Fallout 3 is set in post-nuclear Washington, D.C. The violent video game has won critical acclaim for its bleak atmospherics. It is not supposed to make you laugh.

Then came the YouTube game clips: a “Fallout 3 Baby,” wandering through the game’s apocalyptic landscape in nappies, bashing in mutants’ heads with its tiny fists, disabling a nuclear bomb, cooing “goo-goo” and dealing death with a Colt .45.

“My response was, ‘Oops,'” says game director Todd Howard. “But that’s pretty funny.”

Game designers are increasingly creating wide-open worlds with little to limit the action of the characters. And players are meeting them halfway, hoping to subvert or escape planned narrative lines, however loose, by any means necessary.

It’s fast becoming a sport of its own. In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers’ intentions on their heads. It’s only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play.

That’s only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision’s new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer.

“Today’s news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,” Michicich says. “It’s exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It’s stimulation, plain and simple.”

Videogame designers have added secret rewards known as Easter eggs as far back as 1980, when Atari programmer Warren Robinett included a creator’s credit in a hidden room in his videogame version of Adventure. Not long after that came the rise of the “cheat code,” allowing players to rack up experience points, skip levels or become invincible.

The “Fallout 3 Baby” and other similar glitches represent something in between – an unintended hiccup that allows players to see the game in a whole new light, transforming the narrative and mood into something completely different, and in some cases, creating a whole new kind of game.

In Super Mario Bros., players discovered a secret underwater limbo, dubbed Minus World, and it wasn’t long before they began playing the game just to find other such arcane exploits.

Then there’s Mirror’s Edge, a game that was hacked to show the runner from a third-person point of view — a feature the game designers had intentionally excluded.

“It’s about placing your flag on a previously unsummited mountain. The gamer has acquired knowledge that no one else has, and being first is always fun,” says Next Level Games game director Bryce Holliday, whose titles include the recently-released Wii version of Punch-Out. “One of the core themes of our latest game is exploration. There are plenty of unknown tricks hidden throughout it that we’ll be waiting for players to discover.”

In Fallout 3, playing as a baby requires nimble fingers and a willingness to explore the unintended consequences of the game’s cinematic programming.

In the early moments of the adventure, you interact with your father, who leaves you alone in your crib for a moment. By following closely behind him as he walks out the door, then sprinting ahead and ducking through the next automated doorway, you’ll find your character falling through what seems like an infinite void full of misshapen textures and vast nothingness.

After a few moments, the game will deposit you in the next game-play segment, where you play a grade-school version of yourself. But if you pulled off the trick correctly, you’ll still be a baby.

Soon, the baby must wander past over-sized cockroaches, armed guards and blaring sirens, but once you’ve cleared the gigantic door to Vault 101 and escaped into the wilderness, the game essentially plays as normal.

Well, “normal.” Conversations now proceed like this:

“You lookin’ to trade, stranger?”

“Da da!”

“Check out Craterside Supply.”

“Bye bye!”

Wandering into the first town, Megaton, you’ll be approached by the same characters who would make your acquaintance during normal game play. Though your point of view is a few feet lower than normal, none of the characters you meet will make any mention of it, although they will look down at you to meet your gaze.

There are certain inconveniences that go along with life as a post-nuclear toddler. Babies don’t run very fast, first of all. And Pip-Boy, the game’s interactive menu system, doesn’t quite render correctly.

“The slow run and pipboy messup really suck the fun out of it,” wrote user Fallout3 Girl on GameSpot. “But it is still hecka funny.”

Funny enough that gamers in on the joke began posting Fallout baby clips on YouTube, to wild popularity. Dozens of sequences have been posted since the baby escape sequence was discovered last fall, drawing hundreds of thousands of views.

Another example is found in Mirror’s Edge, a game based heavily on free running with a unique first-person viewpoint. But some players didn’t want to experience the vertigo-inducing action through the eyes of the main character, and found a simple exploit in the PC version that allows them to unlock a third-person camera, created by developers but taken out of the final game.

In Super Mario Bros., jumping through a certain solid wall lets you take Mario into “Minus World,” an endlessly repeating, inescapable underwater level.

Players that had already saved the Princess a dozen times over all turned their attention to finding secret glitches like this, turning Mario’s quest to get to the final castle into a quest to get himself hopelessly stuck in alternate universes.

In a re-release of the game, Nintendo turned the Minus World into a reward. In place of the repeating, boring water level were three new ones that the player could actually finish, and when they completed them they unlocked a “stage select” feature that let them jump anywhere in the game.

Not every unintended game sequence is embraced so enthusiastically, of course. The developer’s response “depends on your ESRB rating,” joked Michicich.

“Your reaction could be anything from delight on the added bonus of replayability, to sudden absolute panic. I once worked on a fighting game where there was an alpha mask rendering bug that when the buxom leading female character walked behind some heat distortion particles from a fire, her top sorted incorrectly, and rendered completely off.”

Bug, or bonus? You decide.

Earnest Cavalli contributed to this article.

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