Day 188: Red Dead Redissonance

Been playing more Red Dead today. As the game has opened up, pushed out of the prologue and into the main body, I've noticed an increasing problem with ludonarrative dissonance. This is a fancy term used by games journalists to help them forget they're paid to write website articles about children's toys, and refers to the discrepancy between a videogame's story as told through, on one hand, its cutscenes, its dialogue, the blurb on the back of the box, and, on the other, the story of the player's actual journey through the simulation.

So, in terms of Red Dead, we have a game that desperately wants you to think it's about the death of the American West, about civilisation supplanting freedom, about a hard-bitten gang of ageing outlaws who cannot get with the changing times and are destined to rob and ride through an ever-shrinking wilderness as the noose closes inexorably about them. The mood that the game's narrative wants to engender is a sombre, melancholic one.

Yet this is at odds with the tone conjured through your interactions with the game's systems. It is something you can find, if you turn off the minimap and the HUD, and trek out on lonely paths up into pine covered foothills with the moon shining down and the clouds rolling in and the music crying sad and windstruck above it all. And it is something that comes through in certain gameplay decisions - the long button presses, the need to clean your horse, oil your guns. 

But mostly this is not the case. If you let it, the game will guide you around its playground world as you tick off missions, collect collectables, perform chores for irritating characters, craft improved equipment, amass treasure, upgrade weapons, buy outfits and unlock drift cornering for your horses. Your jaw goes slack and your brain turns gooey in the middle and you sit in dribbling contentment as a steady stream of easy challenges and continuous rewards are fed into your waiting maw.

Arthur Morgan, the game's protagonist, is not, as you control him, a tragic anti-hero, but a poster child for consumerism and capitalism, a spoilt CEO hoovering up a land's resources in the name of distraction and entertainment

This is no different to any other mainstream videogame of 2018, or of the past decade, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. And it's not forced upon you. Like I said, you can ignore the "content" and simply use the game to go for a meditative horse ride in a simulated natural world so intricately envisioned that it genuinely brings peace to your mind.

But it's interesting, I think, that the biggest videogames still have such a tension at their core between the ambitions of their storytelling and the asinine nature of their systems. You can't be both a boxed set of HBO's Deadwood and a wood-chip playpen with swings and a slide and a hidden parent clapping you on. You can't tout the mature nature of your interactive storytelling medium - filled with swearing and sex-scenes, obvs - while so patently infantilising the player at every turn.

This is a reason, I think, why titles like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight have resonated so deeply. They get you lost, make you afraid, drop you in an imposing maze and force you up against your own failure again and again until any victory you achieve is utterly deserved. The mechanics of the game match the desired tone.

Red Dead, on the other hand, too often spoon feeds you ice cream. Lots of yummy ice cream, here it comes, lovely in the belly, open wide, nom nom in your mouth, oop you spilled a bit on your bib, but never mind dearest, let's try again, you'll get it this time, well done, here's your reward.

The reward: MORE ICE CREAM.

I like ice cream, I hasten to add. But the game isn't called ICE CREAM SIMULATOR 2, is it?

Day 187: Halloween

Hey you. Have you recently walked into the break room at work to find Gale and John and Lizzie chatting about decorations, and you've said, Oh, what are the decorations for? and they've paused and looked at Gale, who has coughed and said he's throwing a small Halloween party tonight, just more of a get-together really, a quiet affair, and then he's paused again and no one has said anything and Lizzie has started looking through the snack cupboard intently and John has busied himself at the coffee machine, and then finally Gale has asked if you would like to come to the party, and you've said that, yes, that sounds lovely, and Gale has said Great, well, great, OK, yes, OK then, and the three of them have walked out of the break room and now here you are with a Halloween party to attend and no ideas for a costume?

Well, if so then fear not, because I've got you covered with this handy list of practical and cost-effective costumes to ensure your night goes spooooookily well!

- That celebrity you sort of look like. Remember that time you wore your hair down and Todd from accounting called you Emma Stone in the morning meeting, and then when everyone was changing their Facebook profiles to their celebrity lookalikes you set yours to a photo of Emma Stone, and after a second glass of wine you added a comment to the photo in which you tagged Todd and said you didn't see the likeness yourself but maybe he was on to something, and you thought for a long time, on your sofa, alone, with now your third glass of Australian merlot, and finally you added a winking face emoji to the comment, and pressed send, and then you waited on your sofa not really watching Holby City on catch-up until past midnight when your phone buzzed with a notification telling you Todd had liked your comment, and you wore your hair down the next morning, and every day of morning meetings for three months, but Todd never said anything again, and later you found out he'd been sleeping with Lucy from HR since the office pub quiz last Christmas to which you'd not been invited because it would have "made the teams uneven"? Well, maybe it's time to bring back that classic.

- Something slutty. Why not crack out that risque dress from the back of the wardrobe you bought online two years ago and haven't yet had the courage to wear? Oh, but now you try it on you remember that it does make your breasts look less like the plump grapefruit of the model in the picture and more like two pale, shaved guinea pigs that have been gassed to death in their burrows. And the plunge neckline draws attention to that birthmark on your shoulder you hate. And your only tights without obvious ladders are the wrong colour, so there'll be no hiding the lumpy twists of your varicose veins. Maybe a slutty mummy then, which, contrary to the obvious interpretation, is just you in the dress and then wrapped head to toe in thick bandages. Perfect.

- Something political. That's what your co-workers appreciate about you, right, the fact you're au fait with current affairs? How about going as the woman "too ugly" for Jair Bolsonaro to rape? Someone "grabbed by the pussy" by the current Republican president, who bragged about it to the old Republican president's first cousin? Or an immigrant mother fleeing torture and rape in her country just to have her baby torn from her at the US border and interned in a barbed wire camp without adequate resources while being used as a symbol of hate to distract the masses while the ruling elite take all the money and give it to the already richest and most despicable of society? Or, no, maybe a Bangladeshi garment worker, sleeping on a concrete floor with fifteen other girls in a makeshift factory in an export-processing zone thousands of miles from her home village and family, earning a dollar and change for 80-hour gruelling weeks in horrendous conditions, where birth control pills are handed out like candy by managers who think pregnant women make for unproductive workers, and where those who do give birth have been known to do it under desks while at their machines, sometimes flushing babies down the toilet for fear of reprisal from bosses - and all this so the people at the party you are attending, these very people, can buy cheap costumes from Primark and Topshop and wear them once and then throw them away, which of course is also a contributing factor to the fashion industry being one of the worst offenders for pollution on the planet. Err. Why are you doing this again?

- Lucy from HR. She of the office pub quiz. She of the insouciantly tousled bangs. The thighs just the right amount of plump in her designer-label pencil skirts. The spine that arches seductively as she bends over Todd's desk and musses his papers playfully, picks up his pens and chews on them, pulls slowly but firmly on his tie with those long, elegant fingers, pulling until the tie goes taut, just a touch further, before letting it fall back and straightening herself and walking away on six-inch heels that surely she must have taken lessons somewhere to be able to glide so demurely across the room upon. Why not go as Lucy from HR? Slap on makeup, dye your hair, squeeze your calloused feet into heels, drink all of a bottle of Aldi-brand peach schnapps, and turn up to the party screaming to Todd that you've made yourself into the woman you know he wants. A foolproof plan.

- Yourself. Or go as yourself. You're 35. You've been single for four years now. You're not even sure if you're mentally secure enough to raise children, whether you want to bring them into this bitter world sliding inexorable into far-right fascism, but you're rapidly running out of time for that even to be an option. You've been overlooked for promotion on a continuous basis since you started at the firm that you were only ever working in as a stop-gap but in which you've now laboured for so long that it's listed as your employer on your Bebo profile, if Bebo profiles are even still a thing. The wallpaper has been peeling behind your dresser since at least last spring, and you have neither the energy nor the inclination to fix it. It just peels gradually higher and higher, and you feel a similar peeling inside yourself, down in your soul, it is as if your being is tearing slowly asunder, and soon you will tear right through and fall to the floor as two wispy sheets on the ground, not even making a mess because there is nothing, you feel, of any substance, nothing real or pulsing or beating, inside you. It is all dust. And your cat doesn't love you. He only stays because you feed him. You haven't painted in years. You look at your old sketchbooks now and it all looks so mundane, so uninspired, and you wonder if anything fuelled your old belief in your secret talent beyond that central illusion that you were special, that you mattered. But you are not special. You do not matter. You will die, alone, and then you will be gone, and no one will remember that you once lived, just as the universe itself will fade, the very energy that fires it pushing it slowly away from itself, into the reaches of oblivion, until every grain of matter comes to rest isolated and unseen and abandoned, staying there, in stasis, for eternity; empty, meaningless, dead.

On second thoughts, maybe you won't go to that party after all. Happy Halloween though!

Day 186: Vines

Blessed day off. But I slept late, then did nothing until Mike came round to play on the PlayStation. He wanted to see the cowboys on Red Dead. We ate French pastries and drank coffee, while in the game Mike rode my favourite horse off a cliff. Dammit Mike.

After he left I started feeling sad, the sadness descended like evening mist, blanketing everything, and I just sat doing missions on Red Dead and slumping further down in my chair. I finally turned the game off and decided I had to get moving and get out of the house. Then I sat for a while longer. Then I remembered I hadn't done social media posts for work, so I sorted that...

...And then next I knew two hours had passed and I was submerged in classic Vines compilations on YouTube, utterly lethargic, and weirdly nostalgic for an iteration of the Internet that is now dead, which is a strange thing to be nostalgic about.

I flat out couldn't leave the house by this point, so I convinced myself it would save money to just eat cereal and brioche and a banana for tea, which I guess it did, but it didn't exactly feel like I was living my best life. As a compromise I put a load of clothes to wash, which I'd earlier decided to leave till tomorrow, despite having worn the same jeans for about eighteen days now. So I washed the clothes, ate dinner à la depression, and slouched back to YouTube.

Now the day is over, I'm back at work tomorrow, and my room smells of wet underwear. But at least my horse survived the fall.

I'm going to write today off as a non-starter, throw it in the bin, start again in the morning. Bubye.

Day 185: Big moustache

My friend Alex has bought Red Dead Redemption 2, so now all we’re doing is messaging each other about the game.

“These controls are awful!” he says. “How am I supposed to get immersed in this massive world if everything is a press and hold and another button press and you need to grip the controller in a Vulcan death grip to even get your gun out?”

“I think it’s meant to be slow and deliberate, to make you feel like you’re struggling through an oppressive environment,” I say.

“Well it’s ruining it for me. I’m turning it off.”

Alex, in certain situations, has less patience than I do.

But the more of the game I play, the less certain I am in Rockstar’s design prowess. While the world they have created is astounding, I’m not so sure these controls aren’t just the work of a studio that has always had a problem with inelegance in their game design. I like that you have to hold buttons down and it’s slower and more measured. But all the fiddling with button combinations, the lack of clarity in the interface, just makes me confused, and makes my character get up and down from his horse, open and close his satchel, accidentally shoot store owners instead of trade with them. That’s not immersive, it’s the opposite.

- - -

The next day, while I’m at work, Alex messages to ask how you get a big moustache. I’ve told him my cowboy has a big moustache.

I go and hide in the cellar and sit on a barrel and write a reply.

“Mate it’s easy. You just go to your camp and select your tent with the right stick clicked down. You hold in the left trigger, bring up your context-sensitive radial dial, push left to highlight trimmers, hold X and press and hold Square while releasing the trigger. You’ve now got your trimmers selected. Go to your mirror and focus on it with R2 - make sure you don’t have your gun drawn though or you’ll shoot the mirror. Now hold Triangle to enter the interact menu, scroll across…”

Alex puts three laughing emojis in reply, and I feel like I’ve really achieved something with my life.

- - -

That evening I message Alex asking if he’s done many missions.

“Nah not really. I keep getting distracted. Have you robbed the doctors’ in Valentine?”

“No. Have you had a fist fight in the mud?”

“With the fat fella? Yeah. Have you killed any famous gunslingers?”

“Not yet.”

“I killed one and stole his boss gun.”

“Well I want to do that! Have you done the mission where you get the enormous rippling veiny black horse and then you have to sell it to learn how to buy new horses? And the only one you can afford is a mangy Skegness pony that makes your feet drag along the ground while you’re riding it?”

“Yeah haha.”

“It’s very disempowering.”

“How do you get clean?” Alex asks. “I’m dead dirty.”

“Press and hold triangle near a body of water. Push gently on the stick towards the water while clicking L3”

“Haha. No. Is that really how?”

“Yeah but you need to be lightly tapping X and toggling your second inventory dial and highlighting your stamina core with R1 as well.”

“Get to fuck.”

- - -

Already I can see how our playtimes are going to differ. Alex is shooting up bad bastards and blowing safes and becoming the fastest gun in the West, while I’m collecting bagfuls of flowers and brushing my horse a lot and standing on hills watching the night sky and taking all the baths.

But each to their own. I do think the interaction with the world is clumsy, wooly; that the systems are a hodgepodge jostling one another, lacking the synergy and grace of those in, for example, Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But the sheer width of the world, the amount of things to do, the different experiences for which the simulation allows, makes up for any mechanistic clunkiness. Enough width, it turns out, is in itself a kind of depth.

Seriously, though - look at this horse. I could fit it in my pocket it’s that small!

Day 184: Turning up

Another better day, although work sucked hard, but I ate the fruit I planned on eating, I cooked the veg; I edited the photos... did social media for work, put up a pic on my own Instagram, food shopped, talked to my housemate, drank tea, listened to sumptuous piano music, wrote silly messages to my friend…. and now I’m here writing my blog. I haven’t wasted time on Youtube, scrolled down Facebook (well, a little at work, and on the bus, and just for a moment when I got home...); I haven’t succumbed to negative thoughts or fallen into lethargy or despair. Another day upright, living, doing what needs to be done. Treating myself with a bit more kindness, practising self-care.

Don’t have much more tonight, but that’s OK. I should be proud of myself for the smallest victories. Because why not? What’s being happy about tiny steps going to harm? I haven’t written a novel today, forced myself to create anything of lasting worth. But I’ve turned up, and I’ve been present, and when you suffer from depression that’s huge in itself.

Gently does it, don’t excoriate myself for not being stronger than I am. What will that help? Breathe out. Concentrate on the positives, on gratitude - that I’m here, that I’m experiencing any of this at all. Don’t slip backwards, hold my ground, and tomorrow is another day.

And now, with all my jobs done, there's time for a little ride into the wilderness on Red Dead Redemption, a little moonlit ranging across wooded hills, over canyons, with wolves howling and birds taking flight, and the first morning mist thick in the valleys, and day coming cold and hard.

I mean, look at this game. How can you not want to lose yourself in this game?

Day 183: Six months

Another busy Saturday shift. Another long bus ride up the hill, eyelids dropping with head bumping gently against glass. Played an hour of Red Dead when I got in, tramped around the first town, looked at new revolvers I couldn’t afford, thought about buying an engraving for my current pistol, hung out in a saloon, squelched through mud, went to a church, took in a show, had a fist fight… then let my character lie back in a bath in the town’s hotel, the drip of water, muffled voices through the wall, moody cowboy blues playing lugubriously in the background.

I’ve had rejuvenating carrot and ginger soup for tea (back in the actual world), with plump brown rolls and lots of butter. I’ve eaten an apple and an orange for dessert, and drunk a mug of steaming blackcurrant tea. I’m going to put this up, and then get an early night, for the first time in far too long.

I’m trying, trying to go easy on myself, to resist the gravitational pull of negative thoughts. To carefully direct myself away from their orbits, to learn to rest in the empty space outside of harmful routine.

Day 183. Somewhere between yesterday and today I reached the halfway point; I have now been doing this for six months. It never feels like it but I have made real progress. I am better than I have been in a long time.

Keep going. It will get worse, and harder, and easier, and harder, and better. And gradually, gradually, life will change.

Day 182: Red Dead

What I didn’t mentioned yesterday was that on the way back from the Van-Shallows I may have stopped by GAME, which may have been open for its midnight launch of Red Dead Redemption 2, and I may have picked myself up a copy of the game. And then I may have played halfway through the night, and been exhausted and grumpy and made a million tiny mistakes at work today.

But what you gonna do? The game is the biggest release of the year - the latest opus from Rockstar, creators of the Grand Theft Auto series - and it demands to be played. Red Dead is Rockstar’s Wild West series, initially pitched as “GTA with cowboys” - although where the former series has always been about unfettered adolescent energy-release, stealing cars, driving at top speeds, mowing people down, Red Dead has staked a claim as a more sombre, mature affair. Yes, there are gun fights, but they are clumsy, brutal affairs, scraping, staccato interludes punctuating slower-paced, thoughtful riding, hunting, simply existing in the kind of huge and untamed wilderness that most of us now only experience in simulated form on our computers.

So I’ve only played a few hours with the game - I came home this evening and did another hour, before passing out and waking up only now - but so far Red Dead Redemption 2 is stunning - oppressive, overwhelming, an order of magnitude better than its predecessor.

What I like most is that its systems are as opaque as the snowstorm your gang of outlaws ride into to evade pursuit after a heist gone awry in the game’s opening hours (it’s very Reservoir Dogs). The gang hole-up in abandoned cabins in the Grizzlies, the game’s caricature of the Rockies, to wait out the winter. The snow falls thick all around. A constant gloom lies across the white. Sounds are close, muffled. Your character struggles through snow drifts and forces his horse up mountain paths as spidery light filters through the trees above. Inside the cabins wood creaks, fire crackles, and the voices of gang members come hushed and coarse.

And this tone is borne out by the mechanics of the game, the verbs of play, and how they are deployed. Changing weapons is unintuitive, time-consuming, fiddly. You store weapons in your horse’s satchel, and must swap them out as you proceed. Interacting with the satchel, and most prompts, involves a long hold of a button, rather than a press. You do not simply have health and stamina gauges, but “bars” surrounding “cores” which deplete and require eating of provisions and sleeping in beds to refill. Your character has a life of his own, the thumbsticks of the controller feel like they’re yanking him to where you want him to go, somewhat against his will. He is old and tired, and moves at his own pace, sluggishly, deliberately. So too the horses, which are beasts to ridden, not controlled directly.

It’s all esoteric, obfuscated, difficult, un-fun - and glorious. It is game design to engender a mood, one of isolation, oppression, existence in a hostile world.

My biggest concern with big-budget game design, with videogames in general, is that it all exists only to mollify us into unconsciousness. An opiate for the masses. A mother’s soft hand on our cheek. “Shh, quiet, here’s the next objective, just press this button, well done, have a million experience points, a level-up award, you’re so special, you’re so perfect, shh, shh, suckle this, bathe in this, go back to sleep… and when you wake up you can buy some add-ons in the in-game store.”

Fuck that. I mean, there’s a place for easy entertainment after a long day at work. There’s a place for warm baths. But it seems to me the vast majority of us are giving our existences in jobs to corporations that do not love us, our money to brands that view us with predatory gazes, all to come home and be jerked off into restless slumber by reality TV and superhero action movies and mainstream videogames. Striving in your day job to, I don't know, bring water to villages in developing countries, or be a nurse, or a teacher, then coming home to a deserved rest is one thing. But many of us - myself included - use entertainment as a drug that only serves to keep us in shackles.

So, all of which means I’m super excited about a huge blockbuster videogame, one that I'm sure will end up being among the biggest sellers of all time, that right from its opening moments offers an experience more thorny and less entertaining, and more grown-up, than any of its contemporaries. It's all the more absorbing for it.

Or maybe I’m just trying to justify why I’m a man in his thirties still playing electronic games. Did it work?