Fallout 3 is one of the most narcotic-heavy games I’ve played in recent years, and one of the few to incorporate addiction and withdrawal mechanics. Unfortunately, it’s a half-hearted effort. “Chems”, post-apocalyptic slang for drugs, can be addictive and non-addictive, and buff player stats like strength and intelligence.

Chems are not illegal, since there’s no law and all, and they can be found nearly everywhere in the wasteland. Even doctors peddle them as if they were the responsibly advertised narcotic cure-alls -- for what ails ya, and doesn’t yet -- of the old fashioned cocaine for toothaches era.

Unlike BioShock, it’s very easy to just say no in Fallout 3, but the incentives to pop pills and spike veins are pretty damn alluring. One chem called Buffout is a highly-addictive steroid that boosts both strength and endurance skills, adds 60 health points and increases the user’s carry weight by 20 pounds for the duration of the high.

Buffout’s a good pick-me-up when your knee cartilage is whittling away to dust under the two ton strain of foraged munitions, scrap metal, and garden gnomes. It’s the drug of choice for human pack mules like me, buckling under the heavy load of worthless spoils gathered by the frontier spirit. It’s not the drug for you if you’re looking to find god, distort reality, enjoy a brainwave lightshow, or escape the doldrums of a grimy, noxious, wasteland life. In fact, none of the game’s drugs will help you out in any of those departments.

Drugs in Fallout 3 are much like all video game drugs; utilitarian for physical labor. It’s the biker thug who needs a head full of speed to make that 1,000-mile grind, and the athlete who uses steroids to win big prize money, or just stay afloat when everyone's doing it.

As with all addictive chems, abusing Buffout will result in addiction. Withdrawal symptoms entail weakened stats, and will endure until a cure is found. Treatment can be a self-administered detox by waiting it out and practicing sobriety, a relatively paltry fee for a doctor to perform an instantaneous miracle cure, or a few in-game items and perks, which build resistance to addiction or dissolve it completely.

These addiction and withdrawal mechanics are of little to no consequence. Merely petty inconveniences, which are easily counteracted, they are not felt and only impact the artificial, out-of-body numbers game you play with your stats. You can’t even potentially overdose on a speedball cocktail of Jet, Med-X, and Buffout.

A germ of good intention exists in this system, that being drugs represent an enticing and satisfying mechanic, which becomes a diminishing return. However, it’s baffling that neither Bethesda nor Obsidian went farther with it, especially when considering drug mechanics have not significantly changed in the 14-year run of the Fallout franchise.

Don’t Eat the Mushroom, a popular third-party level for the indie game, Knytt Stories, is the only contemporary game I can think of that has really experimented with the virtual psychoactive formula. In the game, your mother tells you to deliver a package for her, and abstain from eating the wild mushroom en route. You can deliver the package and end the game with a banal resolution, or you can counteract the ennui of this sleepy suburb by eating the mushroom and descending into the funny and bewildering caverns of 4^th wall ornamentation and classic video game perversions.

Your journey will have you walking across clouds in your suddenly inverted neighborhood, scaling a gargantuan version of yourself, even meandering about inside a browser window that’s loaded theKnytt Stories support forums. Though a pretty misguided and oddly media-referential trip, there’s lots of playful, interstitial head-fuckery to be had, and wildly disorienting setpieces and scenarios. It’s a charming, colorful jungle gym drug, and jarring little haunted house where gravity and misleading physical laws are the animatronic ghouls.

If there’s no shortage of ideas* for expanding the gameplay possibilities of drug use, why do commercial game drugs appear to be untouched by time? Given the pre-release controversy over realistic drug paraphernalia in Fallout 3, and pressure from the Australian OFLC, it’s clear that representing this subject matter in games is a risky prospect. Similar instances of media and political backlash over virtual drug depiction have occurred in the past. I would imagine that many developers might not be too keen about potentially provoking the war on virtual drugs, and paying the associated dividends if they were made an example of. Steroids and fantastical practical narcotics have been the safe bet with a design prohibition on depictions of adverse, ugly, or more realistic aspects of drug use.

The gaming audience could be another reason for developer hesitance on this subject. Any nuanced mechanical representation of drug use will likely involve things such as removing player tolerance, introducing disorienting and negative illusions, events that inconvenience the player, toy with his understanding of what is real in the game, disrupt the established structure and properties of a game’s world, and severely diminish player agency in some regards while boosting it in others -- basically everything it seems the vocal status quo hates about games and bemoans.

Blur© and Jell-O Limb© are drugs that take the edge off of killing. Take as directed and be merry!

My cynical, hardened, and homogenized view of the majority player taste is to boil it all down to one imaginary base user, an ambassador to my conception of many popular gameplay trends. He hates being the afflicted. He loves playing the aggressor, the clear-headed, cool and calculated top predator. He hates when toys are taken away from him. He hates being told what to do, but he whines when he’s dug himself into a hole he cannot conveniently escape from. Basically, he hates it, hates it, hates it with every fiber of his being whenever anything “breaks”, at least anything that’s in service to him. But, he loves breaking the world.

I don’t think he would be very receptive to playing as a broken, tormented addict who’s suffering from the chemical flashbacks of Christmas past. A protagonist in the midst of narcotic vagrancy, disinherited from the larger narrative, without an obvious waypoint to navigate his mirages, without an ‘off’ button, playing his own private meta-game that seems to have no rules, no tutorial, and no forecast of a lifespan.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting advocacy or glorification of drug use through gameplay. Nor am I interested in scared straight interactive melodramas (a D.A.R.E. officer should not be shipped with every copy). It’s a tricky area to explore, grasping for an honest and emblematic representation through interactive means. Of course atomized constituents of drug use will be parsed down. The transcendent revelations appearing to go beyond words cannot be written in a programming language. The experience of hitting bottom cannot fit onto the bottom of a disc. And the real pain, trauma, and fear cannot and should not be an uncut, high-dosage game experience for mass consumption.

If games want to incorporate drugs, they should be a hell of a lot more responsible about it, or at least start the groundwork experiments toward getting there. Narcotic commodities should not be so abundant and bodily beneficent. Why cant I feel that “cocaine blues”? Absent is drug mythology, like that of the elusive peyote cactus and those who embark on dangerous safaris, scouring psychotropic deserts for it. And during the high, some people describe seeing a Native American man, Mescalito, the spirit of the peyote sacrament. He favors some and disagrees with others. How about that for a multiplayer experience?

To accommodate drug culture and use, design needs to change. Drug use is sparked by psychological and environmental factors, not simply boredom. Designers must create drugs that deliver significant gameplay benefits and experiences, but considerable downsides if abused, or present drugs as a tempting vehicle to escape from otherwise drab, painful, or traumatic game worlds, which might possibly lead them into an even more inhospitable place, inside themselves.

More like this, please.

Drugs are an incredibly important social and cultural phenomenon, and it is not beyond the capacity or interest of games to represent them and their use artistically and earnestly. 

Instead of once again lacing up my boots to step into the role of the hulking commando with a thousand grimaces, I want to experience a portrayal of burning out and becoming that experienced, yet horribly shell-shocked veteran of an ancient war fought inside their own head.

I would love to see the game equivalent of Philip K. Dick’s take on drugs -- A shifting, Cartesian labyrinth world, a metaphysical orrery where cosmic and personal absurdities and tragedies are broadcast on a universal scale. The rules are always changing and you don’t quite know where you are. You probe and investigate and prove this reality to be a forgery, and beyond it is another forgery, and another in this recursive, amorphous theater of the mind, with a puppet master deity of uncertain intentions at its center.

Where are the drug yarns of Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, William Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson? The comforting and grizzly hallucinations, which magnify and heighten an idea, an emotion, or place, “the least factual and most accurate” illustrations, true to the spirit of something, but come with teeth. All we have are weeble wobble, drunk goggle mechanics after polishing off an entire bar, rendering us as comically bumbling ragdolls with Paul Bunyan tolerances.

It’s not just about representing drugs in their nominal form, it’s about the wonderful and frightful illusions, the welcome and unwelcome visitors, a different reality that sometimes isn’t in accord with “objective reality”, and not knowing the rules, or thinking you know them. These events, purely as experiences, are what I want to see in games.

Drugs can be an intense battle or magnificent flight, while the user is completely still. It’s some of the most powerful and challenging work of the mind, but doing little work physically. I guess that’s what I hope a game can be as well.

"Mario drugs" photo by SR PINO.

* Fallout 3 drug suggestions:

For one, I don’t think addiction’s immediate like disease contraction. One’s body does not clearly exclaim, “You have become addicted to heroin.” Addiction is often a slow process. I’m all for a system that doesn’t tell me I’m addicted at all. Addiction could be a suite of manifesting symptoms that escalate in parallel with the habit. You may hallucinate that you just spontaneously combusted, or animals begin talking to you, the leaves of Oasis are replaced by hands, Dogmeat stands on his hind legs and stabs you with a bayonet, a swarm of insects cloud around you and deal real damage, inventory items might suddenly morph into something else (your best gun becomes a Videodrome-esque tumor pistol that fires radiation), etc.

Track marks could develop from continued Med-X use, and the player may need to conceal them with clothing so some NPCs are not scared off. You may lose all honest and even dishonest work as a junkie. When addiction worsens and withdrawal sets in, you are bombarded by wonderful and threatening visions, abrasive and disorienting visuals and sounds, and more punitive reductions in health and other stats. One in-game day could suddenly become the equivalent of 10. The user may become so irritable while in the throes of serious withdrawal that only vulgar and threatening dialogue options are available to them in NPC conversation. Or, so high that an NPC’s words come out as gibberish, or intelligible threats and ominous warnings they are not actually saying. 

You may ask a companion to shakedown one too many dealers and fetch you dope, and then, they’ll leave you until you seek help. Fatigued, unsure what’s real and what isn’t, the lows now outweighing the highs, you seek a cure. The first step is diagnosis from a doctor, which demands a considerable fee. Then, your options for kicking the habit and purging yourself are presented to you: A.) Shell out much more money in three not-so-easy payments and procedures to rid yourself of the ugly stuff. B.) Embark on a long, dirty questline through the bottommost dregs of the wasteland to cure yourself (similar to the road to vampirism rehab in Oblivion). C.) Cold turkey, which will be the most cognitively and physically debilitating, bedeviling bout of cerebral warfare yet. 

Even after some form of rehab is complete, the drug may stay dormant inside of you. Reformed Buffout addicts, such as myself, might experience drug flashbacks. Perhaps you pocket some Buffout, or look at your old dealer, take some significant damage, or carry a heavy load -- presumably the very same activity that got you into Buffout abuse -- and suddenly, those stored chem reserves dislodge and erupt with familiar visions, malevolent narcotic phantasms, even the haunting, chiding figures of companions and NPCs you burnt while addicted.