Environmental Storytelling: A Critique
Environmental storytelling is a form of storytelling that teaches you a lot about characters, history and plot through the design and the objects inside a setting. For example, you could learn a lot about me by entering my bedroom: there’s junk food wrappers on the floor, my PlayStation is next to my bed with a plethora of games, my school books are on my desk, along with photos of my family. Much like a detective would recreate a crime scene, you could spend time going through all of my personal effects and learn a lot about me: that I have a terrible diet, play too many video games, and don’t do my homework enough, but also more personal things, like I have a little brother that I care about a lot, or that I’m about to graduate and am nervous about finding a job.
With Environmental Storytelling, you could extrapolate so much information by digging around in a room, provided the room is full of details, hints, and objects you can learn from. This is the primary form of storytelling used in Bethesda Softworks’ game Fallout 4, a game set in post-nuclear-apocalyptic Boston in the year 2287. I’ve played Fallout 4 for tens of hours over the span of four years and have had my share of experiences with the game’s storytelling, both good and bad. In this essay, I will examine the strengths and weaknesses of Environmental Storytelling through its execution in Fallout 4.
Let’s start with a summary of the world of Fallout games.
Fallout’s history deviates from our world’s history during the Cold War. The Soviet Union does not disband, the Cold War does not end, and the fear of/race against Communism doesn’t end.
Just as our race against communism during the Cold War fueled innovations like sending the first astronauts to the Moon, in Fallout, the race against communism fueled innovations powered by nuclear technology, advancing our sciences, our medicine, our energy usage, but most importantly, our military technology.
Fallout’s America has a very over-the-top ideology that is prevalent everywhere you go in the games. Kapell and Elliot discuss this topic in their book “Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History”: “With humor as its main tool, [Fallout] exploits and exposes the cultural and intellectual forms through which American historical consciousness (and thus, in part, ideology) is reproduced.”
This ideology persists for centuries, coming to a head on October 23rd, 2077, when America and China engage in all out Nuclear war. The battle is dubbed “The Great War,” and lasts only 2 hours, when both countries send tons of nuclear warheads at each other, reducing each other to rubble.
Fallout’s America is populated with the remnants of two worlds. The first is of America’s government’s ideology. It is hilariously boisterous and over the top, and it promotes nationalism, capitalism, and the same optimism that came after World War II, where we thought we could do anything as a nation. In Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History BY THIS GUY AND THAT GUY, they discuss the “American High” that took the country by storm after World War II. To paraphrase, they say Americans that endured the Great Depression and World War II suddenly owned cars and houses, were defeating the diseases that terrified their parents’ generation through advancements in modern medicine and flying across the world in jet aircrafts like science fiction heroes. This national attitude carries over heavily into the Fallout world and persists for 200+ years after.
The other world is that of America’s everyday people, who are caught in the middle of a war between the Communists in China and Russia, and America. While the government’s attitude accurately describes the media that Americans were exposed to and influenced by, it doesn’t describe the daily troubles and joys of Americans, employees and parents and children and doctors and professors. Fallout makes certain to separate those two things and show that people’s lives were much richer and more nuanced than the American attitude at the time.
In Fallout 4, as in all other Fallout games, we explore both in great detail. In Fallout 4, we explore the remains of Boston, Massachusetts, 210 years after America was destroyed by nuclear war.
One example of Fallout 4’s environmental storytelling is your exploration of Cambridge Polymer Labs. In this laboratory, we learn about the lives of 5 scientists working for the US Military on the day the bombs dropped. Before the Great War, Cambridge Polymer Labs was contracted by the US government to create a special type of armor for their soldiers. Days before the bombs dropped, the general that represented the army to the lab threatened to pull funding if their progress didn’t advance sooner, but on October 22nd, a day before the bombs fell, the general was much calmer, and told the head of the lab to hold his 4 employees in the lab overnight. When the bombs fell, only the head of the lab knew. After reaching the general over a HAM radio, he said the only way he and his team would be evacuated was if his team finished their research. So, in an effort to save his team, the head of the lab, Jon Elwood, trapped his team inside the lab until they were done, and didn’t tell them the bombs had dropped and civilization as they knew it was over.
You explore the remnants of the lab 210 years later after the events above happen. When you enter the lab, the building is falling apart, the floor is disintegrating, metal exposed, vines growing over the ground, scorch marks covering the walls, and of course, corpses. In the lab, you uncover documents recording the progress and goals of the research project, but you also find internal emails sent between the head of the lab and his wife, also a researcher trapped in the lab, asking each other whether they’ll be okay. Asking what happened to the world outside, what will they have to go back to. You find emails between the head of the department and the IT chief of the lab, who hijacked the lab’s defensive turrets and trapped himself in a computer room, threatening to kill everyone if they don’t let him out, clearly going stir-crazy being trapped in the lab. You find feral ghouls (irradiated zombies) that used to be highly esteemed chemistry researchers. The last thing you find is the final email sent from Jon Elwood, the head of the lab, to his wife Erika. I’ll let you read it for yourself:
“Ericka, I’m sorry.
I know I haven’t been the best husband, but I’ve done everything I can to try and protect you since the attack. If you are reading this, I hope it is because you finished the project and can use the radio to signal for extraction.
I can’t hold out any longer.”
Jon Elwood became a feral ghoul, and when you at last enter his office before leaving, you must kill it. Watch the full story here, told by the lovely Oxhorn.
Fallout 4’s stories are full of real-feeling people, drenched with backstory and emotion, and they are as fun as they are heartbreaking. However, it is not without its problems. One of the worst problems is that there are no physical characters, which means no character design (no unique colors or clothes to recognize), no character animations, and no dialogue. In my opinion, even while you can learn almost everything there is to know about a person just by sifting through their things, there is nothing that can replace the engaging response of having a living being in front of you, talking to you, visually displaying their emotions. I believe that, as humans, we naturally respond differently and engage more to a living, moving person.
Another problem has to do with the implementation of Environmental Storytelling. While previous Fallout games were rich with storytelling and role-playing mechanics, Fallout 4 ditched much of that in favor of better shooting mechanics — which they’ve never been good at developing — in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. This shifted the focus from immersing yourself in your character’s ideology to focusing on the looter-shooter aspect of Fallout, leaving story as a sort of afterthought that has little in-game rewards.
And rewarding story and exploration is incredibly important to Environmental Storytelling, and here’s why. Environmental Storytelling asks a lot from its audience. It asks them to create the story for themselves, paying close attention to documents and the clues laid out in a room. So, the game doesn’t reward discovery as much as it rewards shooting enemies, and when it does encourage discovery, it feels slow and sluggish.
