Nerding Day: Lessons I Learned From Fallout (Patreon)

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to have a sex party on the moon. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…

I love Fallout almost as much as I love myself. See, my obsession with the apocalypse assumes that whatever monumental disaster wipes out the rest of humanity will obviously leave me wholly intact. Because I'm me, and you can't spell 'awesome' without 'M-E.' To increase immersion, New Vegas introduces a 'hardcore' mode that adds more realistic features to the game: You need to eat, stay hydrated, and get enough sleep to stay alive, there are more lasting consequences to injury, and your companions can die permanent deaths in battle. This finally allowed me to combine my two greatest interests -- which are, again, the love of myself and the death of humanity. I started one of these 'realistic' games, and vowed to play it as if it were really me in there. My traits, my habits, my morals. Along the way, I learned a little something...

New Vegas has a ton of interesting companions and they all have specific traits, fighting styles, and perks for the player. Here’s an impossibly strong schizophrenic purple Hulk who grants you invisibility. That’s exactly like my imaginary friend -- the one that got me into that special tutoring program with the neat pills and cool jackets.

Hey, meet the best sniper in the world and overall murder machine who highlights targets for you in the dark. He’s a bit too serious, but I also saw him shoot a raider in the eyeball from 500 yards, so I can make the jokes for the both of us.

Oh man, you’ll love the adorable hipster girl with explosive fists who allows you to build weapons on the fly. She’s funny, she’s sweet, and she can blow up a motherfucker with an uppercut. That’s everything I ask for in a friend, plus “sweet.”

You can join up with this doctor who uses a laser gun and robot armor. He’ll help you heal faster, and do the opposite of that to anybody else. It’s kind of like hanging out with Niles from Frasier, if Niles from Frasier broke off conversations to laser mutant dicks.

All the descriptors in “Mexican Zombie MacGyver” are awesome on their own, and this guy put all three together! It’s like meeting a dude with three first names, and all of them are Thundercrotch.

Finally, here’s a boring redneck girl who is utterly useless in battle and likes whiskey.

Guess which one is going on an epic journey that will change the fate of mankind forever?

Yep. It's the post-apocalyptic Waffle House waitress. Why? Because the perk she grants your character is the ability to get slightly drunker than usual, and to wake up without hangovers. This is the team we need to save our ravaged world from itself: A squirrely bearded dude wearing a fire helmet, a girl who soaks the seat of her lifted Cherokee every time she goes muddin’, and Whiskey (168).

If I'd Realized This About Myself Sooner:

I would have been wearing fire helmets more often. That's just a good look.

Apparently the only thing that stops me from living in a hand-built castle of old People Magazines and cat corpses is the amount of physical effort involved. Hoarding is just too much work in real life. But when there are no physical requirements for collecting garbage, I am an 83 year old widow whose family doesn't visit so much anymore. In New Vegas I refuse to throw literally anything away on the off-chance that, somewhere down the line, I’ll discover a secret formula that combines a coffee pot, two boxes of macaroni and cheese, and 168 bottles of whiskey into the world's deadliest superweapon.

So I’m this grizzled and dangerous warrior wandering the post-apocalypse performing heroic deeds - saving the president, fighting off ravenous ghouls, freeing captured sex slaves - but only after I loot this abandoned hair dresser of all its brushes and suspenders. Wait, is that a nightstand? Holy shit. I’ll be with you soon, Mr. President.

If I'd Realized This About Myself Sooner:

I'd still have the complete Moon Knight run. Those are collector's items now, worth upwards of $27 American dollars.

I genuinely went into this game trying to behave with the same set of morals, standards, and personality traits that I have in real life. And for the most part my video game counterpart is a good person: He doesn't steal, he doesn't hurt the innocent, he always tries to help when he can, and he only occasionally murders senior citizens for their eyeglasses.

When I started the game I chose Four Eyes, a trait that gives you a bonus if wearing glasses, a penalty if not. Since I wear glasses in real life, and I am better than the average person when I wear them, I took it. But I was figuring that if you built a character who needed glasses their entire life, and you joined them as an adult, they would have either found a pair of fucking glasses by now or died from trying to drink out of a radscorpion. I was wrong. After several hours wandering the nuclear desert half-blind, I found what is apparently the last pair of prescription eyeglasses in the entire world… on the nose of a gossipy old woman running a hotel. There was no hesitation: I took one look at her face, double-checked that the door was locked, and put six bullets in her head. For her glasses.

If I'd Realized This About Myself Sooner:

Well, I've paid for prescription eyeglasses about six times in my life at an average of around $150 per pair. So if I realized this sooner, that would've meant two things:

1. I would have saved like $900 dollars.

2. I would've gone down in history as the 3rd Wussiest Serial Killer, just behind Penguin Ted and the Soft Hands Strangler.

Update! The comments when this originally ran said that my character’s glasses were actually on the table next to me when I woke up. So there’s another lesson: My inattention to detail will one day kill somebody. The comments also told me that if I’d followed the old lady’s storyline, I’d realize she was actually selling people into slavery. So there’s yet another lesson: When I do inevitably kill, they’ll probably deserve it.

That son of a bitching Thirst Gauge: You can go days without food and sleep, but one sneeze and all that's left of you is a little pile of dry minerals. Now combine that with being a problem drinker in the nuclear Mojave desert, and that means I need water. A lot of water. Thankfully later in the game you get your own hotel suite complete with bathroom, and therefore water source. However, it is laid out in such a way that, upon entering the little alcove, the toilet is immediately to your left and the sink is just beyond it. At first I tried to pretend like I was a real human being with integrity, but the truth soon won out: If there were no health consequences, and if I didn't have to taste it, and if it was two feet closer to the door, I would drink out of the toilet.

And it's not like your character is alone in that suite. Every one of your companions is also there: Taking down time, reflecting on the dangers they've faced so far, contemplating the fleeting value of human life in this ruined world, wishing they'd spent more time with their loved ones, and chasing the hero of the wastes out of the bathroom because somebody forgot to put the seat down.

If I'd Realized This About Myself Sooner:

Well sure, it's only two feet further to the sink - but that shit adds up. I've crunched the numbers. Over my lifetime, cutting out those two feet would have saved me roughly 500 foot miles. So which would you rather do: Walk five hundred blistering miles, or drink just a little bit of toilet water? Yeah, that's what I thought. Glass houses, motherfucker. Glass. Houses.

There’s a point in New Vegas where you find yourself alone in a room with the man who tried to kill you. You have two options: You can fight him, or you can fuck him.

I tried shooting him at first, but he gunned me down. After seeing how that worked out, I reloaded my game and immediately bent over the dresser for him. Then I killed him while he slept so he couldn’t tell anybody I like to cuddle after.

It's not that I'm bothered by the game forcing these two options on me: It's that I only tried fighting him the one time. Maybe it was a fluke that he won, maybe it was a lucky shot, or he had some weakness I could've spotted the second time around - but no, I lost a fight and so I immediately presented like a baboon for my worst enemy.

If I'd Realized This About Myself Sooner:

I bet Jeremy Sanders, my middle-school bully, would have liked me a whole lot better.

Long before I discovered my soulmate, a woman who cures hangovers, I was roaming the wastes with that charming young lesbian who punch-explodes people I don’t agree with. I really liked her. We’d been through a lot together. She explodes people with punches. She had it all.

One day we wandered onto a small hill that was also a portal to hell: Huge mutants with rocket launchers, mini-guns, and giant swords descended on us. Somehow, when the bloodlust faded, we were victorious. Holy shit, how did we manage that?

Then a mutant de-cloaked behind her Predator-style and chopped her in half. After I killed him, I was left with a decision: Do I reload the game, bringing my dear friend back to life so she can laugh and joke and love again, or do I save over that file because now I have like sixteen missile launchers?

I erased her life. And I felt nothing.

Later in the game, a city guard glitched out and shot my dog. I murdered the entire town with a dress cane before I found 'reload' through the tears.

If I'd Realized This About Myself Sooner:

I would know more dogs and fewer people. I'm actually totally okay with this one.