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3 Essays about Fallout 4
W. Todd Kaneko
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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GOD BLESS THE CHILDREN OF THE BLAST
God bless the body, the way it’s full of eels and vicious grief. God bless the video game, this post-apocalyptic echo of the worst things in the real world. God bless the way radiation worms its way into the body, into every crevice and fracture, into lung and bone and heartache. The version of your father in your head is the image you see in the mirror at night, the boy you saw back before the cancer remade him in its image: the hawk’s talons, the wolf’s snarl, the fire’s feral misery. God bless the children of the dark. God bless the children of the dead prairie. God bless the children of the guard tower, of the barbed wire, of the broken highway running from all those places you dream about when you just want to dream of home. God bless this video game, a fun dream about waking up and living in a broken world. Your son makes up stories about his life before he was born into the body he wears now—he had a lot of friends and a son of his own, he says, and now they are all dead. He asks you if he is going to die one day because he knows your father is dead. I miss my Ji-chan, he says and you say that you do too because God bless the ghosts that live in our houses the way salt inhabits the ocean, the way breath inhabits a kiss, the way the memory of living in a concentration camp inhabited your father’s body, his father’s body, your body—you search your son’s eyes for a sign that he is haunted. You tell your son, yes—he will die one day, but hopefully not for a long time. God bless the shadow of the bomb. God bless the survivors of the blast, the only ones left after the end came and went and left you to figure out how to live after death by yourself. God bless the children who grow old before they die. God bless this video game, the real world disguised as clusters of pixels arranged to look like bursts of blood. God bless the children who learn to live with death inside them, as well as the ones who death eats from the inside out.
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SHACKS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
One day this place we call home will turn to rubble, the skies dark like the crow’s song, the ground strewn with the viscera of everyone we love. We know this because we see it on the news at night in between the shows our children watch before bedtime, in the doomscroll while we wait for them to fall asleep. But in this video game, I can build a shack from plywood shards and rubber to protect us from the end. When the radiation storms infuse our skins with unholy glow, when the bandits arrive with their makeshift firearms and Molotov cocktails, when the zombies shamble out from under the overpass and gather in our yard, the rickety walls I have built will keep our family from harm. And not just us, but our neighbors too—I can build a shelter out of some busted up swing sets and leaky rain barrels. I can build an apartment building with some broken pallets and scraps from a rusted-out school bus. The mechanic is simple: activate the workbench, then collect trash and debris to convert into construction materials. Yes—in this video game, I can rebuild America out of garbage, street by street, settlement by settlement. I can build water purifiers in puddles and plant crops by the side of the road and the people will come from miles around, whole families seeking shelter from the death storm. And I always give it to them because on the news, we saw that a gunman murdered eighteen schoolchildren in Texas while the police waited outside. Like a gunman murdered two people last week outside a high school football stadium in Michigan. Like a woman fired twelve shots at a school bus in Louisiana two weeks ago. Like a dude with a rifle just shot up the university in the next town. There are authentic dangers everywhere and we will never be ready for them because if our children were murdered, that would be the end, right? Because we can keep them safe, right?
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LOAD SCREEN
You carry over five thousand rounds of ammunition in this video game: shotgun shells, laser cells, bullets that explode into beautiful showers of sparks and blood—all of it ready at the push of a button, none of it weighing you down as you glide past the hardware store and away from the gang of super mutants you just slaughtered and left in the rubble. Running low on supplies, you spot the ruins of a convenience store on the next block. You ready your sniper rifle and step through the door toward whatever new fight awaits you inside. The game pauses to load the next area, the screen shifting to a picture of an enormous pistol, all ruby and chrome and aimed straight at your head. While you wait, you get a stream of factoids running across the screen to help you succeed: There is no criminal justice system in post-apocalypse America other than the path a bullet makes through the body and a shallow grave behind the courthouse. Shotguns deal more damage closer to your target and automatic weapons fire continuously with a single pull of the trigger. If you listen close, you think you can hear your son upstairs talking in his sleep, maybe something about watching cartoons or staying out of the lava at school. A school shooting is an assault at an academic institution by an attacker with a firearm. There isn’t a universal definition of mass shooting, but it is commonly understood that the United States has suffered the most mass shootings of any country in the world. Your son is not good at picking up his toys after he is done playing with them—at your feet lie a plastic tiger, a rubber dinosaur, and a limp spaceman. Your son says he wants to grow up to be a firefighter or a ninja, maybe a combination of the two. You have never owned a gun, but you keep a tee ball bat by the front door. Everything seems so real in limbo, the neighborhood’s wreckage outside, the gunfire in the distance, the star-spangled banner shredded across the wasteland. It continues loading, the game, the gun, America—everything.
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I like video games, but I don’t really qualify as a gamer. I have kids so my play time is limited to the middle of the night while they sleep, a few hours a few times a week at the cost of mental sharpness the next day. I don’t have time to experiment or immerse in a variety of games, so I mostly play Fallout 4 over and over again. It’s an open world exploration game so while my kids dream about whatever they are dreaming about, I wander the post-nuclear ruins of video game Boston with my video game dog fighting video game bad guys to bring stability and safety back to video game America. Some nights, I tell myself that I am playing the game in order to write about it, and I have been writing a few flash essays here and there because often, when I am playing Fallout 4, I can’t not think about real life: gun violence, racism, the rise of fascism, being a parent, things like that. Honestly, though—the hours logged with the game controller greatly outnumber the hours logged with the word processor when it comes to Fallout. I imagine that one day I might have a whole bunch of these little essays about Fallout 4, enough to collect into a little book or something that someone somewhere might like to read, but tonight there is a ruined boathouse where a bunch of wastelanders have gathered and I am supposed to save them from super mutants and build them a place to live.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition (New Michigan Press 2023). He is co-author of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash (Diode Editions 2021). His writing can be seen in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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