Red Dead Contention

Last October marked the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the most highly anticipated video games of all time. Set in 1899, as the golden age of the Old West is fading, the story follows a gang of outlaws as they travel westward away from greed and oppression or what they see as the ills of a rapidly civilizing society. Along their journey to this utopian west the gang confronts a world rife with brutality and violence.

Speaker 12: Bastard, I didn’t do anything!

Speaker 13: Damn fool!

Speaker 14: With Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games has set out to create its most ambitious open world experience to date. It is an epic tale of outlaw life that seamlessly blends story with action.

Speaker 13: Arthur, let’s go quick!

Speaker 14: An exploration with choice, all under the constant treat of danger.

Ed Ayers: You play as Arthur Morgan, a rough-and-tumble outlaw and prominent gang member exploring an open world with over 100 main missions, 200 animal species, and 500,000 lines of dialog. Whether you want to enjoy the stunning landscapes or stir up trouble at a saloon, the game lets you define your own Wild West experience.

Speaker 14: You can rob a train, passerby, or a coach, hold up a store, burgle a house, or go loan sharking.

Arthur Morgan: I’m here for money. Where is it!?

Speaker 14: Or you can simply go off and explore alone if you’re feeling brave enough. The countryside, towns, and frontier are full of rival gangs and outlaws, each different but all of them deadly.

Ed Ayers: To say that Red Dead Redemption 2 has been a smashing hit would be an understatement. In its first three days after it was released the game raked in $725 million in sales, the biggest opening weekend of any entertainment product in history. But while the gameplay is undoubtedly groundbreaking, some have taken issue with the game’s narrative which draws heavily on popular western movies.

Esther Wright: With the first Red Dead Redemption they were obviously sort of taking their cues from a very particular kind of western film from a very particular period in the western kind of genre.

Ed Ayers: That’s historian Esther Wright. She says that despite its technical achievements, the game suffers from a story hampered by historical inaccuracies and themes of white masculinity.

Esther Wright: Heavily influenced by the so-called revisionist westerns, the wild bunch, moving all the way down to more recent films like Unforgiven or The Assassination of Jesse James. It’s really sort of taking a crystallization of the western genre and western history around masculine identity, around white masculinity, and brutalization and violence is really the kind of the key. They are sort of a touchstone for the way film has been depicting western history. This image of America’s western past has currency as we see in kind of contemporary westerns like The Hateful Eight or TV shows like Westworld and Oscar winners like The Revenant. This is sort of I guess one of the dominant ways that western history is being packaged by media at the moment.

Ed Ayers: Sort of a Nihilistic approach, right? In which everybody is evil and it’s just differing degrees. Typically that’s some of the characters. A utopian outlaw sounds kind of interesting but is the rest of this huge cast equally interesting?

Esther Wright: It is a huge cast, they’ve really sort of pushed outwards from the first game. So they’ve really expanded this vision of who was in the West in good and bad ways I think. So there was a lot of talk before the game came out about the fact that it was being more inclusive and that translated as having more women in the game. There was a sort of big absence of women. There were a few women characters in the first game, but this one does sort of I guess improve in their visibility, I suppose. So the gang is your family, yeah, it’s this family unit that you can hunt and you can provide for and you get money for, and it’s about keeping them safe. So it’s interesting to have a couple of women, there is a child in the mix of all this. So I guess the composition of the gang itself has changed and even to sort of include diversity in other ways. So there was also kind of talk about the way that it now included some black American outlaws, there is a Native American character who’s part of the gang.
So on a surface level this … And this was emphasized really in marketing that they were sort of pushing the boundaries of what not only they had done before but what a lot of western cinema had done before. But I don’t think really that this has translated into the sort of progressive message that the game wants to send.

Ed Ayers: It sounds to me like a great lost opportunity, right? To have that audience, that skill of creating this realistic detail, this kind of expectation and even these claims, but it doesn’t sound that they’ve really delivered on them historically.

Esther Wright: Well, it’s interesting really. It’s kind of the distinction to be made between historical accuracy and historical authenticity. So for example, there are a lot of elements about the game that you could say are accurate just as there a lot of things that are inaccurate. So you get a lot of inappropriate depictions of historical events and movements. So for example, you can see women campaigning for suffrage or you’ll see sort of civil war veterans hanging around, that you see the influence of technologies like the railroad, or you get a sense of booming business and Native American tribes that have been moved to reservations. There’s hundreds of different types of animals in this world and lots of different types of guns. So it’s very heavily detail-oriented and it’s probably not productive to say that that’s not accurate, but the whole point is to make this historical world rather feel real and believable. And doing that has more, yeah, I guess to do with the kind of flexibly defined subjective notion of what’s authenticity.
So it’s interesting because I think sometimes game designers, game makers can talk about the fact that this is not history, this is historical fiction. And this was something that we saw in the marketing of this game. But I think that’s really a kind of false dichotomy. These game makers, like filmmakers, like writers, have immense power to shape sort of popular understandings of the period. And to kind of try and claim that these games are just fictional rather than history proper is a really kind of outmoded and traditional distinction to make. So I think it’s a try to hide behind this claim that it’s just fictional is a way of managing criticism and it’s kind of a have your cake and eat it too scenario.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. It’s like film, really, which excels at the way things look. Is it possible that this is a satire, and it’s a satire of the genre of the film rather than really thinking about history very seriously?

Esther Wright: Well, I think if you look at Rockstar’s history in terms of the games they make, part of their brand really is doing satire, doing satire of America past and present. But I think despite the fact that I think that shields them a lot, they are trying to make and they are making very serious claims and they are often in very serious engagements with certain aspects of America’s past. It’s like saying, “Well, it’s not proper history but we’re going to talk about what happened to Native Americans.” As if it’s sort of like a progressive step. But it shouldn’t stop them from being criticized for the way that they do that. And often times in their marketing of their games they try to sell these games as being historically authentic or having basis in truth and fact. So we shouldn’t really shy away from treating them as a form of history.

Ed Ayers: Is there a scene that seems to you to capture some of these tensions and inaccuracy or compromises?

Esther Wright: So one example that we can draw on is the way that, as I was saying earlier, the suffragette movement gets represented in the game. So there’s one mission in particular where a young man from a sort of prominent family asks you to protect histories girlfriend who she’s joined up with these women who are campaigning for suffrage. And as Arthur Morgan you have to drive the cart of women sort of shouting and holding placards into the town to the step to the town hall where they sort of stand and they give their speeches. So in theory you’re being positioned on the right side of history, you are helping these women kind of in their campaign for suffrage and for equal voting rights and you sort of stand and you listen to them for a few minutes and listen to what they’re saying, the leader is saying about giving women their rights. But then almost inevitably the mission sort of dictates that you then walk around the corner and you end up in a fight with a guy who’s not happy about the fact that his little brother or his cousin is dating someone from an opposite family in town.
So it’s just one of so many examples where these kind of real, serious things about America’s past are used as kind of historical texture that underpins this sort of narrative that completely revolves around white masculinity and violence and how these sorts of things can only really exist in these very tiny ways that really don’t sum up to being meaningful engagements with the campaign for women suffrage.

Ed Ayers: Can you imagine a Red Dead Redemption 2 that was both fun to play, which I guess is its primary challenge because it’s a game, but that would have not done such violence to the historical record?

Esther Wright: I think it’s possible. And if there’s any company that has the means and the resources and the power to do something different, it is a company like Rockstar. It’s about where you take the time to push this realism. And even in small things like having a different character to play as. You are confined to playing as Arthur Morgan who is this white male outlaw. What’s to say that you can play the other side of these issues, play as a Native American, play as a woman? I mean video games haven’t shied away from trying to represent periods in the past from different perspectives.
Like for example the Mafia series of games, the one that came out in 2016, Mafia 3, that allowed you to control and play as a black American character who is a Vietnam veteran in 1968 in a sort of fictionalized version of New Orleans and having all the kind of civil rights and everything going on in the background.
So it is possible to do these sorts of things and to make them fun to play and to make them games that people want to play, it’s just about sort of thinking outside of really kind of traditional historical imaginations, I think.

Ed Ayers: Ester Wright is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. She studies the relationship between contemporary video games and film.