the final pam – just moving along like everyone else

pyreo:

The Final Pam really is an absolutely inspired creation

The implementaion of Fallout 4′s story, the setting, and the game mechanics are exactly what makes Final Pam the end conclusion of indifferent, unimpressed gameplay, deliberately avoiding immersion at all costs. The use of an engine we all already know the dev codes for, enabling them to enact mass murder RIGHT from the goddamn start in the tutorial… obviously leading to the first characterisation of Pam as all-powerful, bending the will of reality – “I do this.”

The way the game constantly tries to act dramatic in somewhat absurd ways. Watching a nuke go off, escaping seconds before the impact of the blast wave? Of course it’s okay, this is The Final Pam, pock-marked immortal. All Monster Factories are tests – the McElroys pitting their ability to distort a player character’s appearance against the game’s insistence that they conform to its rules. And Fallout 4 is the pinnacle of that idea, since the game itself relies on forcing you to conform to it incessantly. You have to care about the story they feed you. You have to comply with the regular rules of an RPG, stats and numbers, working hard for your weapons and gear, earning them.

The McElroys delight in not just distressing the hell out of a character creator, but extending that to kick the game’s formality apart. Final Pam does not need to search for her son. They spawn in a thousand ghost boys and coffee tins. The Final Pam does not salvage or explore for armour. She spawns in a test cell and takes what she wants. The Final Pam doesn’t give a shit about preserving the delicate integrity of the intro sequence, and they kill everyone just to see what would happen, discovering they can cause a Vertibird to crash. The Final Pam invalidates the entire supposedly frantic rush for the safety of the underground vault in the face of imminent nuclear explosion. Brb, Final Pam forgot keys.

Some of those moments of characterisation are accidental and some are just experience of knowing how to cheat combined with great improv instincts. Final Pam would not have emerged from a Monster Factory in an indie game or a lesser known, more modest game. It’s the legacy behind Bethesda, and the way Fallout 4 obviously expects you to behave and react that prompts Final Pam to behave so erratically, the way Fallout 4 is supposed to be a polished multimillion juggernaut that makes it so amusing to see Final Pam decimate the bounds of virtual reality, and the dogmatic insistence of Bethesda that the player watch their story unfold, engage only in the narrative they have set out for you, that makes it so enjoyable for Final Pam to completely ignore it, right from the very first notion that she is married to Trash Hulk, she rejects and takes instead a metal husband. She doesn’t look for her son, and instead finds a field of ghost boys.

Final Pam could only have been borne from Fallout 4, because in the power tug-of-war between player and developer that is the basis for Monster Factory, in this game the tools and humour and narrative irrelevance existed to make the McElroy’s creation surpass everything that existed around her.