The Chinese in Fallout 3 Operation: Anchorage
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I've no personal interest in the DLC, having lost much of my interest in Fallout 3 for a myriad of reasons unrelated to any of this, so I've kept it off my radar for some time now. So it came to me as a surprise when this post on the Bethesda Forums was forwarded to me.
The post consists of commentary from a Chinese gamer, who's jubilant with Bethesda's implementation of the Chinese in Fallout 3. Here are some of the words he imparted:
Bethesda also clearly did their homework about the language and the culture. The Communist artwork on the walls is so close to the real thing that it's scary. The Chinese pictograph characters are accurate for the most part, and the voice acting is competent (though in both cases there are minor flaws, visited below, but they're very minor). All in all, a good effort by Bethesda to really show an opponent nation as a realistic fighting force, and a factually accurate representation of 1950s Chinese culture. Too many design studios just pick a nation and then make them into cartoon baddies with no redeeming features.
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Long story short - I was a little anxious at first about whether the Chinese-as-enemies theme of the game would turn into another "bash the foreigner" exercise. But I'm very glad to see that it hasn't, and that Bethesda portrayed this element with balance and sensitivity. I hope other design houses will follow a similar degree of research and tact when dealing with real-world nations. The only critiques I have are purely linguistic quibbles, and are offered in a spirit of helping them hone something that is already of excellent quality and carefully thought out in its cultural representations.
Bethesda certainly deserves praise for all of their efforts here. It could have been much easier and taken a lot less work for Bethesda to simply take the easy route by depicting the Chinese as either evil caricatures of Chinese characters like Fu Manchu, and the good ones as Charlie Chan. Instead, they actually did a fairly convincing job in their depiction of "the enemy" with added social commentary, to boot.
