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?