Red Dead Redemption Research Articles

Cowboy as a Symbol of Individualism: A Pragmatic Analysis of Red Dead Redemption 2

As cultures are mainly divided into collectivistic and individualistic, members tend to emphasize, through communication, either their position as part of their group or their independence from the group. This emphasis is manifested in using the pragmatic concepts of positive politeness and negative politeness. The present study looks into the reflection of these two cultures in Rockstar’s renowned video game, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). It aims at identifying the two cultures as present in the game and showing their significance to its narrative. It fills the gap in the studies of language used within video games as well as its cultural reflections. The study addresses the following question: What are the positive and negative politeness strategies used in Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), and what are the implications of using these strategies in its narrative? By adopting Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, the researcher analyzed the positive and negative politeness used in the scripted dialogue of the in-game cutscenes through the mixed methods approach. The researcher hypothesized that the protagonist shows adherence to a collectivistic culture using positive politeness, and he begins transitioning towards an individualistic culture using negative politeness. The results showed that 75% of the protagonist’s interactions contained positive politeness while only 25% contained negative politeness. This transition explains the protagonist’s loss of trust and loyalty to his group as he begins to witness the futility of maintaining such loyalty. It also supports the overall narrative of the game as well as its cultural foundations.

Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West ed. by John Wills and Esther Wright (review)

Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West ed. by John Wills and Esther Wright (review)

“Narrative Enmeshment” in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

Rockstar Games’ 2018 Western video game, Red Dead Redemption 2, received critical acclaim upon its release. In particular, the narrative and technical aspects of the game received praise from critics. A slow pace, strong narrative, and impressively rendered game world are hardly unique within the genre of open-world video games, however. In this article, I analyse the game and argue that the combination of traditional narrative elements (such as plot, characterisation, setting, and time) is carefully interwoven with technical aspects of the game (including the game mechanics and internal honour system) through which the player experiences the narrative. Through this process of imbricated generic elements and game presentation, I contend, the game achieves a high level of what I theorise here as “narrative enmeshment”, a state through which the player’s narrative engagement in the story is heightened to a point that is technically unachievable through other storytelling media such as prose and film. In my discussion, which takes a narratological point of departure, I focus on select moments in the game’s narrative, as well as the game mechanics the player is compelled to use to progress through the game, to argue that the interlinked nature of the game’s technical sophistication and narrative maturity ultimately allows the player to experience a heightened level of engagement— or narrative enmeshment—in the game. This emphasises the importance of studying video games as a highly effective and innovative narrative medium.

Mechanisms of time in video game Westerns from Gun Fight to Red Dead Redemption 2

This article explores the video game Western and its relationship with ideas of temporality surrounding the American West. The fledgling video game industry first put ‘Cowboys and Indians’ on arcade screens in the 1970s, creating a playable digital West for gamers. Content and aesthetics proved decidedly simple, with game worlds reliant on prior filmic presentations. By the 2000s, thanks largely to technological advances, video game Westerns began to offer quantifiable depth and complexity, with Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption series (2004–18) being a leading example. Video game Westerns represent the next technological as well as cultural representation of the ‘Wild West’ in all its complexities. In this article, I explore how both old and new video game Westerns have toyed with notions of ‘time’ and how we experience ‘the frontier’ a century on from the lived historic period. I argue that games not only invite players to (re)visit a distinctive ‘frontier time’, but also, by their coding and mechanics, actively encourage players to subvert the temporal flow of Western history on-screen and even disrupt the West’s larger cultural meaning.

1Affect Theory

Abstract This chapter reviews a range of scholarship working at the intersection of theories of digitality, affect, and labour published in 2022 under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Work (Daniel Nehring and Kristina Brunila, Affective Capitalism in Academia: Revealing Public Secrets; Anna Deumert, ‘Wash Your Hands! Domestic Labor and the Affective Economy of Racial Capitalism’; Carlo Perrotta, Neil Selwyn, and Carrie Ewin, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Affective Labour of Understanding: The Intimate Moderation of a Language Model’); 3. Play (Aleena Chia, ‘The Artist and the Automaton in Digital Game Production’; Stephanie Jennings, ‘Only You Can Save the World (of Videogames): Authoritarian Agencies in the Heroism of Videogame Design, Play, and Culture’; Paolo Ruffino, ‘There Is No Cure: Paratexts as Remediations of Agency in Red Dead Redemption 2’); 4. Queer Affects (Jacob Gaboury, ‘Queer Affects at the Origins of Computation’; Bo Ruberg, ‘After Agency: The Queer Posthumanism of Video Games That Cannot Be Played’; Charnell Peters, ‘Asexuality, Affect Aliens, and Digital Affect Cultures: Relationality with the Happy Objects of Sexual and Romantic Relationships’); 5. Conclusion.

The Mustang Diaries: A Study of Mexico in Red Dead Redemption 1

Can a form of play be used to portray the past in popular culture? Can a person engage in such an act and acquire agency of a particular time in history? Play constitutes many forms—but for the sake of this paper, it will be used in the context of video games. Using the two main schools of thought for the study of these, narratology and ludology, I intend to highlight the potential for games to not only recreate history but also interact with events and how they can provide new ways of understanding history. I will focus mainly on the Mexican Revolution and the U.S.-Mexico border relations in Rockstar’s epic western: Red Dead Redemption 1.

Figures of the avatar: semi-autonomous agents, presence effects and interpellation in videogames

In this article, we analyse the strategies that allow non-player characters to create the illusion that they are autonomous agents in the service of complex videogame worlds. We describe these characters as semi-autonomous agents, and approach them as mediation devices that can induce a presence effect and “interpellate” the players’ avatars in order to make them more emotionally present and involved in the videogame world. We proceed in two stages. First, we examine the immersive and simulative logics that foster the impression that these agents are part of an autonomous world, almost as though videogame worlds didn’t rely on the presence of the players’ avatars. Second, we probe these logics further using Althusser’s analysis of interpellation in order to approach videogame worlds as simulating both worlds and relationships to the world. We consider semi-autonomous agents as sophisticated “interpellators” that have been carefully programmed to capture the players’ attention and assign them a fixed role or function. However, interpellation is not a one-way way process because it fosters “counter-interpellations,” involving the players in the game, not just on the level of their performance, but also as subjects in the videogame world within which they feel they exist. We use concrete examples drawn from a comparative study of the interpellation and presence effect mechanisms that we have identified in two single-player videogames, namely Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) and The Last of Us 2 (2020), both of which have gained recognition for their character design and for the quality and depth of their diegetic universes.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Player Shares Epilog Secret You May Have Missed

Red Dead Redemption 2 Player Shares Epilog Secret You May Have Missed

People and nature: The emerging signature of a relational journal

People and nature: The emerging signature of a relational journal

Rats, Plagues, and Children, Oh My! Multimodal Representations of the Past in Historical Games

Abstract Since their inception, Game Studies and its sub-discipline Historical Game Studies have stressed the pedagogical potential of (historical) games for learning. Today, popular off-the-shelf historical digital games such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017), Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), and Red Dead Redemption (2010) have achieved period-faithful and authentic interactive representations of elements of history that possess pedagogical value distinct from written accounts. To substantiate this claim, the authors forward a multimodal account of the varied ways in which historical knowledge is present in both game design and the gameplay experience. Their approach is illustrated with an under-investigated (yet valuable) mode of historical exploration – ‘Imaginative History.’ Using video and/or screen captures from several sequences of recorded game footage taken from A Plague Tale: Innocence, the authors present a case example from the game’s fantastical portrayal of the Black Death plague. The game’s value for teaching and learning is examined in relation to its re-mediation and subversion of past pre-modern folklore imaginations and beliefs concerning the Black Death. The authors also account for the relevance of the way games achieve a specific mode of engagement that is experientially based and structured within gameplay.

There is no cure: Paratexts as remediations of agency in Red Dead Redemption 2

Towards the end of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the main character Arthur Morgan contracts tuberculosis. The videogame is set in the United States in 1899, a time when many died from the respiratory infection. The videogame does not provide a cure for the disease, nor does it show when the contagion happens. It is presented as the consequence of an invisible action. Combining auto-ethnographic analysis with (para-)textual readings, in this article, I articulate my engagement with the game and with YouTube videos in which players claim to have identified a strategy to save Arthur. I argue that these paratextual practices address, without fully resolving, an affective response that originates from an unresolved reading of the videogame ( Consalvo, 2016 ; Genette, 1987 ). The videos on Arthur’s sickness remediate (in the double sense of restoring upon and healing) players’ agency ( Bolter and Grusin, 1999 ). I argue that this imagination of a restoration of the player’s agency insists on two levels: a narrative level, interpreted as a navigable database of events, and on the environment, seen as a ‘gamespace’ of resources and non-player characters to exploit or keep at distance ( Jennings, 2019 ; Stang, 2019 ; Anikina, 2020 ; Wark 2007 ). The duration of the auto-ethnography overlaps with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article concludes by exploring some recent mediations of the virus, observing how they restore a view of human agency that runs parallel to that which players of Red Dead Redemption 2 have articulated in a much more marginal context. The case studies, although diverse in nature, gravity and scale, shed light on the variety of contexts in which agency is negotiated, on the affective potential of these negotiations, and on the pervasiveness of white and able-bodied normativity in contemporary digital culture.

“My Whole Life I’ve Been on the Run”: Fugitivity as a Postracial Trope inRed Dead Redemption 2

AbstractThis article discusses the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games, which follows Arthur Morgan, a white outlaw, during the decline of the “Wild West” in 1898 and 1899. Taking up conversations of fugitivity in critical ethnic studies, this article maintains that fugitivity operates as a rhetorical trope that stands in for racial identity where the logic of postracialism denies investments in race. Analyzing the narrative, spatial, and kinesthetic elements of the game, this article argues that Morgan, and by extension the player, is aligned with historically and geographically racialized others through a fugitive relationship to space. While Rockstar, as a video game studio, may not see itself explicitly intervening in a racialized and racializing political imaginary in its fictional worldbuilding, the kinesthetic, narrative, and cartographic strategies the studio employs respond to a set of cultural assumptions rooted in the rhetoric of postracialism. As such, Red Dead Redemption 2 serves as a multifaceted text through which to interrogate the dynamics of that rhetoric as it is mobilized in representations of fugitivity and identity.

Re-enacting the American Frontier in Contemporary Popular Culture: The Western Fantasy of “Red Dead Redemption II”

Re-enacting the American Frontier in Contemporary Popular Culture: The Western Fantasy of “Red Dead Redemption II”

The implications of digital visual media for human–nature relationships

The implications of digital visual media for human–nature relationships

“Ain’t the American Dream Grand”: Satirical Play in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V

Rockstar Games is a video game publisher famous for its immersive and highly detailed action-adventure titles set in America, thanks to its two main franchises, Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto. This article explores how Rockstar employs the location and game play elements of Grand Theft Auto V (2013), a title that has now generated over $6 billion in worldwide sales, to critique elements of American culture, politics, and lifestyle. Presented by Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser as “the endpoint of the American dream,” Grand Theft Auto V provides a crime-laden journey through a simulated Southern California landscape (“San Andreas”). The game is awash with social and political commentary. Of interest here is how, through specific game mechanics such as “satirical play,” the title targets the concept of “the American Dream,” and exposes themes of excess consumption, fake-ness, and social decay in the Californian and broader American experience. Exposition of these themes is, however, compromised by Rockstar’s primary commitment to deliver a mainstream gameplay experience, resulting in mixed messages and moments of ludonarrative dissonance.

Rockstar Games, Red Dead Redemption, and Narratives of “Progress”

In both popular and historiographical discussions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, and the successive waves of popular culture that have come to represent Westward expansion and colonization, there has been much negotiation and debate over the nature and meaning of “progress.” Usually bound up with other loaded terms such as “civilization” (and its implicit antithesis, “savagery”), popular culture that falls under the broader umbrella of the Western genre has often used the idea of progress and development, from past to future, as a cornerstone of their stories and messages. This article uses game developer Rockstar Games and the company’s popular and commercially successful Red Dead Redemption franchise (2010-2018) to examine how narratives of “progress” have been used by the company not only to create their own representations of US history but, moreover, to prop up the promotional discourses that the company uses to brand themselves and sell their products. Ultimately, this article explores the tensions between a company that claims to offer games that are both “authentic” and critical of turn-of-the-century US history and culture, yet which implicitly rely on the ideologies that accompany narratives of “progress” and “civilization,” bound up as they are with the Frontier myth, white supremacy, and colonialism.

The educational value of virtual ecologies in Red Dead Redemption 2

Abstract Playing video games is often perceived as the antithesis of engaging with, and learning about, the natural world. Nevertheless, there is growing recognition that digital media is now a central part of many people's lives. This has led to increased efforts to harness the power and popularity of digital games for both ecological education and conservation advocacy. Games designed for educational purposes may be perceived as too niche, or have insufficient resources, to reach wider audiences. In contrast, big budget video games reach many millions of players, but are generally designed for entertainment rather than education. Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), a Western‐themed action‐adventure game, is one such product. Nevertheless, due to its detailed, open‐world simulation of late 19th century North American ecosystems, it provides opportunities for players to learn about real‐world wildlife. We surveyed self‐described gamers who both had, and had not, played RDR2. Participants undertook a wildlife identification quiz focusing on 15 species depicted in the game. We also asked participants about their self‐reported learning and experiences of playing RDR2. We found that participants who had played RDR2 correctly identified more species in the quiz, with this improvement enhanced by having completed the game's main storyline, played more recently or played online in a ‘Naturalist’ role. The difference in performance was greatest for ungulate and fish species which have high in‐game utility value. In addition to species identification, participants reported learning about animal behaviours and interspecies interactions. Their most memorable experiences were associated with RDR2's immersive environment and ability to provoke emotional responses. We conclude that big‐budget video games can have educational as well as entertainment value and should be taken seriously by educators, ecologists and conservationists as a communicative force. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Mezzo: An Adaptive, Real-Time Composition Program for Game Soundtracks

Mezzo is a computer program designed that procedurally writes Romantic-Era style music in real-time to accompany computer games. Leitmotivs are associated with game characters and elements, and mapped into various musical forms. These forms are distinguished by different amounts of harmonic tension and formal regularity, which lets them musically convey various states of markedness which correspond to states in the game story. Because the program is not currently attached to any game or game engine, “virtual” gameplays were been used to explore the capabilities of the program; that is, videos of various game traces were used as proxy examples. For each game trace, Leitmotivs were input to be associated with characters and game elements, and a set of ‘cues’ was written, consisting of a set of time points at which a new set of game data would be passed to Mezzo to reflect the action of the game trace. Examples of music composed for one such game trace, a scene from Red Dead Redemption, are given to illustrate the various ways the program maps Leitmotivs into different levels of musical markedness that correspond with the game state.

Unsung heroes: Reconceptualizing a video game as a work of art

A veteran arts educator’s entrance into the heretofore unknown world of video games, from encountering the community of players to daring a first-hand experience playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Buoyed by her desire to see her actor son’s performance in the game, the author plays to the end and emerges with an understanding of the game as a work of art.

“You Are a True Progressive”:Red Dead Redemption 2and the Depiction and Reception of Progressive Era Politics

AbstractSince its release in October 2018,Red Dead Redemption 2has generated considerable controversy.Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ highly popular video game set in a sprawling open world that resembles America’s southern and western states at the turn of the twentieth century, has attracted criticism from players who have disliked the perceived political messages the game presents. With numerous interactions with people of color, Native Americans, and feminist (suffragette) characters, the game prompts players to engage with the ongoing effects of colonialism, sexism, and racism, as well as the rising problems of an industrial and financial capitalist society. As such, the game’s depiction of Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics has resulted in a large amount of online criticism from a group of traditionally white, male, right-wing players. This article argues thatRedemption 2utilizes the Progressive Era as a vehicle to capture and speak to the current political climate, and that it is the game’s dual relationship with the past and the present that has aroused animosity from part of the game’s audience. Ultimately, it demonstrates how contemporary mainstream progressive politics can be interpreted within and projected upon the politics of the Progressive Era.