Las Vegas is a town of leeches, squirming their wriggling heads out of every taxi cab and 24 hour massage parlor to scream for your money. If you work at a job in which you earn an income that is non-scalable, i.e., the amount of work you do is directly proportional to the amount of money you earn, you can compute exactly what your time is worth in a very objective sense. So your wallet is filled with condensed units of your life force. It’s good to remember this when you’re in Las Vegas, whether the modern one or the post-Great War version from Bethesda’s new video game. The aforementioned leeches that beg and demand your money are siphoning time from your life in the traditional, linear way, but also in a more accelerated way, since they are soliciting these condensed time/life force units from you. This is not so different from any center of commerce, conceptually. The thing that makes Vegas different is that literally everyone is doing this; there is no one without an angle. In a “normal” urban environment, there are people who are not directly trying to siphon money from you. Not so in Vegas. That’s what I like about Fallout: New Vegas. It’s the best Vegas simulator I’ve ever played, because it’s impressionistic. In eschewing the literal dynamics of modern Las Vegas and setting it in a fantasy world, the game captures Sin City’s apocalyptically bleak spirit.
I was trying to escape a sort of slow-motion personal apocalypse the last time I went to the real Vegas. I thought that some solace from my 50-hour work week, where I prostituted myself to a major corporation as a salesman, might be found in the bright lights and long nights. The Vegas Fantasy, for me, is usually a soft-focus, overexposed scene, in which I am flanked by laughing European woman as I break decorum and spin a roulette wheel myself, which the roulette spinner simply laughs off because of my charm, and a mountain of chips spills into my lap along with a glass of top-shelf vodka. The scenes that transpired instead were a bit more modest: many cab rides with a gouty friend who complained about even the shortest foot travel; an uncomfortable density of whores both too young and too old, and feeling somehow slighted at never being propositioned by these literal prostitutes, while consistently being given friendly “tips” and “referrals” by every last desk clerk and cab driver and door man and night club promoter and fellow patron, all of whom, it turns out, are participating in a cabal of kickbacks and commissions, while masquerading as well-meaning fellow citizens out to offer some friendly advice. Now I know that this is how the world operates—walk through a Bangkok market and it’s getting groped by ladyboys whose only English is “five dolla,” or you can opt for a provincial existence and be a number for Madison Avenue demographers to crunch beneath their expensive shoes. But I don’t want the world to operate that way. As a salesman, I had a vested interest in selling product, but I could never find it in myself to bend my humanity itself into whatever shape would be most pleasing for my customer, to lie, to nod impatiently while they shared pieces of their real struggles and aspirations, trying to railroad the conversation back into selling them something. Basically, I found it possible to sell things and still be a human being. But it was really exhausting. So I went to Las Vegas on a five day vacation which involved actually sleeping at night and writing wistful letters to people back home.
The characters in Fallout: New Vegas are wooden puppets who move unnaturally and mostly send you on fetch quests. As people, they lack any accountability, sending you across a town they know inside and out so that you, a stranger, may negotiate with a fellow townie, or steal something, or rough someone up. They treat you like a material asset. This evokes no humanity whatsoever. The token “lotus that grows in mud” inclusion in New Vegas is a medical philanthropy organization that, not surprisingly, sends you to negotiate and fetch on their behalf. The characters in New Vegas treat you like the characters in Real Vegas: as a puppet to be prodded into surrendering your life force.
The population in New Vegas is ultra-sparse in a way that is actually distracting. Even for the post-apocalypse, the New Vegas Strip feels empty in a way that’s either intentionally ultra-bleak or a natural design limitation. You spend maybe 11 hours hearing about the degradation and spectacle of New Vegas, only to find that every venerable casino has about 20 people in it, widely dispersed, playing identical games of blackjack and roulette. And every one of these people either demands something petty of you, or is wholly non-interactive, except as a body to mutilate in the shooting spree you will inevitably inflict on the Strip if you stay long enough. Just like the Real Vegas.
On waking up in your New Vegas hotel room, or in any Fallout room, for that matter, you’re likely to find that you’re surrounded with an impressive array of interactive objects. This is not unlike Real Life. For a moment, the thrill of simply being able to pick up nearly anything and move it somewhere else seems like a bottomless well of fun. That usually lasts about 5 minutes, until the time you realize that a Scorched Book and a Cup and Prewar Money all have the same purpose, which is to say, none at all. Just like Real Life. Most objects in New Vegas, and I mean “most,” as in the statistical majority, have to utility whatsoever. You can pick them up, drop them off a cliff, or hoard them on your person until you are Overburdened with a collection worthless junk. Just like in Real Life.
Traveling through empty rooms full of objects you can’t really use to perform menial tasks for people too lazy or inept or cowardly to help themselves doesn’t really require a simulator. Turn off your TV and step into Real Life. Welcome to the Real Wasteland.
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