Women as Resource: Fallout Shelter

When Bethesda made the E3 announcement that they were going to be releasing a mobile Fallout game I was more than a little bit excited. I have been playing Fallout Shelter (iOS) almost constantly since it launched. I started with just one vault and thought that I might get that one up and running solidly before I started a second. And then on the third day something horrible happened: Rad Roaches blew through my vault and killed damned near everyone before I could kill them all because we were light on weapons. I decided that I needed a fresh start so I started my second vault. But being the kind of person who won’t go back to a previous save or otherwise try to change the trajectory of my gameplay I just couldn’t bring myself to delete that original vault. No matter what I did or how long I waited I couldn’t get more survivors to show up at the door of the original vault and I couldn’t build a radio studio to lure more there because I didn’t have enough vault dwellers to unlock one.

And then I did it. I did the thing that I thought that I would never do in this game. I decided to make a baby. I put a male and female survivor in the living quarters together and left them. I knew what would happen. I had read about other people’s gameplay and I’d seen the pictures. The two would soon start flirting and then they’d go into the back room together and “get happy.” After that dude was going to come out looking smug and the woman was going to come out pregnant. After the deed was done my female dweller emerged from and the back room looking miserable and physically uncomfortable (though dwellers can have a higher happiness level) and the game had taken away her vault jumpsuit and had given her a bright yellow shirt and blue pants. She had her own little uniform, an entirely different one. She had a whole new job: reproduction. That was the point at which she, as a woman of child-bearing years and ability (obviously), had become just another resource. It was all too strangely reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, where women who were found to still be fertile after substantial contamination of the environment were distributed as a kind of rented womb to families with sufficient funds and status in order to sire children and to maintain the human population. In Atwood’s dystopia the sex was ceremonial and every pregnancy and birth was celebrated by both the community and an overseer of sorts. We see the same kind of institutional recognition in Fallout Shelter via Pip Boy, but more on that in a second.

While the resource bars on the game’s HUD itself only includes energy, water, and food, it is clear that pregnant women and babies are also resources in that the game’s objectives that include things like collect 100 water/energy will also randomly include goals like “have 3 pregnant dwellers” or “deliver 1 baby dweller.” Pregnant women and their children are clearly also resources to be collected in Fallout Shelter.

And once my woman gave birth she got a thumbs up (the same thumbs up that you get when your survivors run off to the back bedroom to begin (re)production) from a creepy little image of Dr. Pip-Boy that seemed to be saying “thanks for taking one for the team”…literally. It was like the seal of approval that comes at the final stage of the production cycle. Women as breeders, women as livestock. It’s something that we’ve seen before and something that is just too fucking familiar. I don’t think that the whole process of reproduction in the game would have been as troubling to me if it had been something that felt like it took place voluntarily. If my vault survivors had simply started to flirt (as we’ve seen in game like The Sims) and then run off to “Woo Hoo” before the pregnancy was revealed it would have felt less like an exercise in animal husbandry than having to select the two survivors who were most likely to get the deed done quickly (based on charisma, happiness, and health) and placing them in a room where they did what they “had to do” absent any kind of free will (to use another term from The Sims).

I have to say that the whole process just left me feeling kind of uncomfortable. After that first foray into dweller breeding I have had to go back to relying on old fashioned methods of repopulating my vault, either waiting for survivors to show up at my door or hoping to pick one out of the lunchbox trading cards. So far, I have to admit, that this isn’t working so well for me because at the time of this writing this particular vault only has seven dwellers. But they do seem to be pretty happy dwellers, if I do say so myself. Eventually, I may have to break down and buy more lunchboxes to find the survivors that my vault so desperately needs, but right now I find that a far more acceptable alternative to turning my women’s fecundity into yet another resource.