[This piece was originally an example reflective commentary for the participants in Actions Speak Louder, the focus group that Terry and I are running.  For those unfamiliar with the game mentioned, Fallout 3 is a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game played from a first-person perspective.]

So there I am, inching my way down a derelict train tunnel riddled with booby traps, when I see a strange object in a side tunnel.  The safest way to deal with booby traps in Fallout 3 is to shoot them, so I put a bullet into the object.  It doesn’t explode.  It’s just a baby carriage facing a gate on the other side of the tunnel.  Some useful items are behind that gate, so I go to open the gate and collect them.  As I reach the gate, there is a loud crying noise behind me – I whirl around just in time to see a baby in the carriage before it explodes!  As the dust settles my mind is spinning, trying to process what happened.  The explosion was just far enough away to avoid seriously damaging me, so the intent wasn’t to kill me.  I can’t imagine that this was anything but a completely mechanical booby trap – there’s no way that could have been a real baby – but what sort of mind would devise that trap?  What purpose does this psychological trap serve?

This is where Bogost’s idea of the simulation gap helped me isolate at least one reading of the above game sequence.  He claims that a game can be examined as a series of enthymemes (Bogost, 43), so it should be possible to find the overt and “omitted” procedural statements included in the game.  One representative statement is that Fallout’s world is mostly devoid of civilization.  Procedurally, towns were relatively few and far between, and most of my equipment in the game came from scavenging.  Another representative claim was that the inhabitants were often dangerous and devoid of what we’d consider civilized norms.  Indeed, procedurally, pretty much anyone or anything that I met outside of town was competing with me for resources at the best, or trying to loot my corpse at worst.  In particular, they were the type of people who’d set up a baby carriage bomb just to mess with my head.  Fallout 3 is a harsh environment with harsh people.

With that context, the “omitted” claim made thought my gameplay experience seems to be that the environment molds people in its harsh image.  The world of the game had succeeded in altering my behavior, shifting it away from my previous norms in at least one particular way: I put a bullet through a baby carriage without thinking about the object under my crosshairs.  The procedures of survival in the Fallout 3’s environment altered my procedures of behavior within the game world.  This molding process was mentioned fleetingly in the game’s representation, but never made palpable until this moment.