Sanitizing the Apocalypse

Since Bethesda's acquisition of the Fallout franchise, player freedom has taken something of a back seat to public perception. In the sanitized wastes, slavery and drug addiction have received muted treatment. Fallout 3 included children, but made them unkillable. Fallout 4 excluded prostitution entirely. It is not difficult to imagine either prudential or ethical reasons for the tonal shift: the year of Fallout 's release was also the first year legal proceedings were filed, attributing real-world violence to video games. Significant political and philosophical attention has since been drawn to the phenomenon of virtual vice and the possibility that it could corrupt the youth. Protecting sales by avoiding bad press is probably sufficient practical motivation for watering down the player freedom that characterized the Fallout franchise's origins. But the possibility of bad press is itself the result of certain widespread moral intuitions concerning the appropriateness of simulated evil, namely, that it is (at least sometimes) wrong to depict wrongdoing. Foundational to the Fallout franchise, however, is the idea that it may be wrong to not depict wrongdoing.