Surviving Fallout 4: A Design Fiction

This paper by Marcel Pufal and Theresa Jean Tanenbaum argues that the postapocalyptic video game Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) can be read as a design fiction: a plausible vision of a near future shaped by unsustainable resource consumption, climate pressure, and collapsing infrastructure. The authors position the game as a rehearsal space in which players can explore survivalist practices and sustainable behavior without the heavy-handed moralizing typical of environmental messaging. Their central claim is that the game's immersive, believable world invites reflection on how people might live under scarcity, and that such engagement can inform thinking about sustainability and emergency preparedness.

The analysis rests on the game's detailed world-building, which the authors attribute to a design process that asked what it would truly take to produce each object, structure, and settlement system. Examples include rain barrels and functional water-pumping mechanisms in shacks, and a settlement system that tracks food, water, shelter, defense, social organization, and crafting consistently across non-player characters and the player. The paper also identifies recurring dimensions of the game's imagined society: chaotic political structures, ambient radiation with scarce medical aid, limited information infrastructure, the fraught role of children, and the reappropriation of decontextualized artifacts from the prior civilization.

The authors situate this argument within HCI scholarship on design fiction, drawing on Bruce Sterling's coinage of the term and subsequent work linking speculative narratives to technology design. The paper is primarily a conceptual and interpretive contribution presented as a talk, illustrated by the authors' own attempts to embody sustainable and survivalist practices within the game. It does not present quantitative survey data or a formal empirical sample, and its scope is limited to a single game and its fan-production and play practices.