Lonely miles of wasteland: Radiating failure in Fallout 4

Abstract

In this article, I analyse a radio voice in a post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout 4, set in the future ruins of Boston, Massachusetts. In the quest ‘Confidence Man’, players participate in the heteromasculinization of a failing radio disc jockey, Travis Miles, engaging him in the violence and relations of the post-nuclear war wasteland. Despite the ludic elements at play, Fallout 4 teleologically curtails player agency in Travis’ vocal puberty. I argue that Fallout 4’s ‘Confidence Man’ circulates gendered, nationalistic and capitalistic discourses, which assume an idealized confident radio voice as the natural, preferred intimate aesthetic and which reject the awkward, queer intimate aesthetic. Travis’ transformation into the confidence man Travis ‘Lonely’ Miles fulfils the sonic pleasure ethos of a capitalist formation, one that demands an appropriate aesthetic for a game-world centred on a neocolonial settler imperative.