Why do you find this world convincing?

It’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s biggest selling point, and yet I never believed in it. How many conspicuous sunsets or midnight rides under a prison spotlight moon does it take before you begin to question the sky? How do you feel when the convenient fog rolls in yet again and the light flips to a more fitting hour, all to make your mission extra dramatic? Is this how a convincing world acts? Can’t you just feel Red Dead’s world constantly looking at you? It’s all for you, baby, just for you. The world as desperate suitor. Not a place where things happen but a stage for some third-rate drama. What is the game really seeking but submission when it asks you to ignore the little Hausers behind the curtain, all their corny fakery, and just say yes?

What is it that you want from a virtual world anyway? Good graphics and weightless details? A display of extravagant wealth and misused labor? Horseballs realism might make you stop and ogle, but it does not make a world. Realism has consequences. It alters our expectations of a world, about how it will respond to us. So when elaborate animations manage to make you feel less embodied, when texture proves more distraction than grounds for being, when nothing you do in the world really matters in the end, don’t you begin to lose faith? When your tenth conversation with a stranger goes nowhere, don’t you wonder why this possibility was even included? This game keeps asking questions its world cannot answer.

It’s a technical achievement, I guess, but why does a ‘technical achievement’ mean something to you? What does that achievement serve? What are you getting out of it? What is the fantasy here?

Why do you think this story and these characters are good?

I know this is rude but: have you seen or read any westerns? Or experienced much of any media outside videogames? Because Red Dead Redemption 2 has both bad storytelling and a bad story being told. The predictable ridealong chats in every mission, the awkward transitions between story beats, the sheer reiteration over fifty hours — what is this but bad telling? And the tale of yet another videogame conman, his band of shitty killers, and their romanticized downfall — how is this anything but a bad story to tell? It’s boring. It’s outdated. It’s beyond self-serving for the gameplay here. The voice actors might sell it well enough, but they can’t save writing this repetitive, blandly textured, and unmemorable.

Which of these characters is good? Is it Sadie, the only kind of woman that Rockstar respects, a woman who acts like a man? Is it Charles, your cool and dignified sidekick, who never questions his position as a Black Indigenous man in this society or makes you feel the least bit uncomfortable? Is it Dutch, who is obviously evil from the start? Is a dimestore conman in a dumb vest really that impressive to you? Or is it Arthur, the saddest sack in the old west? Whose entire emotional range is variations of sad: mad sad, weary sad, dirty sad, lapdog sad. I done some bad things ma’am sad. Are you not tired of being asked by a videogame to understand Mr. Bad Man?

Where is the humanity, the spark of life, the soul here? In the camp, that family of tropes? I’m hungry for family in videogames too, but come on, these people suck. They’re familiar types in familiar roles serving a group delusion that requires murder to make real. Realism plus murder has consequences, for these characters, for their stories, for you. Every potential grace note is undercut by this background of reckless slaughter. Every character is a pawn to these violent ends. The game might try to convince you that it’s just tough people in tough times, doing what they gotta do to survive, right Dutch? But the old west was not all like this. What do you really know of 1899 America? Rockstar is choosing to tell this kind of story. Why are you choosing to accept it?

How can you stomach the mournful tone?

It’s not enough to have you play the outlaw. It’s not enough to have you headshot thousands. You also have to feel bad that this ‘way of life’ is passing. What way of life? The phrase itself is so dumbly romantic. Your way of life is shitty murdering. Why does it need an elegy?

You almost get the sense RDR2 wants us to mourn the passing of its own brand of chaotic sandbox gameplay. Rockstar too once played the outlaw on a wild frontier. But nowadays you just can’t jack tanks and shoot grandmas like you used to. The good old days of the early 2000s are gone. Realism made it all less tenable. Progress just kept rolling along, civilizing the wild west of gaming. Whatever happened to freedom, man? Those were the days, Red Dead laments, again and again. The whole game plays like a billion dollar pity party.

It’s all supposed to be some sort of unavoidable tragedy. Even the focus on Dutch’s gang feels inevitable. Do you remember the time before the game’s prequel story was announced? When it was just the next Red Dead Redemption? When it could have been about anything vaguely western? Not necessarily even related to John Marston, as with the Grand Theft Auto sequels. What did you imagine it might be? It’s hard to remember, I know. How many of your gaming dreams have been replaced by the banal reality of the final product?

Or even once you played RDR2 and knew it was about Dutch’s gang, did you ever stop to ask why the main character was Arthur? Why it was another gruff white man with a dark past? Why it wasn’t Sadie or Charles or Lenny? Or better yet, Abigail or Tilly? Did you ever ask yourself why the maleness and the whiteness and the shooting felt like foregone conclusions? Or why it had to be an ode to shitty killers at all?

Because none of this was inevitable. It was all a choice. Rockstar chose Dutch’s gang. They chose Arthur. They chose mourning. Put another way: why is a traditional white male western story ok with you in 2018? (Why did suggesting a game centered on Abigail or Tilly make you think: come on, get real?) Westerns have been through a ton of revisions, and revisions of the revisions. You can’t just give a pass to something that so blatantly draws on the history of cinematic westerns and then ignores the past few decades and plays all ‘classic’ white because it’s a videogame. The burden is on the game to justify itself. Why this story? It could have been anything. Why this story?

The mourning and self-pity are most noxious when it comes to the Native characters. Early on, the game makes a direct connection between the plight of our outlaw gang and the Wapiti. As if both have been cast aside, having no place in ‘civilized’ America. You remember this preposterous moment, don’t you? Indigenous peoples have their own civilizations that are being annihilated, erased. Dutch’s gang is a murder cult. This ridiculous comparison is used as a token act of concern meant to show a base level of awareness about Native peoples, but narratively it only serves Arthur and his adoptive family, to make them more sympathetic and understandable. Rockstar thinks sensitivity and wokeness is something you can just casually slip in. A line here, a nod there. Nothing too disruptive, nothing that might upend some core tenet of your game.

Then, in the final missions of the game, Dutch uses the tensions between the Wapiti and the U.S. army, as well as the intergenerational conflict between Rains Fall and Eagle Flies, to stage a last ditch heist. I know you remember this. But just as Dutch uses the Wapiti people, so does the game. None of this is really about the death of Eagle Flies, the anguish of Rains Fall, or the suffering of Indigenous people at the hands of white men. It’s about Dutch’s villainy, something we’ve been well aware of for 50 hours already.

It’s also about poor you, caught in the middle. Arthur is literally a collaborator in this wanton destruction, no matter his good intentions, no matter what’s in his heart. And so are you. You pull the trigger. You are complicit in this final con. This is what it’s about. A game’s ‘aboutness’ is always circumscribed by and understood through your role, your actions. And so, without any means of resistance in game, there can be no shift in what Red Dead is ‘about’. The end result of this scripting is the expansion of an old narrative trick. These final missions effectively fridge an entire people just to motivate our protagonist and further define the villain.

In the end, the only real tears here are for white people. Red Dead mourns, and its mourning is white. Because the outlaw whose time has passed is white. When the game gestures beyond whiteness, it is always self-serving. It serves Dutch to have people of color in his gang. It serves him to use the pain of Indigenous people for his own score. And it serves Rockstar too. What freedom has been lost here on the ‘frontier’? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? And freedom for whom? This frontier fantasy is a white fantasy. And a white fantasy needs those who are not white to work. Imagine a game centered on Rains Fall or Eagle Flies and suddenly the whole structure of RDR2 becomes absurd.

And so again we must ask: why this story of Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang? We ride and kill for 50 hours and mourn our loss of freedom the whole time. And all for what? So that in the end one white guy can help another white guy temporarily trade an outlaw fantasy for a settler one? This is Red Dead’s white-ass idea of redemption.

How can you play these missions without wanting to claw your eyes out?

We can debate what makes a convincing world. And we can argue over characters and stories and blindspots and taste. Maybe you didn’t consider Red Dead’s centered whiteness or its consequences. There’s a lot to unpack there.

But these missions. Dear god, these missions. If you can tolerate these missions, let me humbly ask: what’s wrong with you? Did you just start playing games this year and think maybe this is what they’re all like? Ok. They’re not. But you’ll see that for yourself soon enough. For everyone else, I repeat: what is wrong with you?

I don’t just mean the rigidity and fail states. Yes, they feel preposterous in 2018. Yes, they show Rockstar’s outdated, authoritarian hand. And yes, they make the world and story feel faker than they already do. What I mean is the lock-on shooting galleries. You know, that thing you do at the end of every mission. The thing you do for 50-plus hours. I mean the soul-numbing left trigger right trigger horror show of it all. It’s just so fucking basic. It’s so not anything. Like, not even a thing. It’s so crazy in a game that looks like this, made with this much labor. How do you manage it every time? Do you keep a screaming pillow handy? Do you even have eyes?

You know all those little moments critics love to praise? Camp chores, grooming your horse, cleaning your gun, drinking with Lenny, building John’s house. I too rubbed my chestnut mare raw with desperate petting. Come on, girl, that’s a good girl, can we please linger a bit longer before returning to the idiot parade? Why do these moments come up so often in the Red Dead discourse? Because most critics, whether they admit it or not, know just how much the shooting sucks. These smaller moments indict the entire game by their very status as exceptions to the shooting gallery rule. They don’t make the game better. They make the shooting worse. We see glimpses of an alternative, denied.

Or take Guarma, that most reviled chapter in the game. Why do critics hate it? Not only because it’s a boring two-hour tropical shootout fuckfest, but because it lifts the veil on the rest of the game. Guarma, like Destiny’s loot cave, is RDR2 distilled. This is the game, stripped of all pretenses, all illusions of story and world. This is your main verb, your primary in-ter-act-ion, stuck on repeat. Position target in the center, pull the switch. Position target in the center, pull the switch. Why is it again that you play videogames?

This is Red Dead Redemption 2. Don’t tell me about the world, about the texture of putting notches on your bullets, of every little pointless detail. Even more than the stale cutscenes and dumb speeches Rockstar so loves, this is the game. This is what you do, this is who Arthur is, no matter how many times he pets his horse. If you dislike it, why isn’t it a dealbreaker? Come on, can’t you shoot straight? There’s no redemption to be had with mechanics like these. Arthur, to his credit, knows this, even if the game doesn’t. The question is: do you?

~ Tevis Thompson

March 2019

*This sub-essay expands on ideas from a larger essay, “It’s Not Coming Back”.