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HOW RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 HELPED ME UNDERSTAND TRUMP'S AMERICA

13/11/2018

16 Comments

 
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I found some photos online the other day of where I live, dating back to the 1800s; instead of shops and roads and cars, grafted onto the shoulder of London, it showed a small village out in the sticks, a bunch of rundown cottages, dirt tracks and horse-drawn carts. 

It's fair to suggest that I'm obsessed with the history of my home town. At the moment, there's a ton of building work going on - a couple of the icons of my childhood are being torn down to make way for high-rise flats, and it's changing faster than at any other point in my life. Getting to witness change like that is the benefit - or downside - of living in the same place more or less your whole life. 

Indeed, my house is built on land which used to belong to a local miser called Daniel Dancer, whose only real friend was one Lady Tempest, the widow of a Yorkshire baronet. His reputation for hoarding - hiding his money in piles of pig shit, strapping hay to his body in lieu of having to purchase clothes etc. - was such that he became the basis for Dickens' Ebeneezer Scrooge. 

I've read quite a lot about Daniel Dancer, and though his miserly ways were no doubt the result of something which would today be classified as a mental illness, I love the notion that where I live was once wild and rural and unpoliced, and populated by characters who could've stepped out of a novel.

It's part of why I love so much of America, because so much of it is still, even today, completely isolated from the rest of the world. So much of it doesn't even feel real. There are huge swathes that are just... empty. You can drive for hours and not see another car, just mile upon mile of the most stunning open country.

It's also no coincidence that it's in many of those areas where the NRA and Trump have been able to get a foothold, and why there's such a suspicion of a liberal Washington elite wanting to take away their freedoms. 

And the thing is, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is helping me to understand it.
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ROAD TRIP!
I was 12 when I first visited America, and even at that age I found its wide horizons incredibly seductive.

Since then, I've done a couple of short road trips, both times in the exact same part of the country; the big chunk of the west that's made up of desert and mountains and forests. 

Though Red Dead Redemption 2 is broadly set more in the East, I'm getting the same feeling playing it as I did driving with my dad from Arizona, through Utah, to Colorado. It's a feeling of freedom, but also a sort of glorious, untouchable, isolation, punctuated by small smears of civilisation - one-road towns, and Native American reservations (you can always tell when you've crossed into one, because the maintenance quality of the roads suddenly takes a nosedive).

For me, the game evokes that in a way nothing else ever has. I've even stopped using the controversial cinematic mode when travelling from place to place, because I want to stay in control of where I'm going. If I see something off to the side of the road, or wish to take a detour across country, I want to have the freedom to do so. It's incredibly appealing, and I now totally get what Rockstar was aiming for.

It loses so much of what I'm enjoying the second it hits (spoilers) the city of Saint Denis. Every time I had a mission which required me to go into Saint Denis - essentially a placeholder for old New Orleans - my heart sank.

Don't get me wrong, what they've done with it is stunning. It feels alive, with trams, and theatres, and hotels. And I love how they've captured a sense of civilisation encroaching upon the literal WILD West. What I've realised though is that there's something in me - perhaps in all of us - which rejects city life, and highlights how unnatural it is.

I've realised that I don't want to be surrounded by buildings, other than the four walls of my home. I want to be out there, with nothing but sky above me, not worrying about the cops coming down on me if my stupid horse accidentally knocks somebody over. In Saint Denis, suddenly there are consequences for my actions. I'm no longer steered by my own moral compass, but forced to adhered to rules and laws which have been imposed upon me. 
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FREEDOM
I strongly suspect that Rockstar didn't stumble upon all this by accident, and knew exactly what it was doing.

I think this was intentional, the very backbone of the game's story, almost as if they're trying to make you understand the lure of frontier life. It's even-handed in its depiction; there's no judgement or critique in any of what RDR2 - indeed, being an outlaw is shown here as a tough, transient, existence, far from absolute freedom. But what they do is hold up a mirror to the civilisation most of us live within, and lets us draw our own conclusions.

Yes, there's electricity, and vehicles which don't need horses, and medicine, and you can get a haircut...  but what have we lost in return for all that? 

In 2018, we didn't chose the laws or culture we were born into. From the day we arrive, we're being told what we can and cannot do, what's good, what's bad (and who is good and who is bad). In some respects, I think we all have a universal urge to escape from that - what is ambition if not an urge to rise above it? People dream of becoming millionaires so they don't have to abide by the same limitations as the rabble. Money, we believe, buys us liberty, but that also brings its own cage.

But before you can get that, unless you're born into it, you have to work within the rules. Unless you reject civilisation altogether - which you can do that if you wish in RDR2; it's up to you whether you just turn your back on the looming 20th Century, and go live off the land.

That's absolute freedom, and I feel that loss of it every time I see Saint Denis up ahead. 
16 Comments
Bjorn Grainger
13/11/2018 11:23:48 am

I didn’t travel to Saint Denis until the game made me as I was sure Rockstar would want to introduce it to the player properly. I wasn’t disappointed. The sound design was something else. After countless hours in the country with chirruping birds and the gentle whisper of the breeze, to be hit with the pounding cacophony of a factory and then the constant din of activity and life in the city. It smothered me and made me feel deeply uncomfortable, exactly like Arthur.

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Billy
13/11/2018 12:27:41 pm

If you have just visited America it is almost imposable to understand anywhere you have not lived and I mean lived not visited not moved there 3 years ago lived, live the people the food the culture. And as an American that has lived in many parts of the world I can tell you that being in one part dose not show you the entirety of it, America is full of local cultures some span states some span just the county your in. I am from a small town where most people had never left the county and if they had it was just one county over, it was very isolated. In any case the culture there was very different than in the boarding counties the gap has closed somewhat over the years but with mountains separating roads and the one highway that runs though the county it will forever have a culture all its' own. I have been places, at the food learned the language and scratched the culture sometimes more than scratched and loved every min of it, ok so the vaccinations you have to get to go some places suck but I love the rest. America there is so much and there are no words, it is home and visitation it is good and bad it is beautiful and ugly both life affirming and deadly, full of contradictions as am I, as are we all. I dont care for politics and talking about it with those who have no real stake in it is next to imposable, but there is no Trump's America there is only America and how far America will bend before it breaks down and fights back. Freedom is not Free and it can not be given it must be taken; and that is what the "Old West" was about in my opinion. Though the America we know today was formed from the roughness of the Old West it has little bearing on the American we know today though I am sure the romanticizing about it has some bearing but it is more of what people will do, can do if given to our more primal urges; we should not look to the past with envy not that past anyway but with pity, learn from it and move on. Dont get me wrong I love RDR2 great game.

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colincidence link
14/11/2018 02:20:02 pm

"learned the language", you say...

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BillyShears
20/11/2018 01:43:38 pm

Don't let the grammar police put you off Billy, thanks for a heartfelt reply and insight into rural USA. I spent 18 months living in the 'bible belt' in my younger days and, whilst I couldn't get my head around some of the beliefs (religious or political,) I can honestly say the people were the most warm, welcoming and friendly I have ever met.

Guru Larry link
13/11/2018 01:04:25 pm

I stumbled across Saint Denis by accident, on the run for punching an NPC for being rude to me as per, so ran into the city only for every police officer to start shooting at me. So it came across as a far more hostile place than it should have been.

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lilock3
13/11/2018 01:24:03 pm

The world's a big place, and for every one of us there's somewhere with a style of life to suit us. It's just a case of finding it and creating the opportunity to go there. Everything in developed western society revolves around developed western society, and it's easy to forget what else is out there...

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Col. Asdasd
13/11/2018 01:38:20 pm

Good article with an interesting perspective. I wonder if gaming itself also fits the analogy: a Wild West frontier from which many sought escape, today increasingly colonised by reality, by an insistence that we need rules follow, that everything is always political, that we sort right from wrong and good from bad.

Not that it's necessarily a bad thing or that we don't gain anything thereby. Some advocate strongly for it and make a persuasive case. But we can't wholly deny that the medium is changing, and that some won't be pleased with the exchange. It would be better to at least understand them before we condemn, even if we ultimately don't accept their point of view.

If it even matters at all. It's just video games you nerds jessusss!!111

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Col. Asdasd
13/11/2018 01:39:41 pm

*in which (not from which) many sought escape.

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Penyrolewen
13/11/2018 08:37:48 pm

I haven’t played RDR2 yet but this article explains exactly how I felt when I played the first one. I felt I understood the NRA, the insistence upon rights, the harping on about “freedom”. So I, with you Biffo. Makes me want to play it - I wasn’t sure, especially after your various comments about it, but that feeling of space, and quiet, and choice that the first game gave is worth checking it out for. Like you, I didn’t use the fast travel in the first one and felt similarly about any intrusion from trains, and modernity. As you say, I’m sure it’s deliberate and I’ve explained this feeling to non-gamers as a way of showing how games offer more than many people think that they do.

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Penyrolewen
13/11/2018 08:40:06 pm

I should have said “understand but not agree with the NRA...”

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Marro
13/11/2018 09:08:52 pm

I refuse to drink the Kool Aid and say RDR2 is anything but a dreary trudge.
For an "immersive experience" why do I feel like a passive spectator for so much of the game?
They could've done so much: they could have told a story from the point of view of a slave who's freed after the Civil War, or even set it during the Civil War - but they went with the hackneyed old "Civilization's no place for us outlaws" schtick.
Having said that, I'm still playing it most nights. But I REFUSE TO ENJOY IT!

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Nin link
13/11/2018 09:20:17 pm

I got into St Denis after about 20 hours and after the initial excitement, I got ran out of town by the police for walking behind someone.

Not following someone.

I was literally walking along the promenade by the shops, some people walking Infront of me, and they called the police on me because I was going in the same direction.

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Dave
13/11/2018 10:11:43 pm

Pervert.

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James Walker link
13/11/2018 11:49:11 pm

If Codemasters made this game it’d be called Wild West Simulator.

And it’d be totally utterly brilliant!!!!!!!!

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Christian Dabnor link
9/1/2019 01:02:18 pm

Mastertronic already did one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(video_game)

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Bobby Chuckles
14/11/2018 10:44:51 am

"My stupid horse" is my new favourite Digi character. Love his (her?) little cameos.

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