VoxAdActa

I’ve played through Fallout 1 and 2 dozens of times.

I have yet to finish Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Vegas.

The sea change from “actual RPGs” to “shooters with occasional minor choices to make” enrages me.

It doesn’t weed out anything but honest people.

That’s like saying a pre-flight check doesn’t throw up errors on anything anything but honest machines. But, more to the point, you’re right, in the sense that the people on either tail end of the “good/bad people” bell curve aren’t going to be precisely detected by a simple test of inclusion/exclusion criteria. The ~60% of people in the middle will be. That’s why it’s a screening tool, not an in-depth socio-psychological exam.

As long as your honesty comes closer to filling the socially expected role than, say, a man who’s high on meth or a Qanon conspiracist who thinks “how are you?” is a sex-trafficker code, you’re probably ok.

I agree. That’s exactly what I do. Memorize two or three different socially acceptable answers to each of the half-dozen or so most common “human vibe check” questions.

Because that’s exactly what they are. They’re human vibe checks. It’s not about finding out how you’re really feeling, or what you honestly think of the weather. It’s about being a quick way to sort out who is capable of of functioning in a social capacity and who isn’t, without putting in a lot of time and effort doing an in-depth screening.

“Small talk” is culturally designed to weed out 70-80% of those people who are likely to be dangerous, unstable, or unreliable, allowing us to know who we need to pay close attention to in our environment and who we probably don’t. It’s not a question of “lying” or “telling the truth”, it’s a question of “can you perform your socially expected role in this cultural ritual?”.

Saying “I’m fine, how are you?” is no more “lying” than doing a safety check on an airplane you’re about to fly is (because you don’t actually need to engage the flaps right now, being on the ground and all). It’s just about checking to make sure the right lights come on and the right motors engage. If a person can’t even answer a question they’ve had decades to prepare for, and can’t engage, even to a minimum acceptable degree, in a small social ceremony they’ve watched thousands of times and had hundreds of opportunities to practice themselves, that’s a bad sign. That’s like trying to engage the flaps and hearing some weird grinding noise and getting a red blinking light on the console.

It’s important to note here that I have a bit of an advantage in this arena over a lot of the rest of the community. One of my deepest autistic hyperfocus areas has been observing, experimenting, and collecting data on human interpersonal communications, specifically linguistic communication. It’s all very ritualistic, at its base, and it’s easy for me to create, memorize, and practice the scripts for performing those rituals in different contexts. And when I fuck one up, I can go back through and memorize another script so if that same conversation every comes up in the future (and it will, because there are only so many rituals!), I won’t fuck it up again (to the same degree).