Fenix Minerva

I briefly considered naming my daughter “Beirut”. She was, after all, conceived within two hours of returning from my first visit there. In 2006, along with my crew, and a number of other foreign nationals, I had been taken off the beach by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and transported by LCU to the USS Nashville, and from there to Cyprus and home. The experience left me with a deep love and appreciation for the US Navy and Marines, the now decommissioned Nashville (once referred to affectionately, I’m told, as the “Trashville”), and, of course, Beirut. That experience changed everything for me. One day I was making television about eating and drinking, the next, I was watching the airport I’d just landed in a few days earlier, being blown up across the water from my hotel window. I came away from the experience deeply embittered, confused—and determined to make television differently than I’d done before. I didn’t know how I was going to do it—or whether my then network was going to allow me—but the days of “happy horseshit”, the uplifting sum-up at the end of every show, the reflex inclusion of a food scene in every act, that ended right there. The world was bigger than that. The stories more confusing, more complex, less satisfying in their resolutions. As I noted in my utterly depressing last lines of Voice Over in the eventual show we put together: in the real world, good people and bad alike are often crushed under the same terrible wheel. I didn’t feel an urge to turn into Dan Rather. Our Beirut experience did not give me delusions of being a journalist. I just saw that there were realities beyond what was on my plate—and those realities almost inevitably informed what was—or was not—for dinner. To ignore them now seemed monstrous. And yet, I’d already fallen in love with Beirut. We all had. Everyone on my crew. As soon as we’d landed, headed into town, there was a reaction I can only describe as pheromonic: the place just smelled good. Like a place we were going to love.

Thanks.  I know this doesn’t really answer the question, but I’d like to use your particular question to address something more broadly.  I think it may help avoid some frustration for people who ask me speculative questions that I don’t answer.

For reasons stemming largely from my personal tastes and my academic corruption by postmodernists, I think it is actively bad/harmful for me to color outside of the lines of the content I’ve helped create.  If I write the story of Joshua Graham and Daniel, define them within the context of the game, and describe the outcomes of player choices within the context of the game, I think I should refrain from speculating on those characters/events beyond the game’s boundaries.

There are a few reasons for this.  First, it’s not my setting and they’re not my characters.  If Bethesda wanted to have Arcade, Joshua Graham, and Caesar go on a space trip with the Mothership Zeta aliens and fly to Venus, that’s their call.  I don’t have any say in the matter.

Second, even if it legally were my intellectual property, I feel like putting down stakes outside of the boundaries we created in the game is limiting for future authors.  Not only Bethesda, but also gamers and modders.  I don’t think that is a good or fair way to exert authorial influence.

This also extends to “approving” or “disapproving” of ideas or content either implicitly or explicitly.  My opinion is no more important than anyone else’s.  It’s not that I don’t have opinions about someone’s companion mod, their speculative fan fiction, or the entirety of Fallout 4.  I have opinions about all of these things, but it is the nature of many fans to latch onto my opinions as though they have more weight and validity than I feel they do.  For that reason, I almost never give my opinion on these things.  That being said, you’re not missing much.  I wouldn’t be saying anything that hadn’t already been covered ad nauseam by other people on the internet.

Finally, my intentions aren’t important.  Well, I think they’re important in a certain context to understand what we were trying to do and why we failed to execute on that (e.g. the desired genetic diversity of Honest Hearts tribes vs. what we shipped with for technical reasons).  Even that is, for me, a grey area that I prefer to not dive into unless I believe it can be helpful for other people.  It has no value for “absolving” us of the mistakes we’ve made, but it can help people understand how ideas can be malformed in implementation.  Essentially, they can serve as cautionary tales.

Where this really applies is things like cut content, incomplete notes/stories found in the world, and even Joshua Graham’s few sentences of untranslated speech to Salt-Upon-Wounds.  If it didn’t wind up in the game, it’s not there, period.  The reasons may have been driven by scheduling, gameplay pacing, or a purposeful choice to make something ambiguous, but in all cases, it was never in the shipped product.

I get messages from a lot of creative and curious people asking questions like the one you posed.  I think it is better and more productive for these questions to be asked in communities where the ideas can be debated, where you will (hopefully) be forced to defend your opinions and push others to defend theirs.  Or don’t ask them at all and just create content – stories in your head, fan fiction, illustrations, whatever – that explore the ideas that you have.  Yeah, there are things that we wanted to do for post-Hoover Dam reactivity in Fallout: New Vegas that we didn’t get to do.  For someone who’s interested in modding in post-HD reactivity, what they think should happen is infinitely more important than what I wanted to do.

It would be contrary to the spirit of creative expression for me to opine on the validity or quality of speculation that pokes past the borders of what I have directly created.  I wish that my opinions were just taken at the same value as anyone else’s, but I know that they often are not – and can even be used as cudgels between passionate and disagreeing fans.  I prefer to build these worlds, characters, and ideas as they are needed and leave their boundaries blank, open, and as free to individual interpretation as possible.

Here’s the link to the source:

Blast off.