No Sense of an Ending

The release of Fallout on Amazon Prime is a prompt to revisit a chapter I wrote a few years ago, on 'The Sense of an Ending: Fallout 3 as a Serial Fiction', in a collection Serialisation in Popular Culture edited by the excellent Rob Allen and?Thijs van den Berg.

In this chapter I used Frank Kermode's dated, but still suggestive, book The Sense of an Ending to argue that Fallout 3 involves three different 'endings' that are in productive tension with one another.

There is the narrated sense of an ending, in the form of a world that has been ended (and then restarted) by apocalypse.

But this end also constitutes a new beginning for the player. That great Bethesda step out moment when the doors of Vault 101 open and we emerge blinking at the wasteland is filled with ludic and narrative possibility. At this moment, we are motivated by the sense of uncertainty as to the ending at which we will drive. Where will we go next? What will define our sense of conclusion in a massively open world game?

While I'm sceptical of claims to have found 'the thing' that distinguishes game and literary fiction, Kermode's work suggests that if we're after a difference this new sense of an ending might be a candidate. For Kermode, literary fiction is defined by its end focus; even when we seem to start a story in the middle of things ('There was no possibility of taking a walk that day', 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times') we know as readers that by the final page the reason for opening in this way will make sense or have a causal logic. Unlike in our daily lives, everything that seems random or incidental turns out to be motivated by the conclusion (which may nonetheless be intriguingly ambiguous or open) that events are inevitably driving towards as we turn of the pages. For Kermode this is why literature really matters as it gives comforting order to our everyday uncertainty. Literary criticism matters too, as the art of 'making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives'.

This of course is a distinct from games, in which the opening of the story and the context of the storyworld generally do not - by design of the medium - presuppose one particular conclusion at which we must arrive.

This is exacerbated further by the serial economy of video games. Major games like Fallout are not compartmentalised in the manner of a single-decker novel. Rather, a video game's life and narrative possibilities are extended uncertainly with downloadable content, fan mods, hardcore replay modes. This is where the third sense of an ending, or lack of it, comes in. Nineteenth-century authors like Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle brilliantly exploited the serial form of publication, developing cliffhangers to encourage readers to consume the next instalment and maintaining narrative openness by leaving it unclear how far we are from the final outcome. However, at least as I argued in my chapter, the video game offers something qualitatively different from these forms of serial fiction and its consumption.

But the advent of video game's television adaptations and the box set means I would need to revisit this today. Linear fiction has in a sense been nuked, and the difference between literary, television, and video game stories has become a fallout zone in which each medium has an irradiating effect on the other. One can already see how the Prime series Fallout both drives towards the ending of its interior and sequential narrative, while simultaneously enticing players to embark on their own new narratives with the games (now free for Prime members).

While I still feel that the sense of an ending works rather differently across game and linear narrative according to the first two criteria outlined here, that third - the sense of an ending provided by the contained space of the television show or paperback novel - is now changed as we enter the era of the intermedial franchise.

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