{"id":33661,"date":"2016-08-11T21:48:06","date_gmt":"2016-08-12T01:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33661"},"modified":"2016-08-11T21:48:19","modified_gmt":"2016-08-12T01:48:19","slug":"fallout-4-ep29-who-nose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33661","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP29: Who Nose?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VGnoToJJ7bg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VGnoToJJ7bg'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>You may have blinked and missed it while Josh was doing the jackrabbit two-step around Kellogg&#8217;s foggy noggin, but we just passed The Quote From Fallout 4. You know; the singular monologue that gets memed and shared around like a dying cigarette in a post-apocalyptic campground. It&#8217;s not mandatory, but even if you passed over it in your playthrough (and you probably didn&#8217;t unless you were very impatient) there&#8217;s a good chance you&#8217;ve seen it online:<\/p>\n<p><i>&#8220;The thing about happiness is that you only knew you had it when it&#8217;s gone. I mean, you may think to yourself that you&#8217;re happy. But you don&#8217;t really believe it. You focus on the petty bullshit, or the next job, or whatever. It&#8217;s only looking back by comparison with what comes after that you really understand, that&#8217;s what happiness felt like.&#8221;<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I mentioned before that I found the line overwritten, and that the message is got across quite well by &#8220;<i>The thing about happiness is that you only knew you had it when it&#8217;s gone.<\/i>&#8221; I&#8217;m not cynical enough to think the line was stretched out so people would take it more seriously, but I think the elaboration does suggest a lack of confidence. I&#8217;d still like to see more dialogue like this in the game&#8211;and in a way, that&#8217;s the biggest problem.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t a special moment where everything comes together. This isn&#8217;t a hammer blow, a mic drop, or a thesis. This is a reasonably interesting throwaway line that does a little to illustrate a character&#8217;s perspective and keep the player&#8217;s attention from wandering&#8211;and yet it has so much more gravitas, thought, and meaning than the dialogue surrounding it, and when you&#8217;re playing it you get this instinctive feeling like it&#8217;s Something Important. And I have to ask&#8211;<strong>is it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think it resonates well with the themes of the game&#8211;past a point we&#8217;re fast approaching, feelings of wistfulness and nostalgia have little importance in the game&#8217;s storyline. I don&#8217;t think it comments incisively on human experience&#8211;I&#8217;d argue that &#8220;you don&#8217;t really know you&#8217;re happy until you know that you were happy and now you aren&#8217;t happy&#8221; is a pretty shallow cut and there&#8217;s not much in the context of the scene to give it more meaning. So all it does is tell us about Kellogg, and since I just killed him, I can&#8217;t unkill him, and there was never anything I could do <em>but<\/em> kill him&#8211;and since Kellogg&#8217;s impact on the plot is constrained to one trigger pull and one messy death&#8211;that&#8217;s some pretty weak tea.<\/p>\n<p>I put it to you that in a game where solid characters spoke about interesting topics that had thematic cohesion and significance, Kellogg&#8217;s line here would have been practically ignored.<\/p>\n<div class=\"dmnotes\">Pop quiz: How many of you noticed this post was written by Rutskarn? I&#8217;m honestly curious, because I feel guilty every time people give me credit for something he wrote and I&#8217;m always thinking about ways to avoid that confusion.<\/p>\n<p>-Shamus<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) You may have blinked and missed it while Josh was doing the jackrabbit two-step around Kellogg&#8217;s foggy noggin, but we just passed The Quote From Fallout 4. You know; the singular monologue that gets memed and shared around like a dying cigarette in a post-apocalyptic campground. It&#8217;s not mandatory, but even if you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}