"I Need to Get My Family Back!" Using Family as Character Motivation (Red Dead Redemption and Fallout 4 spoilers)

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been playing Red Dead Redemption on Xbox One.  For those of you out there who aren't familiar with the plot, you play a John Marston, a former gun-slinging bandit.  His history catches up with him when the government kidnaps his family.  The only way for John to get them back is to hunt down the other members of his former gang an bring them to justice.

That's about the extent of the story you get within the first hour or so.   As the game progresses, you're steadily drip fed more details about John's family and his history with the gang. It's important to note that the player doesn't actually meet John's family until very, very near the end of the main story line.  For the vast majority of the game, these are characters that the player has never even seen, they're just a vague end goal on the horizon for John.

Another game that I played relatively recently also features a story wherein the player character's primary motivation for adventure is having their family taken from them, namely Fallout 4.  Just as a preface, the game lets you play as a male or female character.  I'm going to be writing this assuming the player character is female, since that is the sex of the character I put the most time into.  Sex doesn't really change anything about the game, other than some bits of dialogue here and there, but it's easier to just pick one for the sake of pronouns going forward.  Anyway, Fallout handles the player's relationship with his/her family very differently from RDR.  Fallout introduces the player to their family right from the get-go.  Your husband coos in your ear throughout the character creation screen.  One of the first objects you interact with in the game is a dog bowl, prompting your husband to remark on the dog being missing.  He mentions how good your robot butler, Codsworth, is with your newborn baby, Shawn.  You're introduced to the dialogue system in the game by your husband asking if you want to go on a family picnic.  It's hammered into you right from the onset of the game that your character has an idyllic family life.

The purpose of all this loving familial bonding in the introduction of the game is to make it upsetting for the player when the scene is interrupted by the bombs dropping, and mad dash to get to the local fallout shelter (called "Vaults" in-game).  The player's character and family are tricked, however, and it turns out they won't simply be living underground for a time, as they expected, but actually get cryogenically frozen.  You're thawed an unknown span of time later, and have to watch helplessly from your pod as an unknown group of gun-toting miscreants murders your husband and kidnaps Shawn.  You're refrozen for another unknown length of time, and are eventually rescued by the generators in the vault failing, which triggers the safety release of your pod.

You leave the vault to find that the world is now an irradiated wasteland, and your former neighborhood now consists of a few barely standing structures inhabited by nothing but a few mutated insects, and Codsworth, who reveals to you that it's been 210 years since the bombs dropped.  Your character sets out into the wasteland hoping to rescue her son from his kidnappers.

So, other than being introduced to the family early on, and having customizable characters, it's not immediately apparent that there would be much difference between these stories, right? Well, here's where this gets interesting.  In my opinion, Red Dead Redemption tells one of the best stories in the history of gaming.  I also think that the story of Fallout 4 is completely terrible.  Why?  A major part of my writing this whole thing is trying to figure out what Red Dead did so right that I was able to play through it for probably the fourth of fifth time and still feel hugely compelled to reunite John with his family in a way that I never have with any of the litany of Fallout 4 characters that I've started and abandoned.

One of the key differences in the story is that John knows from the very start who has his family, and what he has to do to get them back.  This puts John in a situation where he pretty much never needs to ask about his family.  He's very leery of talking about them in direct terms at all, in fact.  It's framed as a major sign of trust any time John speaks frankly abut the situation he is in with another character.  He is intentionally vague about his situation, to the point where he is accused on multiple occasions of speaking in riddles.  This isn't because he's at all hesitant about asking for help.  He's more than willing to ask for information about his targets.  He simply wants to keep his personal affairs private.  His being so elusive with information, even towards friendly characters, is telling about his character and his situation.  For the first third of the game, he is trying to apprehend Bill Williamson, so he asks for help in apprehending Bill Williamson.  When Bill escapes to Mexico, John follows, and entirely stops asking about him.  Instead he starts asking for help in tracking Javier Escuella, another one of the members of his gang, under the assumption that Bill is staying with him.  Having John know what he has to do to get his family back from the beginning allows for the story to be broken up into more discrete, tangible, objectives, while still keeping the family as an end goal.  The nature of John's targets as past friends let them make contributions to the player's understanding of John and his family's backstory as well.  Largely though dialogue with antagonists, we learn that John was taken into the gang as an orphan.  We learn that his wife was a prostitute who lived with the gang.  We learn that John left the gang after they left him for dead during a failed heist.  We get a rough time frame in that Jack is mentioned as having lived amongst the gang as a child.

In contrast, the Fallout 4 protagonist is in a situation where she is looking for her child, directly.  As a result, she is pretty constantly asking other characters for information.  Her hounding of everyone she encounters in the wasteland about Shawn borders on meme status in the Fallout community. There isn't anything inherently wrong with this.  It makes sense that a desperate parent would be looking for information anywhere she could find it.  One thing that really frustrated me about the way it's handled in Fallout 4, however, is that she often times specifically says she's looking for a baby.  So, to lay it out, when you find Shawn, he's not a baby, he's an old man.  This is frustrating because the game tries so, so hard to use this as a huge twist, but I saw it coming from such a long ways off that the actual reveal ends up not being remotely satisfying.  The game is just too clumsy about keeping the secret.  Like I mentioned, they make it very apparent that your character was refrozen after Shawn was kidnapped.  I was assuming that Shawn would be old or dead before my character even had a chance to talk to anyone, so now, these conversations where I'm trying to get information are suddenly just me watching my character jump through hoops to remain ignorant for no payoff later.

Eventually, both characters are reunited with their respective families, and the story from that point is largely about their relationship with them.  In Fallout, the conflict from there on is meant to be mostly about your character struggling with who your child has become.  He's the leader of the almost cartoonishly evil "The Institute", positively hell-bent on being an allegory for American slave owners.  The player is supposed to view what he and his organization represent as being reprehensible, but struggle with whether or not they should go along with it, specifically for the sake of being with Shawn.  It had the potential to be a very intriguing story about a parent having to come to terms with the fact that her child was taken down a wrong path, where she wasn't able to help him, and testing the strength of that familial bond versus her own convictions.  It could have been very powerful if executed well.  The biggest issue that it faces, however, is just that I ended up not really caring about Shawn when I got to him, so the internal struggle never happened for me.  He was just another bad guy for me to shoot in the face, so I could get back to exploring with my companions.

So, the question is why did I not feel the way the story wanted me to feel about Shawn?  Ultimately, Shawn is meant to be emblematic of your pre-bomb life as a whole, and I think the biggest thing is just that I didn't get to spend enough time in that life.  The intro sequence is only a few minutes long, and after that you don't ever really get any more interaction with that world.  It's hard to have nostalgia for, or feel anything at all about something that you never really got to experience.  If I had gotten to spend more time in that world in the intro, it would have meant more when it was taken away from me.  For example, I mentioned that at one point your spouse asks you if you want to go to the park.  What if, if you said yes to them, you actually took a family trip to the park?  You get an opportunity to interact with your family more, maybe meet some neighbors, see your pre-bomb neighborhood. Hell, maybe you even get reunited with that lost dog.  Then, when you arrive back home, the bombs drop and the sequence proceeds as normal.  In addition to that, maybe you have sequences further along in the main story, that are reminding you about that world and contrasting it against the one surrounding you now.  That way, by the time you find Shawn, it hasn't been 50 hours since you've seen what the world used to be like.  This could be done with flashbacks or, you know, the facility that already plays a major role in the main story whose sole purpose is to let people relive memories.  Not including a Memory Den sequence for the main character seems like such a massive oversight that I almost have to believe that it was cut content.  The character never even gives any indication that the concept is appealing to her.  It paints the character, herself, as not caring about her past life, so why should I?  She can't even be bothered to do anything about her dead husband's body that is just rotting away in the vault for the entire game.  You have a community full of people who love you within easy walking distance of the vault, get a few of them to help you give your husband (and maybe all your former neighbors) a proper burial!  She's flippant about her past life to such a degree that it almost feels out of character for her to care about Shawn.  When you don't care about Shawn, the story path that he represents suddenly shifts from being about the bizarre relationship you and your child have had across time, to just being about really being on-board for slavery, and hating everyone who isn't a part of the The Institute.... not exactly a story I can really get behind.  Shawn dies, no matter what quest route you take, and leaves to you a synthetic replica of his child self to raise.  It'd be a great gesture, if your character had spent time anguishing about the lost time they had.  As it is, it just ends up feeling kind of hollow, and asks the same question that the whole rest of the game asks, namely whether or not the Synthetics are actually people.  The fact that it is a Synthetic Shawn isn't any more meaningful than it being any other Synthetic child.

The reunification of John Marston with his family, on the other hand, feels like a strong resolution to the story on its own.  You've arrested or killed people who you used to consider family, you've made new relationships, you've traveled across borders, you've traversed treacherous terrain, and fought overwhelming odds.  There's a moment as the story wraps up, where, in a cut-scene, you are standing over the dead body of your final former comrade, and the FBI agent who took your family informs you that there had been a riot in the prison where they were keeping your wife some weeks prior, and that she had been killed.  I remember the first time I watched this scene, I audibly said "god damn it" when John pulled his gun, and pointed it at Agent Ross's head.  I'd never hated a character more.  But, before John fires, Agent Ross informs him that he was only joking, and that his family had been returned to his ranch, safe and sound.  As you ride home to the ranch, the music is noticeably different than the norm for the game, which frames the event as a culmination of all you've done leading up that point.  You have a brief meeting with your family that lets you get to know a bit about their personalities as they tell you about their internment.  You also meet Uncle, a drunken old-man who helps out around the property.

John's story could end right there, and feel complete.  Instead, there's a whole story arc that happens after this about John trying to get the neglected ranch up and running again, and exploring John's relationship with his family a bit more.  In particular, there is a lot of focus on his relationship with his son, Jack.  John's being something of an inconsistent presence in his life has left him jaded and distrustful of his commitment to the family.  I personally related to that relationship on an extreme level because I also grew up with a father who was away for much of my childhood.  This included a stretch when I was 11-12, where he was away from the family for an entire year.  John's attempts to build a relationship with Jack reminded me a lot of my own father's attempts to rekindle our relationship when the family was able to be together, again, right down to the attempts at getting me into hunting.  Abigail gets significantly less attention than Jack, but there is a sequence where she and John visit the MacFarlane Ranch.  The major event that occurs here is that Abigail meets Bonnie MacFarlane, who is a major character in the early game, that John directly compares to his wife on a couple of occasions, and is implied to have romantic feelings towards John.  Abigail and Bonnie immediately hit it off, trading jokes at John's expense, and it's apparent that John's assessment of their being very similar people is correct.  It's not that interesting of a sequence as far as story goes, but I do find it very interesting from a characterization perspective.  Rather than having Abigail get significant amount of time dedicated to her character, directly, what they do is have John say that she is a lot like Bonnie, who you do get to know quite well, and then they have the two characters meet, to further establish the similarities to Bonnie.  So, the player more-or-less ends up just applying what they know about Bonnie to Abigail.  It's an interesting shortcut for establishing a character that I've never really seen before.

Of course, just as it seems like everything is going to be A-OK for the Marston family, there is one more big piece of adversity that they need to overcome.  The government isn't happy having Marston on the loose, given his criminal history, so they come for him in force.  John, Uncle, and Jack do everything they can to fight off the soldiers that attack the ranch.  Uncle is killed, and the family decides to try and make a break for it, rather than just sit and wait to be overwhelmed.  John sends Abigail and Jack away on a horse and says he'll be right behind them.  Instead of following, he simply walks out to the awaiting Agent Ross and accompanying firing squad that has surrounded their barn, is shot dozens of times and falls dead.  He realized that his family would never be able to live peacefully, as long as he lived, so he sacrificed himself in spectacular fashion to allow them to live their lives.  Jack and Abigail ride back to the ranch to find his body, and they bury him and uncle atop a hill overlooking their house.

Again, the story could have ended here and felt complete, but instead there is a time skip to a scene some years later of  Abigail's grave next to John's.  The screen pans up to a young adult Jack, who then sets off to track down Agent Ross.  Over the course of this mission, Jack meets both Ross's wife and brother, and has the option of killing them both.  Ultimately, he finds Ross, long since retired from the FBI, hunting ducks down in Mexico.  Jack introduces himself and immediately challenges him to a duel.  He wins, and the story finally concludes.  It's an awesome resolution to the story because you get a lot of satisfaction as a player from finally killing Ross.  Then you think about it in the broader context of the story, it actually means that everything John did to try and give Jack a chance at a normal life is wasted, because he still ends up becoming a gun-slinging outlaw, anyway.  He's destined to end up dead in shootout somewhere just like John, and Bill, and Javier, and Dutch all did.  It ends up a very poignant story about child-caregiver relationships that I think everyone can relate to.  The lifestyle John lived ultimately had a profound impact on the person Jack became, despite doing everything he could to shield Jack from that life.

I think part of the reason Fallout 4 struggled so hard with their narrative was because they were afraid of giving their character too much of a back story.  Even with the skeleton of a story that we got, a lot of the Fallout faithful were upset about having their role-playing limited.  Red Dead has the benefit of having an established main character, with an established backstory that can be used to create a complex, interesting character.  Player characters in games like Fallout usually aren't allowed to be complex, because they're meant to be vessels through which the player tells their own story.  The way they're made interesting is by giving them agency to make meaningful, difficult decisions in an interesting world.  Fallout 4 tries to stride this line between having the blank slate character, and the established backstory character, and ends up not doing either very well.  The backstory ends up only serving as a limiter to what the character can do, without actually informing anything or being built upon in a meaningful way.  Whereas with John Marston, his backstory is informing everything he does, even before the player is privy to that story.  He's a deep character, and you get invested in his story.  It's not about his family, it's about being on an adventure with him, and that's why it works.