Redemption and the West
I think the Wild West of 1911 proves about the most perfect setting possible for a videogame. Red Dead Redemption (2010, Rockstar, PS3 / 360) exploits this to the full – it’s not perfect, far from it, but in many way it is a remarkable game.
There’s a rich cultural heritage to exploit here of course. The Western genre in film is just a great resource, especially for a videogame – think about Westerns and you usually think about the huge empty vistas, the canyons, the barren expanses, exactly the features that videogames can do in spades. Think of the characters and you will immediately visualise a few archetypes – the gunfighters, the impotent marshalls, the Mexican bandits, the whores, the blind old coots. Games work well drawing on types, they suffer in painting elaborate characters. But Red Dead is able to have its cake and eat it – it takes a second to introduce a gunfighter in the wilderness, and within that second you understand that it’s you or them. But at the same time Red Dead paints a vast selection of different characters, creations of real dramatic significance and merit.
And in a chaotic, lawless place, the impurities of videogame narrative find their perfect match. There’s something random about the old mythic west – you might be dead in two seconds. Someone might run into the distance and never be seen again. And in another way life is simple (like a videogame) – a collection of tiny dwellings in the wilderness constitutes a centre for civilisation, and these are the sort of scale of places that videogames can create with ease and make believable.
There’s always been a slight disconnect with Liberty City (Rockstar’s sister franchise, Grand Theft Auto). Awe-inspiring as it can be, it’s a mannered version of reality for sure – people wander streets but don’t do anything. There are no commuters, no people practising yoga in the park, nobody skateboarding being pulled by a dog. It only breathes to an extent. You know there must be a million stories in a big city that you are being denied – a million shop and house-fronts that are little more than a texture map.
But the Wild West – well it probably never breathed in such grand terms anyway, it is a history created as an artifice by the movies. It’s a world we know little enough about, but that has been mytholgised by fiction already, that we have nothing really to compare against. Brutality, excess, murder and corruption – are these the usual Rockstar extremes, or was it really like that? Who’s to say? The game creates its own history here, and it is believable and authentic in its own terms.
All that said, the way that Rockstar pull the strands and themes together in this game is quite incredible. Each little interaction, each character, each place, all adds to the rich themes and evocative sense of time and place. Every time anyone opens their mouth, there is a sub-text at work – their hopes and dreams seem destined to fail in such a harsh environment, and the bad folk seem more in touch with reality than the good.
The game starts with an early motor car being winched over from a boat – the modern world is arriving, watch out! The bad guys are the ones in the cars. The snake oil salesman is a cipher for notions of capitalism and exploitation, making the corrupt old west of the gunslingers seem refreshingly simple. The politically naive struggle in Mexican politics is depicted in revisionist terms straight out of modern notions of political apathy and frustration with authority. The evil corporation, Blackwater, suggesting oil, is also the name of a modern supplier of military mercenaries in Iraq and elsewhere – this can’t be coincidence. The early picture house presents short films warning against the women’s movement and modern medicine. Rich, potent asides are there if you choose to acknowledge them, which in my opinion is all games should aspire to achieve. The only aspect of this world that avoids the satirical Rockstar treatment is organised religion, which is a very strange omission.
I feel, like GTA, that this is a game about the American Dream. The illusion of the promise of prosperity and freedom, as ill-served by the lawless West as it is by the encroachment of big business and the powers of ‘progress’.
The West is a great practical setting as well. Freedom of movement isn’t a given, and on those terms the practicalities of telling a story in a game-world become that bit easier and more believable. One of the massive problems with GTA is the skyscrapers in the distance that you can’t get to (and my guess is that the great majority of players never make it there). This game-world is simply not as distinct – the only place you are missing out on is another canyon. It should be worse, boring even, but it turns out better. Instead of a sense of being lost in a big city, this is the freedom of making your own way in a wilderness, even though in practical terms you are doing the same thing.
This is a road movie as a game, and it simply doesn’t need to be as dramatically tight as more formal narratives. We accept that we might run into a stranger with a story, or we might wander around and see nothing for an hour. The wildlife doesn’t have to be coherent, or offer an explanation for its existence. A blacksmith might get out of bed and work for the day and then go to bed – this is authentic, and you can see all sorts of people going through these simple existences. I simply don’t know what happens if you follow someone in Liberty City – presumably they just keep wandering aimlessly through the streets.
Red Dead’s only problems are ones of story structure in such a sprawling expanse. I sympathise – this must be an enormous feat of organisation to tie together the strands of such an epic scope in terms of standard story structure. Most movies fail at 90 minutes, let alone 90 hours. The game succeeds here in its early sections, where your enemy is waiting in a fort while you amass the forces necessary to confront them. But then the game moves to Mexico, at which point motivation becomes very unclear or even conflicting and the game sinks into ‘here’s another mission’ mode. It’s a dreadful point to make in terms of value-for-money, but Rockstar’s stories are simply far too long and overwrought.
But then, what seems like the ending of the story is expanded into a long, poignant coda that would simply never appear in a movie or on TV. And maybe that’s a big advantage of a game as a vehicle for story – it can feel its own sense of entitlement to carry on a story – if you don’t want to see it, don’t do it. It’s your choice. It doesn’t hit every note, but games don’t and maybe can’t – that’s why they often defy traditional criticism. But the endgame here is expanded into something meaningful and, dare I say it, elegaic. Not often I make that claim for a videogame.
I disliked Mexico (I wrote about my thoughts on Marston and the game’s narrative here), so I agree. Rockstar’s stories do suffer from over-exertion, and sometimes they get lost. GTA4′s ending was an example of that–I still feel like it would have meant more if it had come a little sooner.
I also really would like to see more life. I think you inadvertently nailed it with your comment about Liberty City and yoga and the like. There should be more details, like more pets. There should be more schedules, almost like how Majora’s Mask had specific routines for everyone–certainly we could make an AI that made a couple thousand specific people in the city that had specific lives who lived in the crowds.
I remember when I first played GTA4, actually, I thought of the construction site as a brilliant example. What if it actually BUILT itself during the game? That if 300 in-game days passed, it became a super mall and somewhere else had construction?
Sim City + Rockstar titles. Probably won’t happen. But I hope someday we reach that level of depth.
Majora’s Mask is one hundred times the game RDR is.