Fallout 3 is, in some ways, a game about collectives. From the beginning of the game, you are constantly exposed to smallish groups of people who have banded together in order to survive in the post-apocalyptic world. This includes the Vault where you are born, Megaton, the first city you visit, and various other places.

In fact, it’s rare to find anyone who’s alone in the game. There’s the odd scavenger, perhaps, and the Super Mutants don’t appear to have much of a relationship with each other (though perhaps they, too, sit and while away the time comparing ‘gore bags’). Ultimately, the people in the game, whether they like you or try to murder you, come in groups.

Naturally, this serves to fairly heavily underline just how much you, the player, are not in any group. You look around and see all these people identifying with their Brotherhood or Clan, and wonder if perhaps you’re just not good enough to be part of these things. Why is nobody inviting you in?

This has led me to have a kind of longing to belong, even as I also feel that I would really want to be a member of any of the groups on offer. They all seem to have their flaws, and I’m not convinced I could submit my planet-sized (or at least game-sized) ego to someone else’s creedo. After all, secretly, at the back of it all, I’m the boss of that world, right? I’m ultimately in charge. The Number One Hombre…

But One is definitely the loneliest number.

I’ve spent a while trying to work out what seems to make George Hearst in Deadwood seems quite so objectionable. In fact, I think it fits in rather well with the collectivist stuff I’ve been considering lately. In particular, Hearst is something like an uber-individualist with no interest whatever in anything except his own self-perception (the boy who heard the earth talk) and interest (the “colour”). As such, his character doesn’t fit at all into the effectively collectivist world of the camp of Deadwood, and this is what makes him so hard to take. Especially since I suppose it’s fair to say that the viewer ends up feeling like a member of the camp in a sense, and so a collectivist him or herself.

We finished season 1 of Deadwood today, and what a mighty fine show it is, too. One observation we’ve made is the interesting tension between individualism and collectivism that the characters in the show exhibit. Normally, of course, these two characterisations of culture are separate, but the situation in Deadwood seems to combine them.

On the one hand, of course, the characters are very much in it for themselves. Al is in it for the money, killing and bribing as necessary. Seth is in it for the honour. The doctor is in it for some kind of salvation. And so on. In these ways they exhibit their individualism, their focus on themselves above all others.

At the same time, we constantly see them finding the collective of great importance, as if the whole town (or at least the characters in it we follow) were a kind of family, a band of brothers. So they gather together in concern when the reverend has a fit. They form an impromptu government to make sure the town is fairly treated. And so on. In these ways they act not mostly in self-interest, but treat the group as their unit of interest and action.

Just another reason to find the show deeply fascinating.