For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.

I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. In other words, it's just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you've run out of ammo. Fallout's ensemble cast – with Walton Goggins' almost-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell's wide-eyed vault-dweller the standouts – lets it cleverly compartmentalise the different aspects of the games' personality. As its director Jonathan Nolan pointed out, when I interviewed him last week alongside Bethesda's Todd Howard (the director of the games), this is a common device in TV storytelling but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it successfully: each of the three protagonists represented a different part of GTA's DNA (Trevor the violent chaos, Michael the prestige crime drama, Franklin the Compton realism). But in most games we play one character, and we know them intimately by the end – or we get to shape them, and they become unique to us.

If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. "Having grown up with the entire history of the medium – I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago – that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing," he says. "That's what I felt with [2008's] Fallout 3: the audacity. Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard's. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other's company, and enthusiastic about each other's work. "I talked to a lot of people about doing a Fallout movie or TV show and I kept saying no to everybody," Howard says. "I loved the work that Jonah had done in movies and in TV, and in a couple interviews he did, he mentioned his love of games ... I said to somebody, he's perfect.

For decades, it seemed like Hollywood couldn't get a video game adaptation right. Movies like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider were all critically panned, with their creators called out for either sticking too close to the source material, failing to capture the magic of the games, or casting actors who didn't really embrace the films' inherent campiness. In recent years, though, there's been a shift in game adaptations, with projects like The Last of Us and Werewolves Within achieving critical acclaim and--in the case of the former, at least--a boatload of awards nods. You could point to a number of reasons to try to explain why game adaptations are getting better (Pedro Pascal, for example), but Jonathan Nolan, co-creator of Amazon Prime Video's new series Fallout, says he thinks it's because games often have "more sophisticated, more interesting, and more daring" storytelling than is often found in film or TV. When Nolan first started playing Fallout 3 in 2009, while trying to write The Dark Knight Rises, he was taken aback.

The distaste of many for the new dialogue system is, in most cases, tied to expectations about what a Fallout game should be. In fact, I think nostalgia for previous entries holds "Fallout" 4 back. Common sentiment among fans and critics is that both "Fallout 3" and "New Vegas" rank above "Fallout 4." Fallout is my favorite game franchise, and "Fallout 3" sparked the love affair. Before "Fallout 3," there was no Fallout as we know it today. The game blew the hinges off the franchise in the best way: "Fallout 2," released 10 years before "Fallout 3," had a bird's-eye view a la StarCraft and turn- and tile-based combat.

While billionaires buy up property in New Zealand and pay technologists huge sums of money for advice on how to keep their staff in check after "the event" – that is, whatever it is that wipes out enough of the planet to justify living in bunkers – the rest of us are left to deal with the looming threat of catastrophe by playing video games. Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout series offers a very American take on the post-apocalypse: humans, ghouls and mutants protect their respective corners of the wasteland with big guns and power armour, in a retro future with sci-fi technology and a 1950s aesthetic. The games present a ravaged, irradiated all-American picket-fence fantasy with classic cars, suburban homes and US landmarks devastated by nuclear bombs. Fallouts 3 and 4 are explorative role-playing games that cast the player as a survivor emerging from a vault after more than 100 years into a world they don't recognise – though, after a few hours, they have significantly more weapons and resources than the average pitiable remnant of humanity. The games offer the player 100 or more hours exploring the wasteland and meeting its dogged inhabitants.

In previous research we concluded that a personality profile, based on the Five Factor Model, can be constructed from observations of a player’s behavior in a module that we designed for Neverwinter Nights (Lankveld et al. 2011a). In the present research, we investigate whether we can do the same thing in an actual modern commercial video game, in this case the game Fallout 3. We stored automatic observations on 36 participants who played the introductory stages of Fallout 3. We then correlated these observations with the participants’ personality profiles, expressed by values for five personality traits as measured by the standard NEO-FFI questionnaire. Our analysis shows correlations between all five personality traits and the game observations. These results validate and generalize the results from our previous research (Lankveld et al. 2011a). We may conclude that Fallout 3, and by extension other modern video games, allows players to express their personality, and can therefore be used to create personality profiles.