[Fallout: New Vegas title screen]
One game that I particularly enjoy is Fallout: New Vegas. The game’s strong role-playing and narrative aspects have made it a personal favorite for me. As advertised in its trailer, it may seem at first to possess many mechanics that would align it with more prolific “first-person shooters” (i.e., gun utilization and management assets, movement mechanics that enable real-time engaging of an opponent on a virtual battlefield, inventory and health management assets, etc.), but I believe it is its narrative and role-playing mechanics that make it stand out. The game very strongly utilizes dialogue choices to advance both critical and non-critical plot moments – and relies heavily upon environmental storytelling objects and similarly gained lore elements (i.e., text entries, voice recordings), to make sense of why certain actions and options are presented to the user. Thus, rather than creating a fast-paced, shoot-em-up dynamic with these mechanics, a more complex personality-management dynamic is afforded to the user. The user, both using these running-and-gunning tools and role-playing choices, can flesh themselves out into a detailed virtual character with supposed thoughts and motives – and a reputation as of such. This sort of virtual cowboy personification is very fun for me, and it definitely helps me escape the world through a fantasy and narrative of my own!
