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 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 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?