American Popular Culture Commons^™

Cold War Cultural Language Transference Into Modern Media: Fallout 3, Kyle Sitka

Undergraduate Research Conference

Video games are fun. The fictional environments and plots they generate are designed with solely this purpose: to entertain. Some try to accomplish this goal by creating environments that are novel to most gamers, but most get by with reusing plots, settings, and language from older games, movies, books or historical periods. One such game, Bethesda's Fallout 3, draws on the imagery, language, and structure of Cold War America to create a chilling, post apocalyptic Washington D.C., complete with anit-communist propaganda posters and giant, irradiated cockroaches. While entertaining in its own right, a basic knowledge of the Cold War …