I have completed ALL THE THINGS! At least I think I have ;)
I said this before on different threads, and KC, TADSLOS and I discuss it fairly frequently, but I swear that conservatives do game design for Bethesda. F3, Fallout New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls/Skyrim titles all have some fairly heavy duty morality plays going on and invariably, playing as a liberal will get you a fraction of the ‘life experience’ the games offer.
When one looks at the raiders in the Fallout games, what we are looking at are libs without their toys or their govt. derived power. They can’t build or produce anything on their own in a more primitive ‘world’ since they lack the skills most of us grew up with, so they band together and rob/kill and enslave. What good will that lesbian studies/art degree be when things go ‘native’?
In a real world SHTF scenario, I would bet the farm that’s what they become. I mean what can they do really? Can’t hunt, can’t fish, can’t farm, can’t do construction, don’t have basic survival skills like any mountain hick/farm boy, Drug dependent, expect someone else to produce so they can take...It’s all a mirror image of a raider. And as you said, ghouls. Same basic mentality.
I use Fallout, but really, any post apocalyptic novel comes to the same conclusions simply by deductive reasoning. They are the parasite class and all parasites cannot live without a host organism. Take away their government free ride/Democrat power and they devolve to their base form.
Raiders.
Congrats on completing all the quests in FO3! This means I don’t have to worry about using spoiler tags :)
The raiders are a wonderful example of liberalism. Their lairs are a good place to find weak guns and drugs, and they regularly kill other raiders for the fun of it. The only somewhat impressive achievement I can remember them doing is finding a way to capture a Mutant Behemoth, but doing so seemed to produce no tangible benefit. That’s probably more than the basket weavers and sociologists of today’s liberals could possibly accomplish, though.
Another thing about the ghouls of FO3: they complain about persecution by humans, but spend most of their time getting mad at “smoothskins”. Since ghouls also have the danger of going feral, the non-radiated have a valid reason to keep their guard up around them. I can’t help but think of today’s black Democrats when thinking of the ghouls (although the Museum of History is kept cleaner than any of Sharpton’s venues!). They seemed to downplay the “woe is me!” status of the ghouls in New Vegas, though.
Bethesda games are excellent examples on self-reliance and how governments are inherently untrustworthy (guards in the Elder Scrolls games being susceptible to bribes, the entire plot of NV). One of my few complaints relates to how the BoS in FO3 are portrayed as valiant saviors who do everything out of altruism, but I generally respect the games otherwise. Even the homosexual characters in FO:NV don’t seem to shove the agenda down your throat, and it’s possible that you’d never know that they are gay in a playthrough; this is much more tolerable than, say, Mass Effect 3’s characters.