I am not what you would call a “gamer.” I don’t dislike gamers, I wish I had the time, attention span, and/ or heliophobia to devote myself to video games.

So lovely… But it’s causing glare so shut the blinds please.

Not to say I don’t indulge in this hobby every now and again. I have a few games I thoroughly enjoy: the Fallout series comes to mind. And it has taught me quite a bit about myself as a human being. These are not necessarily things I like about myself but by the power of video games, I have ultimately come to terms with the fact that...

1. I would break reality at a whim if given even half the chance.

Game Developers… Probably.

One thing that all Fallout games share is their size. These are huge games with complex programming, code, other technical stuff that I will never understand and therefore wholeheartedly believe to be witchcraft.

Because there are so many moving parts, so to speak, there are always ways to bend reality to your whim. These can be as small as tricking a casino into giving you all of the money in the game to as strange as repeating the same phrase to a stranger ad infinitum until you are a walking god amongst men. The latest iteration has community mods (a long time tradition on PC, but brand new to consoles). These can do little things like improve graphics and gameplay, introduce new quests and stories, or allow you to freeze time and cause nuclear explosions with your mind. And I do not use this power wisely. If given the choice between living life as a mere mortal shuffling through a day's events, learning lessons, generally improving as a human being or being an infinitely wealthy, immortal demi-god with the power of flight and destruction I will choose the latter eleven times out of ten.

2. I am not loyal to my ideals.

Now you’re a soldier. A courier turned elite agent for a government hell bent on restoring peace and order to the wasteland that is the glowing remains of the west coast of the old U.S.A. You’re at the end of a long journey building up to the final confrontation with your exact counterpart. A courier turned an elite agent for your flags enemy, a man hell bent on re-releasing a nuclear arsenal upon your republic. You have a choice. Fight to the death, or try to talk the man down, make him see reason and leave together in peace, or you do what I do talk him down, and immediately convert to his side bringing a cleansing nuclear fire down upon the entire American Southwest.

I always thought that when it came down to a hard choice, I’d always stick by what I believe. But apparently, my loyalty is to unexpected twists and storytelling devices.

And fashion.

I do this all the time. Regardless of whether I choose to make my character good or evil, I will betray my people at some point. The only questions are when and how many people will die because of it. On the other side, I apparently believe...

3. ...the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

So you’ve signed on to help a faction of techno-punk Arthurian stand-ins. Their quest to keep humanity from repeating the mistakes of the past, by keeping technology out of the hands of those who would misuse it, and they’ve taken this crusade to Boston. The remnants of an alternate reality M.I.T have done something of a Frankensteinian morality thought experiment. They have created artificial human beings. Fully cognizant and ambiguously sentient people grown from an unholy cacophony of pseudoscience and feasible cloning are used as tools and/ or slaves of the academics. Your job is to stop these inhumane practices by any means necessary, up to and almost exclusively by using bullets and lasers.

Then you find out that twist, record scratch your friend has been one of these synthetic people the whole time without knowing it. You are ordered by the head of this faction, a faction you have once again sworn fealty to, to track down and eliminate your friend. You track him down to a safe-house where he is wholly ready to accept his fate. He has sworn loyalty to this brotherhood, it is his family, his life, everything that he believes in. He asks you to execute him like a proper knight would. You’re torn, as well you should be. Can you kill your friend for the good of mankind?

Well, apparently I can’t. We’ve been on far too many adventures and produced a much too compelling storyline for me to uphold the ideals I swore to embody. So I spare his life and convince him to continue living. When we leave who else confronts us but the King Arthur analog… Arthur.

Pictured: Subtlety

Furious he gives you one last chance. Kill your friend or be branded an enemy. Taking a defeated breath I raise my gun and kill Arthur Pendra... er Maxon. I may have doomed the entirety of post-nuclear Boston by killing the one man dedicated to saving them, but I kept my robo-friend. And in the end isn’t that what really matters? But you know what? None of this matters because…

4. Permanent consequences are all that are keeping me sane.

Imagine you are walking through a small town, it is not a particularly beautiful or bountiful city, but it is a relative paradise to the hell that is just outside its walls. This city is one of humanity's last hopes for civilizations: people working together selflessly for a common goal, trading, charity, law, order, ultimately the embodiment of hope against the abyss. Now, imagine one of these citizens is having a bad day, maybe his wife left him, maybe a child was killed on a hunt for food; whatever it is, the day just isn’t going his way. He notices you, a new traveler seeking refuge or trade, and in his frustration gives a snide “Just another freeloader. Typical,” under his breath.

On any day in my actual life I would brush this off, or kindly ask the clearly frustrated man if there was something I could do to help make his day a little brighter. This reaction is apparently only because I do not possess the powers of a time traveling warlock. Because, in the game, I pause to remember this moment so that I can leap right back and calmly and dispassionately proceed to murder, not only this man but everyone that calls this hole-in-the-ground a home. I then take a breath and reload.

And it’s not just wanton murder I use this temporal trickery for. I find myself committing morally dubious actions ranging from theft and hacking to precipitating the nuclear destruction of an entire city for a man I later plan on feeding to irradiated zombies.

They know.

And then I rewind. Reload to a previous point in time and watch. They know something is off. They know they are somehow lesser than they were. The man with the snide remark knows. They know that something outside of their control is tampering with things, terrible things that should not be tampered with. They know they are powerless to stop it. They know.