Last week we tore apart Christopher Nolan’s Inception with Emil Pagliarulo. Today we continue the discussion with Fallout 3 lead architect/level designer Joel Burgess, who managed to tie in the Pisa Effect, the Rule of Right, and flying meatballs.

Inception’s dream levels are mostly grounded in reality. On the game side of things, you guys create fantasy worlds, but they have their own set of rules that aren’t too far off from reality in many ways.

There are certain expectations people have of reality. And unless you’re going very out there and fabricating an entirely different reality with its own rules, people still have very specific expectations about the heft of something, or the rules of physics.

There’s actually something we refer around here to “The Pisa Effect.” The idea behind the Pisa Effect is that something like the Tower of Pisa, when you see it in the real world, is backed up by the fact that it’s reality. So you see it, and it’s weird, and you say, “Oh that’s crazy,” but you buy it.

But if that was in a video game, and somebody had never seen the Tower of Pisa, they’d be like, “That would fall right over, that’s dumb, this game is stupid.” And as the level designer, you can point at the Tower of Pisa as much as you want and say “this happens in the real world,” but it doesn’t matter, because it’s about the player’s perception. If the player expects it to fall over, then the player is right and you do it differently.

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Video games have certainly inspired plenty of movies, but mainly in the area of bullet-time acrobatics and CG-laden effects sequences; it’s rare to find a film that specifically reflects the artistic creation of a game. So it was surprising when Inception not only brought the submachineguns, but also the subtext.

Plenty of Bethesda developers dug the film, so we sat down with a few to extract some of their thoughts. First up is a chat with Emil Pagliarulo, point man/lead designer on Fallout 3. Warning: some slight Inception spoilers follow.

I’ve heard people call Inception the first movie about game design. Going into it, were you conscious of any analogy to games?

No, I wasn’t conscious of any of that — it actually surprised me. And then with the Ariadne character [played by Ellen Page], they actually talk about the dreams being “levels.”

Right, “level creator,” or however they termed it.

Right, and then it was like, oh, whoa, okay. And it totally took on this other weird meaning. Up until that point, I had been thinking about the movie solely as a dream. But once they brought up the term “level,” then you can’t help but think about losing your consciousness when playing a game, and what that means. Sort of the same type of stuff that James Cameron did with Avatar, making the fantasy your reality, and where does one stop and the other begins.

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