Reading The Game: Red Dead Redemption 2

Paul Bellow · Jan 1, 2019

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.

I could tell you a hundred stories about my life as Arthur Morgan, gravel-voiced anti-hero and the poet's heart of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2. Big stories and small stories, loud ones and quiet ones. Everyone who plays the game can, because RDR2 is a lot of things (a clunky shooter, a gorgeous art project, a love story between a man and his horse), but it is mainly an engine designed for the creation of stories — places where the competing strands of algorithmic AI and narrative benchmarking collide to make unique moments that are ridiculous, bloody, and sublime, often all at the same time.

This newest Red Dead, a direct prequel to 2010's original Red Dead Redemption, is big (as you've probably heard). It is undeniably gorgeous (as you've probably heard), representing uncountable hours of effort by hundreds of men and women responsible for, among other things, designing the way leaves move in gentle breezes and making Arthur's horse poop. It is a masterpiece in several different ways — the look of it, the feel of it, god, the sound of it, which is worthy of an entire essay all its own.

So many of its pieces are. I could write ten thousand words on the rising convergence of the outlaw/lawman dichotomy as explored via Red Dead's relationship between politics and the gun or ten pages on nothing but my own personal relationship with Arthur's Hat.
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Reading The Game: Red Dead Redemption 2

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Reading The Game: Red Dead Redemption 2

Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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