another post about the apocalypse

There's a chapter about a third of the way through The Stand--I'm pretty sure it shows up in both the original and uncut versions, but I don't have a copy at hand to check--that talks about the survivors who didn't make it, for one reason or another: a five-year-old kid who falls down a hole, a junkie who finds his dealer's uncut stash and overdoses, a guy who runs himself to death out of grief over his dead family, and so on.

Whenever I reread that book, which I used to do every few years, I tend to linger over that chapter, and over the chapters that are little more than scenes from the breakdown of civilization. They're strong and memorable in a way that the rest of the book isn't, particularly once it gets into King's particular brand of 1980s coke-fueled messianic good vs. evil in the last half, and I'm reasonably sure that those chapters are what sparked my current, ongoing fascination with fictional apocalypses.

One of the things I like about video game storytelling, as dissonant as it can sometimes be, is that with the right design, the player can step into and out of the main plot almost at will. You can look around and see the stories that took place before you got there, and if the level design is strong enough, you don't need journal entries or notes scrawled in blood to do it.

The Last of Us is particularly good about this in a few areas, such as the college campus in Colorado or parts of Pittsburgh. It resorts to the old "survivor keeping a diary" dodge at times, yeah, but there are other areas where you have to figure out what happened by yourself, such as what happened to the kids in Ish's hideout, and it's a more effective moment for it.

I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas for the first time right now, and it's not quite as strong about that as I'd like. Vault 34, for example, might as well just be a cave full of zombies. This isn't to say that it's a bad game for it, but there's something I find appealing about the idea of the post-apocalyptic detective, sorting through a location to figure out what precisely happened there before you arrived. All you get in Fallout, typically, is that there was Something Bad in there and they stacked up a bunch of furniture to block the corridor.

This may be one of the things I revisit if I ever end up making an indie game: scenes from the apocalypse. Start from the short story, then work it backwards. Make the player construct the narrative for you.