Rockstar Games Research Articles

Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity by Esther Wright (review)

Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity by 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.

Como as marcas utilizam a publicidade in game no jogo Grand Theft Auto

This article aims to present a study on the insertion of advertising practices in digital games, this being within the servers of the game Grand Theft Auto Roleplay (called GTA RP), an illegitimate modification of the game Grand Theft Auto V by the developer Rockstar Games. It is worth mentioning that GTA RP is nothing more than a base platform for GTA V, which supports a large number of players simultaneously and allows partial customizations in the game map, in which the brands that we will discuss used this resource to carry out activations at the along the Cidade Alta server, this being a kind of functional city in satire of the real world. In addition, more than identifying the brands in the game, the study seeks to verify the ad formats and their possible impacts on the player's perception of such brands presented within this universe. In short, it is understood that digital games have been an important media channel in our society, capable of reaching new consumer niches, in which brands were able to visualize in their structure countless possibilities for the insertion of advertising messages.

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.

“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.

El cine negro en los videojuegos, el caso de L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games, 2011).

El cine negro es un género cinematográfico que tuvo su gran apogeo en las décadas de los cuarenta y los cincuenta en diferentes partes del mundo. í‰ste fue capaz de superar la barrera del tiempo, convirtiéndose en un importante antecedente de varias tendencias modernas y contemporáneas en el séptimo arte, llegando, incluso, a mostrar su influencia en el mundo de los videojuegos. Tal es el caso del juego de vídeo L.A. Noire(Rockstar Games, 2011). En el presente texto, se realiza un análisis de los elementos —tanto técnicos como narrativos e intertextuales— del cine negro que se encuentran presentes dentro de este videojuego, teniendo como objetivo destacar y evidenciar cómo se llevó a cabo el proceso de apropiación y adaptación de éstos para este nuevo medio.

“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.

Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded, by Andra Ivănescu

<i>Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded</i>, by Andra Ivănescu

El videojuego histórico como memoria literal y memoria ejemplar

El objetivo de este trabajo es el examen de las claves del recuerdo que se contienen en el videojuego de tema histórico. Partimos de la distinción realizada por Tzvetan Todorov entre memoria literal y memoria ejemplar y analizamos dos títulos, Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018) y This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014), para ilustrar cada uno de estos tipos de memoria. Sobre esta base examinaremos tres elementos de cada título, la intención de los autores, los mensajes y las imágenes contenidas en cada obra. Todo ello, junto al contexto historiográfico, nos ofrecerá la información necesaria para determinar el porqué del recuerdo en el videojuego histórico acercándonos, en un contexto más general, a las causas y potenciales consecuencias de la memoria en los medios de comunicación de masas.

User delinquency and instructional conditions: Undesirable behaviour in open virtual worlds

Abstract Virtual environments are becoming an increasingly common tool for instructional designers, but the creative freedom of these digital worlds can come with an increased risk of deviant behaviour from users. The scenarios at the centre of this research explore the impact different instructional conditions have on unwanted virtual behaviour. Participants in these scenarios were asked to play modified versions of the game Grand Theft Auto 3 (Rockstar Games, 2001) under one of three different instructional conditions. The goal was to measure which instructional conditions had the greatest impact on player behaviour, with an emphasis on investigating which set of conditions resulted in the least amount of deviancy in the experiment’s play period. Deviancy was measured through quantifying negative actions, such as killing computer controlled characters in the virtual space and reckless driving. The final results show that the instructional conditions given to users can have a major impact on behaviour, and thus have a major impact on potential learning.

Evoking Interactivity: Film and Videogame Intermediality Since the 1980s

Videogames have become a huge presence in the entertainment media landscape. From Pac Man (Midway, 1980) to Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games, 1997–2013), gaming has gained a level of mainstream engagement that has resulted in particular games and characters becoming reference points for popular culture in a way previously seen with iconic film and literature. How film has dealt with this growing popularity is particularly fascinating, revealing a great deal about how reproducing elements of the videogame form constitutes part of a strategy to remain relevant and compete for attention in an increasingly crowded media marketplace. Avoiding the common limitation of discussing films adapted from particular videogame properties, this paper explores films that deal explicitly with the game medium in their narratives. From Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and The Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992) to The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) and Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011), I use the concept of intermediality to demonstrate a clear increase in the engagement with and complexity of the interaction between games and films over time.

Torched song: The hyperreal and the music of L.A. Noire

Abstract Film noir is a genre that is essentially conflicted: not only does it have both love and death at its essence, but it is also a story about impending failure enveloped in style, beauty and smoke. This contradictory core is also reflected in a number of ways in the paradoxes of one of the most prominent noir games of recent years, the appropriately titled L.A. Noire (Team Bondi and Rockstar Games, 2011): the seemingly open world contradicts the linear narrative and, while the gameworld is firmly rooted in a meticulously researched historical past, it is also heavily stylized and grounded in a cinematic legacy. This is also reflected in the music of the game: along with the original soundtrack composed by Andrew and Simon Hale (with additional songs written by The Real Tuesday Weld), borrowed music helps place the game both in a particular place and time and in a particular genre. In this article, I explore the multiple functions that music plays in L.A. Noire, acting as temporal signifier but also reflecting the themes and tropes of film noir. Finally, I argue that Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal can be used to better understand how appropriated music in video games relates to music history.

Gaming history: computer and video games as historical scholarship

‘Gaming History’ explores how scholarly computer and video games could be developed to present original historical scholarship and meet the standards of the discipline. Instead of a monograph and the presentation of the history as lineal narrative, the work of the historian could be produced as a video game. Not historical fiction that sacrifices history for story and not a video game that sacrifices history for gameplay, but a video game that presents original research rivaling any great work of history, transforming readers, learners, and viewers into players interacting with history. The video game offers far greater potential for the creation and presentation of history than any other entertainment or interactive media. Although computer and video games may seem to be far removed from the historical narrative, both examine and form points of view about how cultures, economies, polities, and societies function. Ignoring the realities of budget and hiring a game design team, this article will imagine how historical research could be presented as a scholarly game. To explore these issues, the article analyzes key game mechanics and narrative structure in the popular history-based video games: the Assassin's Creed series, the Total War series, Rockstar Games' L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption, and Paradox Interactive's Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis. It also examines Tracy Fullerton's experimental game Walden. In addition, it explores how the game design process could be applied to developing a scholarly game.

Computerspiele und Soziale Netzwerke

Abstract Ethics regarding media use can be pointed out in several situations in which media are used. The article takes Grand Theft Auto V, published by Rockstar Games, as an example to show opportunities and limits of the »acting subject« - the gamer - in computer and online games. Human dignity is debated by reference to socio-critical aspects which are confronted with the violation of moral limits. Finally, computer games are highlighted as a convenient medium for the process of ethical learning.

New York: The Animated City

The urban landscape of New York City is one that is familiar to many, but, through the medium of animation, this familiarity has been consistently challenged. Often metamorphic, and always meticulously constructed, animated imagery encourages reflective thinking. Focusing on the themes of construction, destruction, and interactivity, this article seeks to cast critical light upon the animated double life that New York City has lived through the following moving image texts: Disney’s Fantasia 2000 (1999), Patrick Jean’s computer-generated short Pixels (2009), and Rockstar Games’ open-world blockbuster Grand Theft Auto IV (2008).

Rejuvenating "Eternal Inequality" on the Digital Frontiers of Red Dead Redemption

This essay argues that since the 2008 economic collapse, the popularity of the rugged cowboy has significantly increased in American film, television, and of particular interest to this essay, video games. As the reformed gunslinger/cowboy/outlaw John Marston in Red Dead Redemption (released by Rockstar games in 2010), players go west in a 3-D diegetic universe that furthers and, more importantly, rejuvenates the hierarchy of national identities, informed by racial, gendered, and economic status, that has comprised the cultural field of the United States in one form or another since the early twentieth century. On the digital frontier, Red Dead Redemption resuscitates white, middle class, heteronormative identity in the form of those who own small ranching operations and homesteads, and through these representations, teaches its players that suffering, loss, and rapid technological change are simply part of life. Red Dead Redemption naturalizes and, therefore, depoliticizes the economic downturn. This digitized frontier operates as a safety valve for the pressures brought to bear on American citizenry by the continued repercussions of the 2008 collapse.

Coming of Age at Bullworth Academy: Bully and Narratives of Youth Violence

The 1999 rampage at Columbine High School, and the high-profile school shootings that preceded it, dramatically heightened pre-existing cultural anxieties about the consumption of violent media in childhood. In particular, videogames received unprecedented public scrutiny, and even now the spectre of Columbine continues to hang over any discussion of violent videogames. When Rockstar Games, developer of the ultraviolent Grand Theft Auto series, announced Bully, a similarly styled game that would take place in a school, controversy predictably ensued. Rockstar made no effort to dispel this controversy, and might have actually encouraged it, but the game itself bears little relation to an archetypal school shooting. As a text, Bully represents a much different narrative of adolescence, one that questions the morality of adult institutions and problematizes the very idea of “growing up.” This essay compares and contrasts Bully with other narratives of youth violence, ranging from the popularly accepted telling of the Columbine shootings to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.