Reading Red Dead Redemption 2: The Game

Levelling up in Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t precisely linear.
With thanks to Rockstar Games

For many years, video games have been the source of some of the most incredible, bizarre, poignant, or enlightening tales we have told ourselves—rather than books, movies, or television. As a result, we occasionally host a series called Reading The Game in which we examine some of these games from a literary standpoint.

I have a plethora of anecdotes to share about my life as Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s poet-at-heart and gravel-voiced anti-hero Arthur Morgan. Tales of grandeur and diminution, noise and silence. RDR2 is many things (a clumsy shooter, a stunning art project, a love story between a man and his horse), but primarily it’s an engine built for story creation — a place where the opposing threads of algorithmic AI and narrative benchmarking collide to create unique moments that are ridiculous, bloody, and sublime, often all at the same time. Anyone who plays the game can do this.

As you’ve undoubtedly heard, this most recent Red Dead is a direct prequel to the 2010 original Red Dead Redemption. It is unquestionably beautiful (as you have undoubtedly heard), the product of countless hours of labour by hundreds of men and women who have created Arthur’s horse manure and designed the way leaves flow in soft breezes, among other things. It is a masterpiece in many aspects, including how it looks, feels, and, my goodness, how it sounds—the latter deserving of a whole essay on its own.

Its components are so many. I could write ten thousand words about how Red Dead’s relationship between politics and the gun explores the growing convergence of the outlaw/lawman dichotomy, or ten pages about nothing but my own relationship with Arthur’s Hat.

However, RDR2 is too large, too expansive, and too dense to tackle the plot piece by piece. Maybe enough to mention that it depicts an epic, brutal story of treachery and obsolescence over the length of more than sixty hours. It is the work that transcends its genre and, in this case, its medium; in the world of video games, it is our Godfather, our Star Wars, or Wild Bunch. It is a fiction given life, a film brought to life, and discussing any one aspect of it would inevitably reduce it to a series of gears and washers – how this piece slots into that one. And I believe that to be a disservice. This explains why deconstructionists frequently don’t have much fun at parties.

Rather, I will concentrate on a single bold, subversive, and potentially singular decision that was made early on in the Rockstar writers’ room and which, narratively, sets this Red Dead apart from all other games I have ever played.

There will be major spoilers ahead. Seriously, if that kind of thing makes you feel like Clint Eastwood, stop reading right now.

Are you prepared?

Alright.

Nobody should be at all surprised by Arthur Morgan’s passing. He must, for every detail of the first Red Dead suggests his absence from the earth.

However, what matters is how he passed away. This is hardly a grand, cannonade-wielding farewell for Arthur. No death of a hero. Rather, he passes away by himself, having accomplished so very little in the end. Tragically, he ends his life unsatisfied. Just a prop in a bigger tale that goes on without him.

And in terms of narrative choices, that’s quite daring. That would have been an unexpected conclusion for any main character in Video Game Land if it hadn’t been contextualised. But the true trick that pulled it off was a thorough and intentional violation of the Power Curve, which is my personal interpretation of the First Law of Video Games.

What powers video games is the Power Curve. In almost every game since Pac-Man, it serves as the central plot device and gameplay element. In its most basic form, it operates as follows: As the player, you are thrust into a universe where you are a lone, fragile, and (almost) powerless pixel blob. You use a stick to strike certain slimes. You make an effort to live. And you become larger over time. Perhaps you make friends. Perhaps you discover a better stick. But no matter what, you discover that you can become… more—by working hard and persistently pushing yourself. By the time the game ends, you’ve transformed into something akin to a god among humans, able to vanquish the Final Boss and restore harmony to Hyrule (or whatever).

The power curve is the sole unbreakable rule in the world of video games, and it is 100% accurate.

not in RDR2, though.

Because just here, the Dutch van der Linde gang, led by Arthur Morgan, starts the game just past the peak of their power curve. They are a group of outlaws that include stick-up artists, working girls, bank robbers, and loan sharks. However, they consider themselves to be virtuous because they carry out their crimes in support of Dutch’s idealistic notion of individual freedom. They all wish to live free from The Man’s boot on their neck. Their only goals are to make a little money, locate a place where they won’t be bothered, and spend their remaining years free from the constraints of their quickly evolving civilisation.

When we first encounter Arthur and his companions, they are escaping from a botched assignment in Blackwater. Before that, we’re made to feel that they were all extremely talented and fortunate, a group of people at the pinnacle of their abilities. But it was in Blackwater that everything went wrong for them. Nothing will ever proceed as it did in the imagined past, prior to our becoming fully immersed in Arthur’s persona.

And throughout the early part of the game, everything is handled subtly: tasks going wrong, gang dissension, growing feelings that Dutch, the bookish psychopath who is also Arthur’s buddy, mentor, father figure, and embodiment of criminal virtue, is losing his sense of morality and sanity. The gang is always on the run from the authorities, Pinkertons, and the forces of industrialisation. Arthur and the group lose strength with each ill-prepared move or desperate battle.

However, there comes a point in the game where this power leakage becomes personal. For me, it began one lovely afternoon in Saint Denis when Arthur suddenly starts coughing. Arthur had just finished working for a few bucks hunting rats in a small dive bar.

and just cannot give up.

It is determined that he has TB. Uncurable. A death sentence that will be carried out in the most brutal manner possible by gradually weakening Arthur the longer he is able to cling on. The power curve in reverse.

And that is truly brilliant.

Why? Considering that it gives you a ticking clock. Because Arthur will now approach every story objective in worse health, viewed as frail and incapable by everyone around him, even though you know he will somehow gather the power to see the game through to the finish of its narrative course. You, Arthur, can now feel the unavoidable approach of death where, before, you could stand in a hail of lead and rely on the healing powers of a can of magical baked beans to put you right when the last body struck the floor.

Storytelling-wise, it accelerates the plot to the point of despair. Arthur is aware of his finite time on this planet and the tasks he must complete before departing. Subtextually, it’s a great physical representation of Arthur’s heartbreak over some of the poor decisions he’s made in life, and his hacking cough voice the decay that the van der Linde gang is experiencing as the walls (and the law) press in.

Offering this character, who has carried a gun with him all of his life, a personal reaper that appears in the most innocent and commonplace of ways—as a physical malfunction not caused by a drunken person’s knife or a Gatling gun—stands as a stark critique of everything the supposed hero represents. We automatically accept the internal poetry of “to live by the gun and die by it.” But to die on a mountainside, coughing up all your lungs while the world turns dark, living by a gun? That’s a very harsh criticism, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s outstanding. It’s flawless.

If you decide to play around in Arthur Morgan’s universe, death will follow you everywhere you go. You will come into the world slain and leave it just as you found it. Yes, there will undoubtedly be instances of generosity, happiness, and breathtaking beauty. But without a doubt, it will kill you. And everything you’ve seen and who you were will be lost to memory. Red Dead turns into a work of exceptional literary genius in this depressing nihilism; it’s a narrative that makes you feel bad simply for picking it up. Because once you make the decision to chose the outlaw’s life, you can never go back.

And as soon as you started, you were headed out.

Jason Sheehan is an expert in food, video games, literature, and Starblazers. He writes books about enormous robots and ray guns when no one is looking. He is currently Philadelphia magazine’s restaurant reviewer. His latest book is titled Tales From the Radiation Age.