Red Dead Reflections

Original Post: June 11, 2010

Yes, I’ve been waiting weeks to use that title.

I actually had a very brief review of this game published at Kotaku so check it out there.  What we have here will be a longer version with more elaborations than the 500 words allowed me there.

Read Dead Redemption is the spiritual successor to Red Dead Revolver by Rockstar (San Diego).  Using the same basic open-world framework and gameplay mechanics as Grand Theft Auto 4, the player is John Marston: an outlaw trying to turn over a new leaf, but being played like a hand of cards by higher powers.

Wide Open Spaces: Red Dead Redemption has presented a truly beautiful, detailed and convincing representation of the  American West.  I lived in Arizona for many years and can personally vouch for the authenticity of most of the landscapes presented.  Of course, Rockstar have not built a world quite the right size for all the things in it, but they learned how to approximate reality through a kind of architectural metaphor in Grand Theft Auto.  As is rightly noted by Bogost and Klainbaum, in a videogame, cartographic accuracy is less important than getting the ‘feel’ right.  That feel is based on a cultural understanding of the pieces that the overall place is made up of.  The American frontier, as a place, is composed of deserts, mountains (of the particular red shade), prairie, and forested highlands.  If these areas are present, we will understand the concept of the frontier.  The vagueness of New Austin as a place is precisely because it is an abstraction of several places, combined together in a distilled format.  Something like making a video documentary of New York and quickly filming Queens, the Bronx, Little Italy and Times Square in succession.  The experience of New York will be condensed in time.  The equivalent for a game is to compress the space.

Procedural Encounters: Sometimes the desert is empty, hauntingly so.  Other times its teeming with wildlife and random strangers to divert your attention.  This is a remarkably entertaining variety of experience.  The various behavioural engine technology first applied in GTA4 is obviously in effect here.  But the signalling of interaction in that game was really only just that: a signal, a sign without referent.  In RDR, I was actually (virtually) interacted with by many strangers who invited me to sit down with them, asked me for help, and occasionally stole my horse.  These interactions went rather deeper than the greetings and exclamations made by the citizens of Liberty City.  The soft, opt-in/opt-out mechanical structure of these tiny missions (the ‘get my carriage back’ or ‘stop the thief’ type) was very welcome as it achieved two goals: firstly it made the world feel more alive, inhabited by real people with goals and motivations beyond making the world seem more alive!  Secondly, by allowing me to not assist everyone, I was allowed to remain in control, and so blast through story missions more quickly if that was what I wanted to do.

The more formal Stranger missions were equally well-handled.  Being able to pursue them in the middle of other missions was a great example of learning from other games and refining the mechanics of quest administration to a very smooth experience.

The experience of hunting seems fairly genuine, unlike an MMO where there are always animals everywhere.  There was a real sense of adventure when I attempted to break the American Standardbred.  It was the single hardest thing I had to do in the game—partially because I was hunting for them in a more difficult area, I came to discover, that was heavily populated by cougars.  I could have found one in another area, but I didn’t know that at the time.  Instead I chased a single horse across the map for a solid half-hour.  This is after I initially lassoed it, only to be dragged down a cliff when it reared and bolted.  The fact that I didn’t die from the fall (I sort of rolled and tumbled down a steep slope rather than free-falling) meant I could call my own trusty steed, and set off in pursuit of the same horse.  It felt like I was actually chasing a genuine individual, not a computer subroutine, replaceable with any other predictable copy of itself.

Gunplay: There are lots and lots of guns in this game, but none of them are out of place.  In a gaming world of plasma cannons and multiple assault rifles, the economy of a single-shot rifle was really refreshing.  There were the repeater rifles, but these weren’t fully automatic weapons either.  The sound effects on the various kinds of weapons combined with the one-or-two shot kills gave the shoot outs some real oomph!  I am going to make the call here: best gun sound effects since the Goldeneye:007 Dostovei pistol.  I can’t even pick on that I think is better, because I think they might (almost) all be.

Riding Shotgun: Seriously, riding in a stagecoach flying down dirt tracks blasting rustlers or outlaws with my Winchester never got old.

Rookie Mistakes: The storytelling here is not as refined as I’ve come to expect in these big-budget titles.  One of the first rules of effective storytelling is “Show, don’t tell.”  The game gets off on a bad foot when we are simply told that Marston’s family have been kidnapped, so we’re obliged to carry out their orders.  This fundamental error troubles the entire plot, as it establishes (or rather, doesn’t) Marston’s motivations for doing anything.  I as a player had no idea what is family were like, I never saw them, didn’t see them kidnapped and so have no emotional connection to them at all.  This could have been rectified with a simple cut-scene, or better yet, with a Mass Effect 2 style opening episode.

Arguably, videogames actually introduce a third ‘-esis’ which I’m not sure there is a name for yet.  The first is diegesis, that is, the explanation or verbalisation of a fact or explanation.  This is the ‘telling’ of expression that we use in daily life, in art and media, and its obviously where we get the word ‘dialog’ to mean some kind of interactive communication.  Mimesis is the sort of ‘showing’ I recommend above, and is the ‘miming’ or ‘mimicking’ of reality rather than a verbal rhetoric.  This is the fundamental principle of stage theatre, where stating “Lear was upset” is ridiculous and the idea is to show how upset poor King Lear is through acting.

Both of these modes of expression rely on a clear boundary between ‘expresser’ and receiver or observer.  The orator must be telling something to someone for the concept to make sense.  A dramatic performance must have an external observer to interpret the presentation of information.  Games, including live-action role-play and other sorts of participatory fiction, enable a new kind of simulated experience of the “narrative” (for lack of a better word).  The fiction can be not just seen, but played at from the inside.  Of course, actors, or players, in drama are experiencing the fiction from the inside themselves as they seek to identify with their characters, understand their motivations, etc., but they do so for the benefit of the audience.  In Gaming, we do so for our own benefit as one of the players.  Furthermore, we are not simply experiencing the fact that Lear is upset, we are manipulating and being manipulated by a series of functional rules.  Whether these are algorithmic code in a computer, conventions of a LARP group, or the mixture of code and convention used in a session of Dungeons and Dragons, we the players are learning, and having our understanding tested, as part of the game system.  This should be a fundamental goal of the game designer: do not only tell or show, but cause the player to experience and understand.

Grit in my Spaghetti: (Full disclosure: I am not a film scholar with no claim to understand the Western or spaghetti Western genres.)  The game is a bit confused between the comedy of an over-the-top spaghetti Western and the grit and something darker and more meaningful.  The entire cast of the first chapter (other than the MacFarlanes) are painful caricatures that a hardened outlaw like Marston wouldn’t have allied himself with in a million years.  He certainly wouldn’t have made himself errand-boy for them.  This is related to one of the other problems that doesn’t really have to do with characters, but with action: why doesn’t Marston just go looking for his quarry himself?  There are only so many places to hide in New Austin and Mexico.  Couldn’t he have just walked away from the crazy people in Hannigen’s Stead, and had a look around himself?  Failing that, why wouldn’t he just pull a gun on that ass West Dickens and tell him to get on with it?  I really, really wanted him to.  You can, of course, tell me he needed the machine gun, but that fails to convince me that Marston couldn’t have ridden in with the marshal and taken care of business without all the fooling around beforehand.

The middle chapter is more balanced—and by balanced I mean ambivalent.  The disconnect between Marston killing a couple hundred rebels, then being invited to join them and lead a counter-attack seems very strange.  The numbers just don’t add up.  How many rebels are there that they can suffer the kind of losses that Marston inflicts on them while working with the Mexican Army, and they are immediately prepared to actually take the city?  Simply spin these questions around, and ask the same: how many soldiers were there occupying the various strongholds in Mexico that the battalion (or whatever the division name would be) wouldn’t have fallen apart and abandoned some of their territory, at least long enough to regroup and reinforce?

The third becomes increasingly dark, and this is the only one where I believe in Marston’s deference.  He is at the mercy of the Federal agents, so when they tell him to go run errands, he has little choice.  The cocaine addicted professor is a bit caricature-esque as well, but at least realised he was out of place and ran back to the East.

The final chapter I found truly remarkable.  GTA4 has the problem of ‘after the story’ the world simply stops.  Obviously, it doesn’t ‘stop’ but there is no place for Niko there, the world stops interacting with him, and Niko is naught but an observer (maybe that’s the whole point of the game, haven’t decided  yet).  The idea that Marston was working on building up his farm, giving him a place to settle, as the player begins to sense an end to the game, is wonderful.  Then the real climax hits, and it’s a genuine surprise.  The gentle slow-down Rockstar give us on the ranch lulls the player into a false sense of security, then capitalises on it.  That is what I mean by showing, not telling.