That’s right, after a nearly six year hiatus…the blog is back. Maybe?
A charismatic, domineering leader with a compelling vision of the world who claims, against all evidence, that he has a plan and just needs a little more time. A deadly respiratory illness. The weight of conscience. The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) offers clear analogues to the world we’re living in now. As the lockdowns began in March and I was sent home from my office, I reached for a familiar game whose hold on me has remained strong since its release in the fall of 2018.
Arthur’s journey is compelling in itself, but the relative freedom the game’s design gives you to explore his morality is key in making the game re-playable. Each new playthrough can be a different experience even when one knows the general contours of the story. When I began again in March on what became my third playthrough, I knew to listen for Arthur’s cough after his encounter with Mr. Downes. I knew when other members of the gang would meet their ends. When Arthur would grow weaker and weaker. When the final break with Dutch would come and what it would cost.
“There ain’t no freedom for no one in this country anymore.”
Dutch van der Linde
I wasn’t sure what it was about this game that compelled me more than the other games I’ve revisited over the years. The storyline and the world it’s set in are very rich, but so is a game like Skyrim (which had no hold on me). As the pandemic wore on and it became clearer with each day that there was no plan, that we would be limited to our homes and neighborhoods for months as the disease wore on, that hundreds of thousands of us would die with nary a mention from the President, it was a relief of sorts to enter the world of RDR2 and travel across recognizable, but distant landscapes. This was an America of another time and another imagining. One where you could ride from the coal country of West Virginia (inexplicably on a coastline), down to the marshy swamps of Louisiana, across the plains, scrubs, and deserts of Texas, into the southwestern landscapes of Arizona and New Mexico, up into the mountain towns of Colorado and California, and further still to the snowy high country of Wyoming and Montana. All of these were simulacra represented by stand-ins with names like Ambarino, Tall Trees, Armadillo, and St. Denis. They were at once known and unknown, familiar and strange. Most importantly, they didn’t look anything like the neighborhood where I lived.
The vision of America presented in the game is much like the landscape – a funhouse mirror of the present. The game goes just far enough to edge up to a point (the stories we tell ourselves about America aren’t the whole truth), without quite making it. Women have some small degree of agency in the Dutch van der Linde gang, but the only woman with any real freedom is Sadie Adler whose new self is born in tragedy. Arthur’s own redemption is only complete with his death, which is inevitable regardless of which ending the player chooses. The gang is multiracial, but the storyline is driven by white characters (Arthur, Dutch, and Micah). The game introduces Native American characters like Charles, Rains Fall, and Eagle Flies, but imbues them with some of the same “noble savage” tropes that have appeared in white representations of the American West for decades. There’s much to grapple with when playing RDR2 and the first time through, I really just wanted to vacuum up the plot. As Arthur grew sicker, I was driven to finish his story and learn how the gang breaks up (anyone who played the first game knows Dutch faces justice much later). On my second and third times through, however, I slowed down considerably. I wanted to explore the world and meet more of the strangers whose side missions can lead Arthur and then John into further moments of self-reflection. With this slower pace, I thought harder about the way the game was laid out, what was important to the story, and the ethics of the game itself (what it wanted you to choose even if it gave you the freedom to go the other way).
Arthur begins the game as a hard man in a harder place – an outlaw exiled to the snows of the mountain north. As the story wears on the van der Linde gang is forced to move from one hideout to another – always further and further East, towards civilization rather than to the supposed freedom of the West. It’s unusual for a western to be told in this geographical direction, but it broadens the game’s ability to apply its story to the myth of America rather than simply the myth of the West. The further East they move, the more Arthur begins to understand that Dutch is wrong and that the truth of his experience is somewhere between the American hagiography and Dutch’s own personal amoral philosophy. This is the direction the game nudges you in, but it gives you a certain amount of freedom to make Arthur his own agent, beholden to almost no one. He can rob, steal, and kill wantonly so long as you, the player, are willing to play the game with the added complication of bounty hunters. This can create some asynchronous experiences in missions and cutscenes where the game assumes that Arthur has moved at least somewhat in the direction of righteousness, but your individual gameplay has left him as an evil man whose last loyalties have frayed.
“It weren’t us who changed.”
Arthur Morgan
The game links its world to versions of our own past. St. Denis (a city so closely based on New Orleans that the layout and many buildings match nearly exactly) is located in the state of Lemoyne, presented as a Southern state still knocked back on its heels decades after the Civil War. Lemoyne likely comes from Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a French soldier and explorer who made his way through much of the Louisiana territory and founded New Orleans. Eagle Flies, the son of Chief Rains Fall and a martyred figure who appears towards the end of Arthur’s journey to redemption, has a close associate named Peyta whose name must be borrowed from Peta Nocona, a Comanche warrior and key figure in the Cynthia Ann Parker saga. There are surely other such simulacrous links to our past throughout the game. They serve to tie our old myths to a new version of the West, one that looks much like what we’ve seen before, but feels different.
These details serve to give the game more depth. What really provides depth, however, is the prevalence of strangers and mysteries for the player to discover as both Arthur and John. I often eschewed fast travel in favor of riding the horse across the world and seeing what kind of people and side missions I might encounter. It’s what kept me coming back to the game for a second and third playthrough. The morality at the center of the game, the journey for redemption, is compelling and the relative freedom the player has to decide creates new experiences, but the world of RDR2 is so rich that continued exploration is rewarded. The side missions and strangers can reflect on Arthur’s journey, the state of his trust in Dutch, and even as commentaries on America and its myths. Some missions encourage the player to explore the world and observe its environment closely like the dinosaur bone collector, the dreamcatchers, and the rock carvings. Others perhaps encourage the player to make a connection between Arthur’s larger journey and the side mission he’s on or for the player to make between the game and our national myth of the West.
These stranger encounters and side missions were key to my desire to play the game again and again – even from the beginning. There are hidden one-off weird things throughout the game from a UFO encounter to strange carvings and statues, which are amusing to come upon and the detailed guides found online are helpful in finding them. For me, though, it was the unpredictability that brought me back. Even as John, you still encounter runaway wagons shot through with arrows, dead men hanging from trees, or women tied to the back of a galloping horse. Every time I played something new could happen. I could be (as John) setting up camp when suddenly a man comes up behind and puts a knife to John’s throat and taunts him. In a year where travel was limited and walking around my neighborhood could bring only so much relief, the game and its variety brought me another world to wander through. The promise of undiscovered mysteries and new encounters was too enticing to pass up. Even just riding through these Western landscapes interested me and as the heat grew more and more oppressive last August, I found myself sending Arthur back up to the snowy reaches of Ambarino to search for treasure maps, a mammoth skeleton, and whatever else he could find.
Saying goodbye to Arthur is heavy and I still, years after the game’s release, see posts on Reddit from players expressing some measure of grief for him. On my second and third playthroughs I savored time with Arthur and often left camp for days or weeks to explore, hunt, and complete side missions. After all, the game will wait for you though you may encounter characters like Bill and Javier asking when you’ll be returning. For me, Arthur is a much more interesting guide through that world than John who gets some emotional shading in this game, but remains the gruff, rough, and angry guy of RDR1. The shift from Arthur to John is jarring even on the third time through.
As I write this, I am at 95% completion with all side missions finished in addition to the main story, of course. Most of the searching missions (the bones, the carvings, the dreamcatchers) are complete. To reach 100% I have to focus on more quotidian goals and some of the desire to play has seeped away. Over the years, this game has ebbed and flowed for me with many months of not playing at all coming in between months and months of regular play. I’ll never rule out a return.
Old Country Waltz 