In 2010, when the constitutionality of a California law that
restricted the sale of certain violent video games to minors was taken to the
Supreme Court in the case of Brown
v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and Academy of
Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) filed a joint amicus brief in support of protecting video games’ First Amendment
rights. Included in the document were analyses of four video games from recent
years that had been rated "M” or “mature" for violence, which were
followed with arguments that the violence in these games function as part of a
story and a means to explore complex social and moral issues – just like in
film, literature, and television. One of the titles used as an example was
Rockstar Games’ then newly-released Western title Red
Dead Redemption. In its analysis, story's influences from various
films were highlighted, as well as influences that extended even to novels, such as Cormac McCarthy’s
highly-esteemed novel Blood Meridian.
Then the violence in the game was compared to the violence in the novel:
Significantly, the violence in Red Dead Redemption utterly pales compared to
that of McCarthy’s Blood
Meridian,
which also explores the
last years
of the Old West. Violence in Blood Meridian includes graphically rendered scenes of mass murder, scalping, rape,
and indeed all manner
of
bloodshed, brutality and cruelty. Yet the book is widely regarded as
McCarthy’s masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels of the last century, ranked by the New York Times as runner-up in the most important works of
American fiction in the last
25 years. Notwithstanding the novel’s
disturbing
nature,
however, it may be purchased by minors in nearly any bookstore and has assuredly been read by thousands, perhaps
millions, of minors around
the world.
Just as California could not—and presumably would not want to—pass a law banning the sale of Blood Meridian to minors in California, government intervention
categorically denying the
experience
of Red
Dead Redemption to minors
makes no
sense.
In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court struck down the law.
Justice Antonin Scalia provided the majority opinion, which stated that, much
like other protected forms of art, “video games communicate ideas--and even
social messages--through many familiar literary devices […] and through
features distinctive to the medium […] That suffices to confer First Amendment
protection.”
Though its popularity has waned in recent decades, the genre
of the Western – in fiction, film, television, and music – has been one of the
most valuable entertainment platforms to communicate ideas and social messages about
American values. The controversy about video game violence perpetually in the
media spotlight may suggest otherwise, but the iconic status of the Western and
the Old West prove that America
loves violence. And both Blood Meridian and Red
Dead Redemption challenge the idea of a West
that ignores its historical foundations in brutal violence and bloodshed.
But first, an introduction of the two titles:
Blood Meridian or the Evening of
Redness in the West (1985) is the fifth novel by American author Cormac
McCarthy. Though it was initially met with mixed reviews, it has come, as the
aforementioned amicus brief stated,
to be lauded as one of the best novels in contemporary literature. Based on
actual historical events and people, the novel follows a teenage boy, known
only as “the kid,” as he sets off towards the lawlessness of the Texas-Mexico
border in the 1850’s. In McCarthy’s West, all the nostalgic elements of a
mythic land where rugged, John Wayne-esque gunslingers fought for justice are –
horrifyingly and grotesquely – subverted. The kid soon joins a band of ruthless
outlaws, the members of which include an ex-priest and Judge Holden, an
enigmatic, intelligent, and massive man bereft of body hair who literary critic Harold Bloom once called “the most
frightening figure in all of American Literature.” They are contracted by
Mexican authorities to hunt and scalp Apaches, and McCarthy writes a trail of
blood and carnage miles long as the gang indiscriminately slaughters, rapes,
and pillages throughout the land with no effort to distinguish between peaceful
and hostile.
Red Dead Redemption
(2010) is an action-adventure video game for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
developed and published by Rockstar Games and its studios. Both a commercial
and critical success, it garnered multiple “Game of the Year” accolades from
critics and sold over 12.5 million copies a year-and-a-half after its initial
release. In the game, the player assumes the role of John Marston, a former
outlaw who is forced to hunt down ex-members of his gang after his wife and son
are taken by federal agents. Like Blood
Meridian, it takes place around the Texas-Mexico border, but the game is
set some 60 or so years later in 1911. Though there is a main storyline, the
game is largely nonlinear and “open world” – meaning the player can travel
freely around the beautifully rendered environment and engage in any number of
various activities or side missions.
The belief of purification and regeneration through violence
has been part of American political and cultural mythologies arguably since America’s establishment
as an independent nation. However, it was the rapid expansion westward in the
19th century that brought it into the forefront of America's collective conscience. The push of American borders west was more than a simple
migration; it was a “manifest destiny,” which held that the American people –
specifically the Anglo-American people – had divine right to expand across the
continent because of their virtuousness and moral superiority. The west would
be place to shed the conventions of Europeans, to regenerate, and cultivate a
culturally “pure” American. Frederick
Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” presented in 1893 claimed that the
“presence and predominance of numerous cultural traits” such as
"coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that
practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful
grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant
individualism" – all arose from the frontier.
However, the romanticization of Manifest Destiny in
fictional works overlooked the historical realities in order to justify the
motives. This historical reimagining can be seen in the traditional depictions
of the American Old West, which reinterpreted the bloody clashes with Native
Americans as a much less ambiguous and sanitized trial of virtue. In these
works, the “virginal” frontier served as the ultimate test of moral character,
and the means of evaluating this moral righteousness was through violence. The
heroic gunslinger and frontiersman became an American cultural icon, always triumphing
over outlaws and “savage” Indians. These fictionalizations soon became
Americans’ realities, as they “[became] symbolic myth” which “legitimates and
perpetuates particular values and behaviors” as Richard Slotkin writes in Regeneration Through Violence (1973). He argues that these myths have sanctioned local and national violence through
sanitizing or erasing the fact that these heroic settlers the West violently
displaced and conquered Native American communities.
Emerging during the 1960s and 1970s was the subgenre of the
“revisionist Western” in film, though the term can be applied to any medium.
Its filmic roots can be traced to post-WWII Westerns, but the disillusionment
of Vietnam
is generally regarded as the catalyst for their production. The revisionist
Western reuses, parodies, and dismantles elements of both the genre and
historical records to critique the historical myth of our traditional
narratives of the West. They generally are darker and more cynical in tone, and
more morally ambiguous. Both Blood Meridian and Red Dead Redemption are
classifiable as revisionist westerns, as they both address violence, morality,
and the association of the two in the context of the shaping of America through
the history of the West. Through both acknowledging and recreating the senseless
and morally ambiguous historical violence in story and gameplay, the works
brings awareness to the beliefs and values held by American society today.
Violence is always justified and sentimentalized in
traditional Westerns in some nationalistic or moral sense. It’s a means to an
end for heroes with righteous intentions; and when the smoke and dust clears, who
is good and who is bad will be revealed. The revisionist Western, however, does
not give the audience this clear motivation. Especially in both the novel and
the game, where violence is a defining theme, it is both the means and the end. The characters are mere instruments
of this force. The violence is “a sustained intensity rather than a simple
reaction, a constant which smooths away all custom and law to facilitate
unfettered movement,” Brian Evenson wrote about Blood Meridian in the essay
“McCarthy’s Wanderers: Nomadology, Violence, and Open Country,” which is also
an applicable description of Red Dead Redemption. The two works do not shy from recreating the
extreme violence present in the history of the West, and embrace the idea that
the proclivity for violence is engrained in human nature – regardless of race.
There is recurring regeneration through violence, but rather than the
decimation of the “primitive savage” or morally bankrupt to bring about purity
and progress, it is instead a ceaseless generation of more violence.
In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy said, “There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.” The violence in Blood Meridian incited some controversy when the novel was first
published due to the unrelenting and foregrounded graphic, senseless violence.
McCarthy’s use of poetic and epical language when describing horrendous acts of
violence creates a harrowing reading experience – not only because the acts are
so depraved, but because their aestheticized presentation make them somewhat
thrilling to read. However, McCarthy denies the readers any way to understand
the violence as part of some larger plan. He uses the West as place that
doesn’t expose the inherent goodness or badness in people, but exposes their
inherent violence. The scalphunters are contracted by the Mexican government to
kill and skin Apaches initially, but that thin motivation eventually
disappears. When they cannot find Apaches, they slaughter and scalp dead or
alive peaceful Tiguas (“the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps
bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon”), then even Mexicans
(“one of the men from inside appeared in the doorway like a bloody apparition
[…] he had been scalped and the blood was all run down into his eyes”). The violence is not symbolic or justifiable.
There is absolutely no interiority in the novel, and the characters are beyond
redemption or empathy. The violence is simply there for its own sake. And it is
not some transformative or plot related device either as the very first chapter
shows. The kid is described as already possessing “a taste for mindless
violence,” and, McCarthy ends the passage with the sentence “he is the child
the father of the man.” This particular line is taken from English Romantic
poet William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps up when I Behold,” and is meant to
express that the innocence of children brings them closer to God and to nature,
and their experiences must help shape them in adulthood. However, its meaning in the
context of Blood Meridian is twisted brutally to stress the innate – and
inescapable – violence present in humans through history. To emphasize this, included in the epigraph of the
novel is a reprinted excerpt from a 1982 newspaper article describing the discovery
of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in Ethiopia that shows evidence of
having been scalped – a practice that has obviously continued on into modern
times as evidenced with the characters in the book.
McCarthy also plays with the idea that not only is violence
part of human nature, but also it is hereditary. In one scene, the character of
the Judge tells the other scalp hunters the story of a harness maker who kills
a traveling man in the woods. The harness making then rips his clothes and bloodies
himself in order to convince his son and wife at home that he had been beset by
thieves. On his deathbed, the harness maker confesses the murder to his son,
who forgives him, but secretly was “was
jealous of the dead man” and consequently “went away to the west [where] he himself
became a killer of men.” The judge goes on to say that “the death of the
father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir” above all else.
This is echoed in the relationship between the kid and the Judge; the latter
who tells the former that he would have “loved him like a son.” “Love” in this
case, is past tense because by the end of the novel, the kid has distanced
himself from the life of slaughtering, and rejects the Judge. The conclusion
sees the Judge rape and murder the kid in an outhouse, as if to “regenerate” a
taste for violence and pass on this brutality, since the kid has since rejected
the violence within him.
Though the characters in Red Dead Redemption are portrayed
more sympathetically than those in Blood Meridian, they are still brutally
violent (though there is, luckily, no child killing). The storyline of the
single-player campaign introduces the character of John Marston seeks to
distance himself from his violent past, but still regresses back to the very
violence he seeks to escape. In one of the final story missions, Marston
finally confronts the leader of his old gang and surrogate father, Dutch van
der Linde. When van der Linde is cornered, he says to John in a cutscene, “We
can’t always fight nature, John. My whole life, all I ever did was fight […]But
I can’t give up, neither. I can’t fight my own nature. That’s the paradox,
John,” after which he jumps off the precipice and falls to his death. The idea
of violence as a part of one’s nature is not only integral to Red Dead Redemption’s storyline,
but also to the functioning of the game through the gameplay. Though the player
may act altruistically and pacifistically between story missions, John Marston
– and eventually Jack – are not only written, but coded as instruments of
violence. Killing is the only means of advancement through the game. In some
ways, the way the game is played mirrors the structure of Blood Meridian –
“restless, incessant […]nomadic wanderings, topographical displacements, [and]
variations of weather” punctuated by graphic, frenetic "skirmishes in the
desert."
Passing down violence through generations is also a theme of Red Dead
Redemption. When John is betrayed and killed by the government agent Edgar Ross
in the final act, the game does not end. Instead, the player assumes control of
Marston’s teenage son, John Marston, Jr., or “Jack”, who discovers his father’s
bloody body on the family farm. A time skip takes place after this scene, and resumes
with the player controlling an adult Jack. There is a single new storyline
mission that also becomes available to complete, and it allows the player/Jack to
confront and kill the now retired Agent Ross in vengeance for John Marston’s
death. However, the game does not present this in some heavily moralized light;
it is bittersweet, at best. The duel between Jack and Ross is identical in
gameplay to the numerous duels with the generic NPCs (non-playable characters) encountered playing John
Marston, and in the cutscene that follows Ross’s death, Jack is silent and expressionless.
He looks down briefly at the gun in his hand, and there seems to be a moment of
before he holsters his gun again. He too has now become a “killer of men,” and
the nature that John could not escape is the same nature Jack will never escape.
What was set up to play out as a typical Western a showdown of revenge; the
culmination of the struggle between tyranny and democracy instead is somewhat
anticlimactic as neither side wins. Ross killing John did not create a more
tamed West, and Jack has now effectively bound himself to a life of violence. The
game also explores this through ways that blend both literary and video game
devices. The player acquires all of John’s personal affects and abilities and
is then able to roam around the world freely and have Jack finish any
side-missions not completed or started as John Marston. One particular convention
utilized in many forms of fictionalized storytelling is the significance of a
child bearing the same name as the parent, as it always invites a comparison
and/or contrast in a generational context. Red Dead Redemption uses its unique
attributes as a game to create metaphors that function on a similar level as literary
devices. The game’s engine uses John Marston’s character model for the adult
Jack, with the exception of the head and the body texture – Jack isn’t just
like John; he is John. It’s not just
technically relevant but thematically relevant that they share the same base
model. The differences are merely superficial.
Revisionist Westerns usually seek to disassociate violence
from morality, as has been the case in the myth of the West and the
fictionalized West. The amorality that accompanies the graphic violence in both
the game and the novel exposes the moral justifications during the time of
manifest destiny and that of modern times. The character of the Judge says, in
a now oft-quoted line, that
Moral law is an invention of mankind for the
disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law
subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by
any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be
proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives
evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further
argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to
petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates
of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences
thereof.
Simplified, the Judge’s speech not only expresses that
“might makes right,” but expands upon it by implying that there is no right,
only might. The records of history invalidate the concept of an immutable and
universal morality because the powerful are never disenfranchised; and it is
morality that shifts to fit power. The events of history are always written by
the victors, and the system of virtues and beliefs are predicated on where
power lies. Morality can be the reason behind exercising power, as is the case
of Manifest Destiny, but it will never be the case that morality constrains
power. Instead, the world is amoral.
Within the first 70 pages, Blood Meridian dispels the myth
of a West won because of righteousness. Before joining the scalphunters, the
kid joins the filibustering mission into Mexico lead by Captain White.
Captain White channels the often racist rhetoric of Manifest Destiny saying
that Mexicans are a “degenerate” and inferior race who are incapable of
self-government, and he champions Americans as “instruments of liberation in a
dark and troubled land.” He then attempts to rouse patriotic spirit in the kid
by asking whether the latter would “abandon a land that Americans fought and
died for to a foreign power.” Though with this line he implies Europeans
usurping American territories as popularly depicted, the next few pages
subverts that with a cruel irony as the Comanche Indians slaughter White and
most of the other filibusters:
[…]riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and
leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground
with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of
locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up
by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and
the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and
chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the
strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals,
some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in
it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with
loud cries to their fellows. […] Dust stanched the wet and naked heads
of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and
tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the
bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and
horses lay screaming.
The defeat of White – who is subsequently beheaded by a
Mexican trooper – and his company contradicts his staunch belief in both his chosen-by-the-divine
racial and national superiority, as claimed by Manifest Destiny. His “moral
superiority” was no safeguard against the power of that particular band of
Comanche.
Red Dead Redemption both supports and refutes the concept of amorality,
sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally; the narrative and the
gameplay convey quite different perspectives. John Marston in the storyline is
presented as a man who wishes to atone for his past misdeeds, and one who cares
deeply for his family. Rather than the during the frontier conquest under Manifest Destiny,
the game is set during the demise of the Old West, a demise brought about by
modernity and a steadily encroaching federal government. The story plays into
standard Western tropes at times: Marston – the reformed outlaw – serves as the
anti-hero protagonist, the main antagonist is a government agent who kidnaps
Marston’s family to force Marston into killing or capturing members of his old
gang, and there are several stereotyped characters. However, as the storyline
progresses, some of these tropes are deconstructed, and, as is possible with
Blood Meridian, serve as an acknowledgement that our contemporary beliefs are
in some ways unchanged. In one of the beginning story missions, Marston laments
the decline of the West to the character of Bonnie, and he describes it as a
place “where the old ways still hold true. “If you do a man wrong, he'll shoot
you for it” he continues, and this describes the traditional West which meted
out justice by force because they were privileged a clear “idea of what's right
and what's wrong” by the natural innocence of the American frontier. Though there
seems to be a level of self-awareness by the game developers about the game as
a “simulation of the West,” because Bonnie criticizes this belief and
acknowledges its unreality, asking what “dreadful novel” John took that from and whether there was ever such a West as what is written in “that
romanticized drivel.” Instead, she says, the practice of determining a man’s
rightness or wrongness by shooting him “were just people shooting each other
because they lost at cards,” a possible reference to the Judge’s speech on war:
Suppose two men at
cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? […]
What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement
of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of
fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and
irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision
without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their
stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. […] This
is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the
justification […] it is the testing of one’s will and the will of another
within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to
select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity
of existence. War is god.
As mentioned earlier, morality is not proven by some
ultimate test – and Bonnie exposes the falseness of John’s assertion that there
is a clear right and wrong decided through violence out in the West. It only proves
who was more powerful. As the game
progresses, this ideal mythic West held by the protagonist is proven false
through both the storyline and the gamespace. The landscape, while atmospheric,
vast, and beautifully rendered – is a dangerous and morally desolate place and
far from the pastorial Eden
that Americans supposedly had tamed with their virtue. There can be fatal
consequences if the player pauses too long while out in the wilderness:
cougars, grizzly bears, and other sorts of hostile creatures appear from
nowhere to attack (and often kill) the player. The player is often ambushed by
highwaymen and other criminals, and in some encounters an innocent who needs
for help is really a criminal. The player is shown things aren’t as black and
white as Marston believes; what seems like a criminal attacking an innocent is
sometimes not the case, and the player is only made aware of this after they
have shot and killed what they thought was the hostile NPC. By the end of the
game it is clear that the West, at least envisioned by the game developers, was
a place rife with violence, gore, legal and moral corruption, and other
manifestations of the grotesque and perverse aspects of humanity. John, a
character cut from the mythology of the Old West, no longer subscribes to the
frontier idealism as evidenced by later dialogue. After he is reunited with his
family, he learns his son Jack is fond of adventure books where “people killed
the savage redskins and […] [a] brave man hunts the man who killed his father.”
Jack remarks that both he and John could become outlaws like in the books.
Contrary to the romanticized Old West Marston speaks about earlier, he says that
Jack lives “in a dream world,” and the reality of the West isn’t “like they
tell it in books […] it was ugly, and brutal.” Unlike Blood Meridian, the
characters and most of the events of Red Dead Redemption have no real historical precedent, relying mainly
on cinematic and video game tropes to engage a discussion about the fictional
and the historical West. Additionally, the nature of a video game which
requires the player’s input into the crafting of a narrative does not lend much
strength to a condemnation of a fictionalized history. However, the
controversy surrounding video games and their supposed advocacy of violence can
be an engaging dialogue for contemporary society, which, as mentioned before,
has values that are traced back to those “cultivated” from westward expansion.
The storyline and dialogue near the end of the game serve as quite the critique
on this. John worries about Jack’s engagement of the fantasy of his novels and
his apathy and resentment of the more monotonous tasks of daily life. After
going off to the woods to hunt a grizzly bear like the heroes in his books,
Jack is given a wake-up call after he is nearly killed, but John saves him at
the last minute. Thereafter, Jack is less enthusiastic about violence and guns;
especially his father’s seeming predilection towards them. Jack later jokes
that he will write a story called "The Day John Marston Stops Shooting,"
to which John responds that he doesn’t think the book would sell, because
“people like shooting in them things.” With this exchange with a greater
subtext, the game puts a mirror up to those that are playing it. As one reviewer
noted, this exchange “gives voice to the developers responsible for games so
often criticized for their violence” by acknowledging that the audience’s
consumption of it. Though it may not be a direct critique of history, it is a
critique of American values which were formed from the West.
However, gameplay, especially the free roaming between
storylines, conveys a different message entirely – if there is a message at all. The game, ostensibly, has a morality system worked into the
structure of the gameplay. Termed the “Honor” meter, it is described in the
Brown v. EMA amicus brief as “a
meter on the screen [which] tracks Marston’s morality.” After the completion of
certain actions or tasks, the player receives immediate feedback from the game
through the display of the Honor meter and a move of the marker denoting
Marston’s current Honor rank to either the left (for negative Honor) or right
(for positive Honor) depending on how much Honor was lost or gained. Dishonorable
acts are discouraged through such obstacles as bounty hunters who chase the
player if they accumulate a bounty from their crimes, or shopkeepers will
refuse to sell items to the player.
The game attempts in places to break up the pure binary of the honorable/dishonorable system. Having high Honor does not make you universally reputable (or conversely, low Honor and universally disreputable), and there are both negative and positive consequences associated with the two alignments and aligned actions. For instance, having high Honor will open up perks in law-abiding towns such as both reduced prices in shops and lawmen and civilians willing to overlook petty crimes (such as horse theft), but in locations such as Thieves’ Landing, the price of goods increases and Marston is likely to be attacked by NPCs. The inverse of this situation occurs with low Honor. Though the player is able to actively shift their ranking on the Honor scale, there are certain side-missions where the player’s Honor-based decisions have irreversible consequences. In another “Stranger” task, a prohibitionist is preaching outside of a bar in Blackwater. The player later encounters a disgruntled bar owner who asks Marston to kill the preacher. If the player decides to kill the preacher, the player will lose Honor and gain a small bounty, but will be awarded a small sum and half price drinks in saloons across the playable world. If the player chooses to warn the preacher, Honor will be gained, but the bar owner will be angry and will tell Marston that he will be “spreading [Marston’s] nonsense all over the country,” which results in the doubled price of drinks, houses, and rooms across the playable world. While buying drinks is optional, houses and rooms are necessary to save game progress.
And though the Honor meter is described as one that tracks
“morality,” a more accurate description is a measure of how socially/lawfully
acceptable the player’s actions are – though even then, it is sometimes
inconsistent even in this interpretation. In one of the unique “Stranger” side-missions,
a man by the name of Uriah Tolletts hires Marston to retrieve a package from
the Mexican village Nosalida, which is involved in a conflict between the Mexican
Army and revolutionaries, and deliver it to a foreman at the outpost of El
Matadero. Marston receives payment after delivering the package, and
confronting Tolletts later, learns he has been unwittingly made into a drug
mule – the package contained opium, which is being used by the foreman at El
Matadero to create and sustain an addiction among the Chinese railroad workers
to “help ease the pain and loneliness of being so far away from home.” Tolletts
asks the angered Marston, “are you a moralist or just a fool?” to which Marston
replies, “Both, I guess.” However, there are only two options to complete the side-mission:
the first is to kill Tolletts and keep the money, and the second is to give him
the money and walk away. Honor is lost or gained with each option, and handing
over the drug money is the option which will earn the player Honor. If the
player decides to keep the money and walk away without killing Tolletts, they
will immediately fail the mission, and this last objective will reset and must
be completed at a later time. The player later encounters one of the foreman’s
Chinese workers, who, the player learns, is an indentured servant and mistreated
by the foreman. The player can eventually complete objectives in order to give
Zhou the freedom to return home. However, the last objective for Marston is to
“see why Zhou missed his train,” and upon arrival at the mission location, Zhou
is shown sitting at the train station, drugged up and unable to make the trip.
The player receives 100 points of Honor upon completion of this side-mission. Through
an “honorable” lens, the player’s actions in the previous “Stranger” task,
which earned positive honor, are partially responsible for Zhou’s state. And
this concept of distributing points of Honor on an individual level without weighing
prior events and their consequences is a limitation by the games to recreate
subjectivity through mechanics.
Honor is quantified – as it is in most games –
and there are specific amounts of Honor points distributed for specific
actions. Putting aside the fact that a numerical value is assigned to murder or
looting the corpses of civilians, the values often seem disproportionate to the
act, especially in the case of “dishonorable” acts. The player loses 100 points
of Honor for murdering a lawman, preacher, or nun but only a fraction of that
amount for murdering a generic innocent civilian. But the greatest reduction of
Honor points is not murder, but rather attempting to bribe a lawman if one has
a bounty – this results in a loss of 1000 Honor.
However, the Bandana item changes the gamespace into something
that resembles the Judge’s amoral paradise. When equipped, it “hides your
identity so honor and fame won’t change” While the player’s crimes can still be
reported to authorities if any nearby NPCs witness them and the player does not
then kill the NPCs, there is no feedback from the game that normally occurs
after such Honor changing actions. The Honor system is merely illusory. Despite
how the narrative may spin it, violence is for the sake of violence in
gameplay, there is no actual universal or moral truth at stake when fighting
enemies. All that exists in the game is for the sake of competition, and the
gamespace becomes nearly the perfect simulation for the Judge’s philosophy. The
concept of law and morality in video games “is just part of an algorithm” says
video game theorist McKenzie Wark in his book, Gamer Theory. As the Judge says,
“moral law is an invention of mankind,” but in the case of video games, it’s a
disenfranchisement of the powerful not in favor of the oppressed, but in favor
of extending and complicating gameplay.
The revisionist Westerns of Blood Meridian and Red Dead
Redemption utilize graphic violence acknowledge the less than pristine history
of the American West – though the way the violence is consumed by the
respective audience is for different effect. On one hand, Blood Meridian
presents a horrific yet fascinating display of gory and senseless massacres
that have been glossed over by history and popular culture. The more readers
read these repetitive, beautifully-rendered scenes of carnage, the more they
are desensitized to them – and the detachment from this alien-like history –
because this isn’t the “American way” – becomes less certain to the modern
American reader; and this forces the reader to acknowledge many of the morals
and values held today were shaped by this violence. While Red Dead Redemption
cannot bring about the kind of awareness of history like a book can, because of
the immersion, rather than the passivity of a book, a game requires. However, it
still functions as an experience with history, and Red Dead Redemption – within
the limits of what the ratings board allows – does not sanitize the West as a
pastoral dream by completely perpetuating the mythic West. However, the video game is able to parallel
this situation of myth versus history because of its hybridization of different
media. As evidenced in the dialogue where it’s
discussed that fiction without “shooting” wouldn’t sell, the game makers are
fully aware of this history of violence and its influence on what a modern audience
wants in a game. Gamers enjoy the saturation and desensitizing of historical violence
in the game unlike Blood Meridian’s because it’s justified by the narrative and
what is expected of a game. “The narrative is the gamer’s alibi,” Wark says,
and perhaps this can be what the myth of the West has served as for America’s
“game” of conquest.
***
Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West.
1st ed. New York, NY:
Random House, Inc., 1985. Print.
Rockstar Games. Red
Dead Redemption. Take-Two Interactive, 2010. Playstation 3.
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