Nuclear Weapons In Media

"Forgive the insubordination, but your boyfriend has an order for you... Come back alive. It'd be an awfully empty galaxy without you. [instead of the above if Garrus is romanced]"

"[after Shepard deliberately loses a friendly shooting competition] I'm Garrus Vakarian, and this is my favorite spot on the Citadel!"

"[when romancing Tali] You're so mean... and I'm okay with that."

"[If Shepard and Tali are in a romance and start flirting] Uh, I was there when you two had your thing, remember? Just get a room and work it out."

"[To Shepard] If this thing goes sideways and we end up on the other side, meet me at the bar. I'm buying."

"[fleeing Earth as the Crucible fires] Joker, listen. We have to go."

"You've obviously never seen Turians swim. It's a lot of flailing and splashing around interrupted by occasional bouts of drowning..."

"Blending history, science-fiction, and interesting decision-making is what makes the Fallout games modern classics. And while there is no need for the series to become full-fledged anti-nuclear weapons education materials, it would help if the latest incarnation maintained the closer connections that the older entries had to the realities of our own nuclear age. Earlier Fallout games show that a humorous treatment of nuclear weapons is possible without slipping into outright ambivalence about their implications. (And yes, one can indulge in dark satire and still be outraged by the dangers of nuclear weaponry; witness movies such as “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”) What should be clear, rather, is that repackaging nuclear weapons and technologies as entirely unproblematic makes for less-interesting decisions for players and weaker ties to the historical flavor that has underpinned the unique appeal of the games. And, perhaps most important of all, these sanitized representations risk teaching a misleading version of humanity’s nuclear predicament to a massive audience."

"To be sure, the Fallout games have never had an explicitly anti-nuclear stance; they have never come across as an after-school special. But the satirical humor of the series has frequently targeted the hubris of mid-20th century science, politics, society, and industry. The alternative universe created by the game developers diverges from our own timeline after World War II, imagining a world where dreams of robots and nuclear-powered cars came true. Far from ushering in a utopia, however, in Fallout, nuclear technologies led to a nightmarish collapse of organized human civilization in the United States and the rest of the globe. The Bomb is only the most obvious cause. Before the war, nuclear-fueled consumerism and unchecked mega-corporations pillaged the natural resources of the continent and poisoned the environment. (The series has never been content to poke fun at the past, but often draws unflattering comparisons to our world today.) A rampant military-industrial complex led to a garrison state, social unrest, and international tension. In short, the setting of Fallout is hardly an endorsement of the nuclear age. As players move through the hellscape of post-nuclear war America, they are confronted by jarring relicts of the pro-nuclear age. Advertisements for the best-selling soda before the war, Nuka-cola, are everywhere. One variant of this soda was even sold with the exciting inclusion of real radioactive isotopes. All the while, players struggle to deal with finding food and water that isn’t dangerously irradiated. Take too many doses of radiation, or “rads,” and the player’s character will die. The nuclear utopianism of the past is made to look preposterous next to its horrific consequences."

"Trading heavily on its nuclear theme, the Fallout video game series has so far teetered between satirizing the Bomb, and reveling in its power. But now it may be toppling over that fine line. These games are almost certainly the most well-known (and well-loved) media that deal with nuclear weapons today. Fallout must therefore be taken seriously as an influence on the real-world politics and culture of nuclear weapons in the 21st century."

"The Fallout universe paints a picture of a dystopian future. It exists in what people on the cusp of the atomic revolution in the 1950s saw as the sci-fi world of tomorrow... if several thousand nuclear bombs were dropped on it. It's a quaint sci-fi view of a future filled with atomic cars, robot servants, and incredibly basic computer terminals. A nuclear war has taken away most of these technological comforts, providing the backdrop for a game with a dreary, desperate atmosphere filled with glib and dark humor. It's a world that is both fantastic and somehow believable. And it is one that's exciting to explore."

"You know, In a 100 years, when I finally die, I only hope I go to hell- so I can kill you all over again you piece of shit."

"War. War never changes. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower. But war never changes."

"Come here, Chosen One. There are things you should know."

"You will be faced with many challenges throughout your lifetime, and the most difficult of these will be dealing with your fellow man. There will come a time when diplomacy and tact will prove to be useless and your hand must be raised instead."

"You've gotten a lot farther than you should have, but then you haven't met Frank Horrigan either. Your ride's over, mutie. Time to die."

"What do I want? I don't really know. Most of the time I ignore my quest and walk into the homes of others, riffling through people's shelves... oooh, like those over there!"

"Come on over here. I want to show you something. See that? It was your mother's favorite passage. It's from the Bible. Revelation 21:6. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely." She always loved that."

"You’ve made your last delivery, kid. Sorry you got twisted up in this scene. From where you’re kneeling, must seem like an 18-karat run of bad luck. Truth is, the game was rigged from the start."

"Makarov: [from intro] All warfare is based on deception. For years, the West's hypocrisy has made the world a battlefield. The corrupt talk, while our brothers and sons spill their own blood. But deceit cuts both ways. The bigger the lie, the more likely people will believe it. And when a nation cries for vengeance, the lie spreads like a wildfire. The fire builds, devouring everything in its path. Our enemies believe that they alone dictate the course of history... And all it takes is the will, of a single man."

"Capt. Price: Well that's a spot of luck! Not bad McGregor, nice find! Right, listen up, we're finished here! Well done boys!"

"Soldier 1: You hear that Norman's been sent home?"

"Pte. MacGregor: Sir, are we there yet?"

"Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)"

"Halo 2 (2004)"

"Halo 3 (2007)"

"Halo Wars (2009)"

"Halo 4 (2012)"

"Halo 5: Guardians (2015)"

"I think the great tragedy of Halo is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content, and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it. So Halo 1 built these 10 labor of love missions, and only if you decided to go back and replay them was there any incentive to do so."

"The guns on the [Halo 1] Ghost were balanced by making them really inaccurate. If you aim at something in Halo 1 with the Ghost and shoot at it, your shots are going all over the place. That balances the weapon, because it’s not overpowered. But it wasn’t balanced in a way that was empowering for the player. “I think one of the ways that I describe that is that every object, every player-facing verb, needs to be a power fantasy in some way. And so the Ghost was correctly balanced numerically, but it wasn’t that fun. It didn’t make you feel awesome. It wasn’t something you jumped on and thought you were going to tear the place up with."

"Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D. Even as a primitive vehicular prototype, emphasizing the physicality of the terrain, there wasn’t really anything that looked quite like it."

"Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly."

"The Halo series is, obviously, not an allegory for America’s involvement in Iraq, or the war on terror, where America is the UNSC, the Covenant is radical Islam, and the Brutes and Elites are the Sunni and the Shi’a (or vice versa, it would be idiotic and wrong to try to map one onto the other anyway). It’s a ridiculous idea that breaks down in any number of flagrant ways. Obviously the first Halo came out long before we invaded Iraq, and was conceived and planned even further back (I think it came out November 2001). And unlike the Iraqi insurgents, the Covenant have, or at least had, technological superiority, and they don’t go in for terrorist tactics — they’re toe-to-toe fighters. And they’re aliens. And they’re obsessed with purple things. And on and on."

"Le Guin first mentions the Ansible in her novel Rocannon’s World, published in 1966, and the invention of the device itself was a central motif to her 1974 novel, The Dispossessed. The main character of that novel was the inventor. Card, either through laziness or lack of imagination, appropriated Le Guin’s device full-bore and for reasons that have escaped me over the last thirty odd years, is that no one’s complained or cried foul. Indeed, other writers since then have also used the Ansible for their FTL communication needs. If Card had stolen a tune from a song and incorporated it in a song of his own (and consequently made a boat-load of money) without sharing the credit with the original songwriter, he’d have his ass handed to him in a sling in court. This is what happened to M.C. Hammer when he stole a famous riff from Rick James in 1990 for his song, “U Can’t Touch This”. The riff that made the song a world-wide hit (and made Hammer’s career) came from the creative mind of Rick James and it was only after a lengthy court battle did James end up sharing credit for Mr. Hammer’s song. Did Hammer say in court that it was a homage to Rick James? No. Did he say that everyone steals from everyone else in the music business and that it’s no big deal? No."

"That Ender could be tricked into believing a real battle scenario was a game-like video simulation is one of the most believable post-modern twists in modern science fiction, particularly considering how often the difference between our digital and "real" lives is debated and conflated. Ender becomes a "hero" in a supposed video game, something that embodies and magnifies fears about video games, both in 1985 when the book was published and today."

"Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault."

"I don't know of any pair of novels that have been as consistently misinterpreted as Card's Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Even a reader with a rudimentary knowledge of twentieth century history might be expected to guess that the character of Ender Wiggin, the near messianic superhero, is based on that of Adolf Hitler. Card himself is the "Speaker for the Dead" who seeks to understand and forgive the genocidal dictator's behavior by demonstrating that his intentions were good. Because Hitler/Ender committed genocide to preserve the existence and dignity of what he defined as human, he is not a monster but a true Superman who willingly shouldered the heavy responsibility thrust upon him."

"For the reader who isn't convinced that writing a book (no matter how highly acclaimed) makes up for exterminating a race, Card offers an alternative, albeit rather contradictory, excuse for his genocide's actions -- genetic determinism. Although this "science" has been shown to represent such an oversimplification that it's a downright distortion, Card makes it the foundation of the biology of his universe. From the very beginning, authorities can breed geniuses more easily than you or I could establish a strain of purebred blue budgies, and never mind that breeding for color and size involves at most a few genes, while breeding for intelligence would require a total understanding of the complicated interactions between whole chromosomes. In Card's strange world, children can inherit advanced qualities like a talent for xenobiology -- a bizarre combination of genetic determinism and Lamarckianism since these characteristics were presumably artificially acquired at some point in the past. (Or does Card imagine that there is literally a gene for xenobiological talent that we can breed for? How could such a thing evolve? Surely our genes would have to be macroscopic to carry all the information he assumes they do.) In any case, his pseudo-science serves primarily as an excuse for ugly actions running the gamut from genocide to vivisection."

"In Ender's Game, the Nebula Award-winning 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card, a 6-year-old boy is taken from his family on Earth to an orbital military academy to be molded into a soldier for a looming extraterrestrial war. For Ender, a misfit genius among some of the world's scariest adolescent prodigies, surviving the other cadets is a violent affair in itself—from maiming fellow students in the shower to orchestrating zero-gravity battles."

"One doesn’t need Freud to work out why Card’s novel is popular. “Ender’s Game” tells the story of an infant prodigy, Andrew Wiggin (nicknamed Ender), who is torn from the bosom of his family at 6 to be trained in “Battle School.” Earth is under threat from aliens -- the Buggers. Future war is waged as a computer game. And who are the virtuosos of the game console? Kids. Who are the best de-Buggers? Not Donald Rumsfeld’s generation."

"Sure, people get new jobs, or go to different schools, or grow in prestige. But at no point over the course of the novel do we see a demonstrable growth or change in any of the characters, despite the fact that Ender ages from six to roughly eleven. I'm willing to grant Card the "exceedingly young hero" just because every science fiction novel geared toward young adults — and many that aren't — runs into this problem. But to see no demonstrable character growth just sort of removes the stakes from it. Card in many ways suffers from the same problem that Asimov faced in some of his great novels, the fact that he had a rocking plot concept but his characters were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts just going through the motions to make that awesome plot happen."

"“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”"

""“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.”"

""That monitor is going to come out today. We're going to take it right out, and it won't hurt a bit." Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth."

"For a moment, the others backed away and Stilson lay motionless. They were all wondering if he was dead. Ender, however, was trying to figure out a way to forestall vengeance. To keep them from taking him in a pack tomorrow. I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse."

"I'll lie to him." "And if that doesn't work?" "Then I'll tell the truth. We're allowed to do that, in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."

"Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid."

"He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. He was afraid, and fear made him serious."

"“It isn't the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.""