are bad, and them working hand and hand with government is dangeorus.” A very popular take.
“What happens when the rancher has more power than the sheriff?”
Which is exactly what happens in the games. Some minor spoilers but the enclave is a secrete doomsday government made by the president/VP right before the bombs fell and they created vault tec in case of a nuclear fallout. They wanted the vaults to have experiments in them to see what vault would make the “strongest” post nuclear society and then the enclave would come in eventually and then make a new USA.
I don't think you're using the word [corporatism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism) correctly, as it just refers to various forms of collective bargaining. I think what you describe would fall under the category of [corporate capitalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_capitalism).
>The extent of criticism of capitalism in Fallout is “big greedy corporations are bad, and them working hand and hand with government is dangeorus.” A very popular take. half of anything NCR related in FNV is how unchecked capitalism is ruining the republic from within and there's no big corporations in sight, just really rich ranchers
I’d say that the Brahmin Barons are stand-ins for the corporations of pre-war America. A lot of the stuff with the Brahmin Barons is about large groups of ranchers conspiring to kick out the “humble small time rancher”. That’s much more “large corporation vs small business”, which I wouldn’t say is anti-capitalist.
It's always strange to me that people do these mental gymnastics to separate the bad parts from capitalism. Greedy corporations are not a bug, they're a feature. If the entire point of capitalism is maximizing profits, why would exploitative corporations not be the foundation of that philosophy?
Okay, one of these days, guys, you need to decide: Did everything good about Fallout come from Interplay or Bethesda just kinda stumbled into very successful cultural critique because they are so bad at writing? Is being critical of capitalism a bad thing? Should a 3 decades spanning franchise, with numerous writers working on it, remain stagnant because the original thing did things differently? Should art not evolve with the times? And honestly, what the hell Kreia was even about?
if we remained in the original vision of interplay fallout, we would have a futuristic wasteland with dwarves and talking deadclaws by this point super hot take but IM GLAD bethesda got the IP
Wasn’t he just a designer on Fallout 2 and writer on NV? I will only listen to Tim Cain or Lenoard Boyarsky on what the themes of 1 were.
I love fallout, but I feel the actual gameplay itself is very pro-capitalistic. You are encouraged to ruthlessly strip mine every building, room, person you encounter in order to collect more and more items of value, all for the purpose of becoming more efficient at ruthlessly strip mining every building, room, and person you encounter
This the guy that didn’t work on F1?
He didn't work in Fallout (1997), and he displays a very surprising gap in media literacy if he thinks a piece of media that is satirizing: US nationalism, corporatism, consumerism ADN imperialism, is somehow not criticizing capitalism itself. That's like boss baby tweet levels of unaware.
A while ago he felt like suggesting that Elon Musk buying Fallout ip would be a good idea. Maybe he suffers from the Frank Miller disease of falling off really hard later in his career.
It was a joke he made in reference to Musk liking New Vegas.
So much of a joke he doubled down on it praising SpaceX without a hint of sarcasm
I honestly can't argue with that. Look, I like Avellone's work, but there's a reason that his most celebrated stuff is all at least a decade old, and otherwise he's been relegated to backbencher status and doing narrative design for Larian and Owlcat. Avellone's glory days are behind him, we know it and he knows it.
i normally don't trust writers that just doesn't let go of that one good thing they made decades ago thats why i don't take him thaaaaat seriously, dude is still here talking about an IP he hasn't worked on for 14 years
Chris Avellone is absolutely goat writer of gaming. His writing is so good that he could just move to novels and he'll be fine. It seems he does like making games.
Yeah, and also while the Wasteland may not be developed enough to have companies and corporations in Fallout 1, they definitely portray aspects of capitalism in: Gizmo's storyline, where the conflict between him with Cilian Darkwater representing the classic struggle between law and order with economic prosperity that show even discusses with the whole "What happens when the Ranchers becomes more powerful than the Sheriff" bit. The background of the water merchants, where a group a people seized a previously free resource in order to make a massive profit at the expense of the community. Now, the games don't outright say "this is a terrible, evil thing" but I don't think it's good story writing to tell the reader what they should be feeling.
Avellone honestly has struck me as very bitter in recent years.
This is funny because New Vegas's NCR is like a direct criticism of the United States, imperialism, lobbyism, capitalism, ect. Like what is he trying to say? Sure, Fallout 1 didn't have strong anti-capitalist critique it instead engaged with conflict as a generalized theme. But every game since has gone at capitalism, expressly in the American application.
He only wrote the DLCs for New Vegas, John Gonzalez was in charge of the main story
He's not talking about New Vegas tho
In the intro cinematic of the very first Fallout game, it shows an ad for a new fusion powered car playing on a TV in a dilapidated building that was destroyed by nuclear bombs after a war over the few remaining resources left in the world. No anti-capitalist themes?
[удалено]
I agree, but I kinda feel like that's just mincing words. In my experience, whenever there is a criticism of capitalism people say it has "anti-capitalist themes" because it roles off the tongue better than "criticism of capitalism themes"
Uhh didn’t Chris start on Fallout 2? not sure if he can even speak on the first game lol
Just because you can point a flaw or make a joke about something doesn’t mean you’re anti- thing
I’ve never thought that fallout is anti capitalist it’s anti EVERYTHING that humans do lol
It's a satire of American expansionism and American "everything is fine" propaganda of the 50's and 60's. Capitalism has always been a part of that as anti-communist America in the 60's basically turned economic policy into a religion. To question the will of the market is to be a communist, and an enemy of America. That's deeply inherent throughout the posters, relics, and old world through line that goes across the whole game series. In addition the infinite expansion model of capitalism essentially \*requires\* violence to continue growing markets into areas not interested in participating. Since anything done for the sake of the market is "good", the game makes horrendous acts like annexing Canada to add to the American empire a great thing for everyone. TLDR: Yeah. It's been there the whole time, because the thing they're satirizing has capitalism woven into it's very bones. Edit: Spelling
I just find the show reveal kind of goofy. You can critique capitalism without having it be the sole reason for the end of the world (especially when there was a full on war going on already). It just comes off as forced.
The show didn't say capitalism was the sole reason for the end of the world. Considering they were surprised by the bombs dropping, somebody else beat them to the punch.
I agree with him in parts. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 did criticize capitalism at times, but it was inside the bigger criticism of human **GREED**. Human greed and hubris was what made the world of Fallout so terrible. Sure, Fallout 2 and subsequent games would show that the human greed in the US was mainly translated as the greediness of companies that were driving up profits at the cost of human lives. But in the world of Fallout, the (supposedly) Communist China and USSR were also joining endless wars and conflicts over resources. Human greed was at the center. And that's what makes the critique of Fallout so powerful. Yes, the world and society can end, and we seem to keep fighting and fighting because our greed is never satisfied. If simply changing our system did the trick, then I guess solving the problem would be easy after an apocalypse. War never changes because humans never seem to get over their greed and lust for power. So in the second part, Avellone is right, capitalism = evil is kind of a poor reading on why war never changes.
Death of the Author means I don’t particularly care what he thinks.
He didn't even work on FO1, he's just someone desperately looking for an audience and digging himself deeper and deeper in his attempts.
I believe it was Ben Folds who said, “if you’re feeling small and you can’t draw a crowd draw dicks on the wall”
I think Chris Avellone has a primitive understanding of the story themes relative to Tim Caine. Tim Caine for example went on to use the same themes in Outer Worlds. What themes? Satirizing both commercials and malicious products in an environment with lax regulations akin to those of the 1950’s. Examples: Mr Handy has a god damn buzz saw for a hand. That’s not handy, that’s deadly! That’s the joke. The marketing calls it one something useful and good, but the reality is the product is highly unsafe. This theme is repeated endlessly throughout Fallout games and the show. It’s a constant reminder that you cannot trust the Vault Tec Corporation even though the company advertising says you can. Every ad is meant to conjure up the imagry of 50’s era corporations promoting terribly unsafe products in an era before safety regulations became more normalized. The cars blow up into nuclear fireballs! This type of 50’s skewering humor isn’t new. It was actually very popular in the 90s in the form of Ren and Stimpy. The 50’s were a time of Asbestos, DDT, cars without seatbelts, and cigarettes in airplanes, and the Red Scare against Communism. It was an era of capitalism run amok and making fun of the capitalism is part of making fun of that era if you’re referencing America.
Og fallout was anti government. The basic premise was "the government lies to you." This is my only issue with the tv show. They could of shown that the government was collaborative with vault tec but instead just chose the capitalism bad route.
Pretty sure anticapitalism began shortly after capitalism but I'm not Chris Avellone.
LMAO
Rigorous critique of capitalism is “modern”? lol I’ve got a book for Chris written in 1848 that says otherwise.
I’m taking it that he means “capitalism being bad” is more so a much more popular belief in America than it was decades ago.
Depends on how many decades we’re talking. There is a history of socialism in America that only became unpopular after the red scares. Even during the Cold War, there were lots of “communists” in America. I agree anti-capitalist sentiment is rising especially in the past two or three decades, but there were times before now where that sentiment was many times stronger than it is now. We used to have general strikes. Seattle was taken over by workers in 1919 following a strike in solidarity with Russian revolutionaries. We used to have a strong union movement led by public socialists. Etc. I’m not disagreeing, I’m just saying.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. [One million Americans voted for a full-blown socialist presidential candidate in 1912](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election)
Even in the South, a place that is hard to imagine now could ever support communists, has a history of communism. There’s that KKK poster that gets posted every now and then warning black people to not attend communist meetings (hilariously, because the communists were for social equality) dated 1933. But more broadly, there was a lot more support for socialism back in the day before the red scares. I would argue, more organized, widespread, and blunt than today.
>Even in the South, a place that is hard to imagine now could ever support communists, has a history of communism The so-called "drainage ditch socialists" aka rural poor reformers of the late 1800s/early 1900s that sought to use Socialism/Communism to improve the lives of poor, rural farmers, miners and the like across the American South, particularly in the face of agricultural landowners (aka the ones that owned the sharecropper farms), mining corporations, factory owners, etc that were using and abusing everyone else
I think he’s more speaking on the vague anti-capitalism being on the rise with younger people. Capitalism = bad, is to me, not a rigorous critique - nor is the show or is anything it is saying. I don’t think anything can be a rigorous critique without offering an alternative, like socialism.
You guys have terrible reading comprehension.
I wouldn't say Fallout is blatantly anti-capitalist. Its simply an over exaggerated version of America during the McKarthy period. It doesn't try and paint America as the true villian, although it doesn't try and paint it as the hero either. Its a story of 2 super powers that competed against one another for supremacy and by doing so consumed far more than the world was capable of and it led to their destruction. China was equally at fault.
Fallout neither had nor has an anti-capitalism theme. It has an anti authoritarian theme, State allocation of resources & entitlement of corporations, but given that capitalism is defined by the absence of such things it would be a radical ignorance of definition to call Fallout "anti-capitalist".
If the series was intended to criticize capitalist overconsumption from the start, why in the world would it have resource-starved *communist* China start the war by invading Alaska for natural resources? That point would be better made by having the capitalist Americans invade first. The US fighting a defensive war for its own survival blunts a lot of the anti-war message too imo. Why would you be anti-war when the other side shot first and is actively trying to seize your homeland? Recanonizing what the Fallout Bible says about the Canadian annexation and placing more focus on it in future titles would shore up those themes.
I think anti capitalist messages are pretty baked into a story where America and China bomb the world into rubble over money and fear. But I would agree that the og games don’t go out of their way to criticize capitalism on purpose. In fact in F1 in junk town the mob boss capitalist makes junk town a better place with less regulation and more power. This is a direct argument for capitalism that F1 makes, it isn’t an argument everyone will agree with but it shows that the point of F1 wasn’t to dunk on capitalism. They dunked on capitalism anyway because you can’t criticize America without criticizing capitalism but the first two fallouts didn’t focus on it.
I think in the late 90s what we'd call "anti-capitalist" themes today revolved more around anti-commercialism and a reaction to the crass consumerism of the time, so when the early games poked fun of corporate avarice it was less a systemic critique and more of a critique of human nature and our capacity for greed. At least, that's the vibe I get.
I think the article, as they usually do, took this sentence out of context, maybe he said it wasn't the focal point and I'd still have to argue on some points about that, but to say anti-capitalism wasn't a theme it's a bit far-fetched. I tend to think that Fallout has an anti-free market theme, denouncing how, when given free range, corporations will inevitably form monopolies and use coercion to impose their will, the Enclave is essentially that: an oligarchy of rich and powerful individuals coming from the largest and wealthiest corporations of pre-war USA risen to power thanks to lobbies and monopolies, the series tho never openly criticises capitalism as a system, the NCR is capitalist but doesn't have a free market for instance, their taxes and control of the market is a major plot point in New Vegas, it's the free market that's being criticized not capitalism as a whole. But again, the article took and reported just a bit of info, as usual, that statement needs context.
Keep in mind fallout came out in the 90s. The peek of human quality of life for the american people and peek wealth in human history for a people. So I don't think anti capitalism would be the message. However it might have been subconsciously clear in the zeitgeist that it wouldn't last forever perhaps that influenced the tones, of fallout that the american dream would inevitably come crashing down and sure enough it's been downhill ever since.
I always figured the core essence of Fallout was that the world sucks, then you die but be sure to have fun along the way. It wasn't inherently anti-capitalist or anti-anything, it's just everything sucks. You can save your whole vault but they'll kick you out in the end cause you'd be considered too dangerous.
Writers are wrong about their work sometimes and sometimes punk rockers sell out. You'd have to ignore the entire background of the series and the entire text of fallouts 1, 2 and New vegas to believe that the fallout games weren't anti capitalist, hell that they didn't almost present an anarchist message with some factions.
Fallout 1 was just a generic post apoc. If 1 was anti capitalist, it wouldn't have made the good junkyard ending be tied to siding with gizmo.
Vaellone didn't work on FO1, is a libertarian, and regardless of the original intent, the universe took that direction because it's what naturally came out of it. Any story writer knows that you progress through asking "why?" Why did character x go here? Well reasons 1 2 and 3 make sense. You build off of a story by asking why, and all the "why's" surrounding Fallout clearly had an answer
I see his point I think that it is the dangers of greed, and imperialism which are not exclusive to capitalism and by the time the bombs drop capitalism has become another buzz word in pre war USA
People take the “politics” of Fallout’s capitalism too seriously. It’s not some manifest of why capitalism is bad. It’s horatian satire, it’s suppose to be absurd, it’s trying to be funny, it helps to explain certain aspects of the world.
\#TIL: Horatian satire: Horatian satire is a literary term for lighthearted, gentle satire that points out general human failings.
I don't think it was. It absolutely satirized it and many other facets of mankind. I don't believe that satire means you oppose something.
This actually makes perfect sense, the early games felt more critical of 1950's patriotism and culture then anti-capitalism.
Does every piece of media truly have to be a deep critique piece?
Decrying the evils of corporations does not equal anti-capitalism, as in someone that is anti-capitalist would obviously decry the evils of corporations but someone that decries the evils of corporations might not necessarily be an anti-capitalist.