Cold War Cultural Language Transference into Modern Media: Fallout 3

Stephen F Austin State University, Baker Pattillo Student Center, Twilight and Grand Ballrooms

Video games are fun. The fictional environments and plots they generate are designed with solely this purpose: to entertain. Some try to accomplish this goal by creating environments that are novel to most gamers, but most get by with reusing plots, settings, and language from older games, movies, books or historical periods. One such game, Bethesda's Fallout 3, draws on the imagery, language, and structure of Cold War America to create a chilling, post apocalyptic Washington D.C., complete with anit-communist propaganda posters and giant, irradiated cockroaches. While entertaining in its own right, a basic knowledge of the Cold War culture it draws upon adds a campy flair to Fallout that actually strengthens the gamer's connection to the environment and increases the entertainment derived from it. The game-world is just familiar enough give the player with such knowledge an eerie chill, but ridiculous enough to dispel that chill with a fit of laughter moment later.