Moving in Video Games: Fallout and Skyrim
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In what has to be one of the oddest editorial series I've ever stumbled upon, a moving website called "The Movers" has written about the intricacies of crossing the landscape and moving to a new home as it applies to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the Fallout series. So very strange:
Your choice of home and the management of your belongings is extremely important. All items that you carry and pick up have value in caps, so items equal money. You need to level up your bartering ability to get a good amount of caps for your items from most vendors. It is much like moving insurance in the real world. A low barter skill will only get you a fraction of the true value of the item, like released value protection for broken or lost items when you move.
If you are carrying too many items you will be encumbered and move painfully slow, making fast travel impossible and combat very difficult. For this reason, you're going to want to keep most of your things safely stored in your home.
One of the biggest challenges of the game is deciding what to pick up and what to leave behind. Everything has value, but heavier items will take up space in your inventory and prevent you from moving with more items. It is analogous to your character having a moving truck and needing to limit the amount of items he is moving for the truck to be able to move efficiently.
That means that trying to literally move in Fallout is much like moving a household in real life because suddenly you are worried about an object's weight in addition to its value. There are times that you must leave something behind that is worth a lot of money because it simply is too big to move to a new location. You may face this dilemma in real life when choosing what large items to leave in your old home when you move.
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Another aspect of Fallout that is interesting to movers is the fact that the entire plot of the game is an analogy for moving out on your own for the first time.
In Fallout 3, you start the game growing up in an underground vault. This community lives underground to avoid the radiation at the surface. Nobody leaves the vault for fear of the harsh conditions on the war-scorched surface. But one day your father does leave the vault, so your character, at about 18 years old, ventures out of the vault for the first time to face a world that is alien and harsh. The game's plot starts with a person's first move.
How you move in the game may indicate how you will move in real life. Do you move in to the first home you encounter in the nearby town of Megaton? Do you literally blow up that home and town for the opportunity to live in a safer higher class tower? You can choose to be on the move constantly in Fallout or find the first good home and settle there. Your real life moving tendencies may reflect your virtual choices in the Capitol Wasteland.
