Living in Tahiti

Another on call weekend, so any attempts I make to do anything get interrupted.  Despite all that, I keep trying.  I’ve made it this far, so that is progress.  I may get this finished before morning. 

The only problem is I have no idea what to say.  None what so ever.  Work is work and it’s a holiday weekend that I will be working.  I don’t know what to say about any of it.  I know I’ve been playing more Fallout: New Vegas than I’d like to admit recently.  I finished Dead Money and I’m moving into Honest Hearts.  I’m far enough in (level 38) where money isn’t an issue, and neither is quality weapons of mass destruction.  The Barret, er Anti-Material Rifle, even does wonders against deathclaws, that problem is solved.  Really, it’s just a matter of finding and examining decent terrain.  I haven’t been killed by encounters in a while, so the game doesn’t frustrate me as much as you’d think by now.  I spent a lot of time dying in Dead Money because it’s got a bunch of sections where you have to find random hiding spots to prevent a collar from blowing up.  Yeah, it’s annoying.

That being finished, you end up back in the Mojave wasteland with more money than you need in the guise of 37 gold bars, snail walked out of the Sierra Madre Casino.  Sure, it took forever to get all that junk back to my hideout ,but with that kind of money…  Well, the game gets kind of easy when you don’t have to worry about money.  It’s about 8,000 caps per gold bar, which equates to an in game amount of about 296,000 caps.  So you’ve got all the money in the world to do whatever you want.

On the fun side, I got bored and wiped out Vault 3.  The Fiends inside made easy prey, but it did get me thinking about the kind of life they are described as having.  Though the backstory is interesting, it makes me wonder how such a society could survive.  That’s generally the description as provided by most dystopian futures, but the Fiends are an extreme example.  They are portrayed as drug users, murders, and rapists who have no clue what is going on due to their constant drug use. 

As with most video games, there is lots of talk, but not much action.  I think it’s the mental picture that fails to capture the true horror of this dystopian future.  The talk makes it sound bad, but the actions are generally the same as the friendlies of the Mojave Waste.  There is somewhat of a desire to wipe them out.  Only the back stories and discussions presented by several non-player characters make them seem despicable. 

The true horror of the situation is far beyond what could accurately be described in video games, or at least by people in civilized worlds.  The Art of Manliness describes such a situation as a trip from Siberia to Tahiti.  In Tahiti, there were no major differences between the sexes because resources were plentiful and there was no need to protect or fight for resources.  As such, the men and women end up in roughly the same roles.  In comparison to other areas, this was an aberration.  In the rest of the developing world, men held the role of protector and provider.  This resulted in a very low survival rate.  The average death age was late thirties to early forties.  So seeing people in Fallout New Vegas who have survived to old age seems weird. 

Back to the Fiends, though.  The Fiends show a sanitized, homogenized version of what happens in the world.  It shows a great disparity between the life in Tahiti and the life in Siberia.  Those living in Tahiti have little realization of what life was like in Siberia.  The Fiends are a good example of what a person living in Tahiti would think of a person living in Siberia.  In reality, the video game description of hell on earth just doesn’t match reality.  It’s much too easy.