skinning gators in RDR2
RDR2, which in 2018 had the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, is an open world game in which you roam the ever-shrinking American frontier with a band of outlaws. The primary storyline—a series of quests that acquaint you with the territory and other gang members while you rob stagecoaches and shoot up dens of ex-Confederates—often seems more like a vehicle for exploring the game’s vastness than a series of tightly crafted plots. That’s probably as it should be: the strength of these open world games lies not in narrative deftness but in scale, texture, immersion, attention to detail, and a sort of half-joking referentiality (lifts from Yojimbo, Romeo & Juliet, and Deadwood feel more like easter eggs than ripoffs). There’s a main story, but it unfolds unevenly; the main event is the world itself—some 29 square miles of it.
In such an impressive world, though, the in-jokes and dime-novel dialogue can get a little thin. In one town, a man named Jeremiah Compson asks you to fetch a watch from his family’s dilapidated mansion in a nod to The Sound and the Fury. “Time is hell,” mutters Jeremiah as you walk away, a pretty weak paraphrasing of Jason Compson III’s “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.” But he isn’t there to say anything interesting about Faulkner; he’s there to wink at whoever was paying attention in English class and provide a quirky side-quest to whoever wasn’t.
Still, games like RDR2 aren’t waylaid by this sort of thing the way a TV series (like, say, Westworld) is, in part because narrative is often secondary to other aspects of the simulation. The thrill of playing RDR2 comes less from being told a story than from being given a world to explore, encounter, and test the limits of. And the world is astoundingly well-built: in the movement of horses, the seamlessness of cutscenes, the scattering of deer as you ride past—but also in the way it slows you down.
All games stretch believability to keep tedium at bay: there are bottomless inventories, super-powered health items, and blows to the head that don’t knock you out. Chests can be cleared out or cities traveled to with the press of a button. RDR2, however, elevates many mundane tasks rather than eliminating them. After killing a deer or an alligator, for instance, you have to skin it with your knife and put the heavy thing on your horse or else leave it to rot. When you loot an outlaw’s corpse you have to flip him over and rifle through his pockets. If you commit a crime in public, witnesses will rush off to inform the law. It has a cumulative effect of giving your actions consequence, of redirecting your focus, of encouraging you to consider the world rather than just rushing on to the next gunfight. It also, I think, makes you more conscious of all the death you leave in your wake.
ben tapeworm