Playing in Public: Radioactive Grace

For the last month or so I’ve been writing an epistolary narrative report of a playthrough of the 2008 open world RPG Fallout 3.

 

I wear a lot of hats. Author. Publisher. Screenwriter. Producer. Game dev. Got a lot of irons in a lot of fires. Keeps me busy, keeps me working, keeps me productive.

What does it all have in common? Storytelling. I eat, breathe, and dream story. A good chunk of my waking time is spent writing, and when I’m not writing I’m thinking about story issues.

The thing is, when you think in a certain way for a long time, the brain rewires itself to do that thing more efficiently. You burn new neural pathways. This form of optimization is a manifestation of what we think of as “intelligence.”

I’ve been at this for almost four years now, largely without stop. I don’t have a day job, I don’t have a safety net, I don’t make enough to really feel a sense of security about my financial situation, so I work at this real damn hard, all the damn time.

What does this have to do with playing Fallout?

It’s hard for me to kick back and not work. Even when I’m doing something else, I’m building story, developing ideas, and mining casual conversation for bits I can inject into my fiction later. Seriously. When I meet a new person, my priority is to get a feel for their character arc, their story, what their place and purpose is… the same way I evaluate characters in the books I write.

So it’s hard for me to justify spending hours playing a video game without turning it into story. Thus was born Radioactive Grace.

Radioactive Grace

Radioactive Grace is an epistolary narrative interpretation of a game of Fallout 3. As I play the game I put myself into the mindset of the character I’m playing, Grace, and make choices based on what her emotional state is based on the events of the game thus far. I take screenshots as I play.

Afterwards, I write it up as in-character journal entries, posted to my blog.

This has changed the way I play the game in three ways:

I didn’t build the character with optimization in mind. Instead, her stats are more or less even across the board.
I don’t explore everything, seek out every quest. I’m skipping much of the content.
I’m spending more time thinking about the character’s internal life. What she’s thinking. What she’s feeling. Sometimes this leads to sub-optimal choices.

Fallout 3 is a violent game, and it’s very difficult to avoid physical contact. Almost impossible to avoid killing people. How does this affect someone who comes from a peaceful and isolated upbringing? How does someone adapt to the sudden pressing need to kill to survive? How do the events of the game change who Grace is?

It’s been an interesting examination of character, and an interesting exercise for me… extrapolate the emotional journey of a character encountering events that I didn’t write. I do not control events. I only control the character’s reaction to events.

Sort of like real life.

And Grace Goes On

I don’t know how long I’ll continue writing and playing Grace for. A year, maybe. Maybe a few months. As long as I enjoy writing it, as long as people enjoy reading it. As long as I learn from it.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

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