Rejuvenating "Eternal Inequality" on the Digital Frontiers of Red Dead Redemption

Abstract

This essay argues that since the 2008 economic collapse, the popularity of the rugged cowboy has significantly increased in American film, television, and of particular interest to this essay, video games. As the reformed gunslinger/cowboy/outlaw John Marston in Red Dead Redemption (released by Rockstar games in 2010), players go west in a 3-D diegetic universe that furthers and, more importantly, rejuvenates the hierarchy of national identities, informed by racial, gendered, and economic status, that has comprised the cultural field of the United States in one form or another since the early twentieth century. On the digital frontier, Red Dead Redemption resuscitates white, middle class, heteronormative identity in the form of those who own small ranching operations and homesteads, and through these representations, teaches its players that suffering, loss, and rapid technological change are simply part of life. Red Dead Redemption naturalizes and, therefore, depoliticizes the economic downturn. This digitized frontier operates as a safety valve for the pressures brought to bear on American citizenry by the continued repercussions of the 2008 collapse.

Los clásicos como resistencia: la lectura literaria en el marco de una educación lectora transmedia / The Classics as Resistance: literary reading within the framework of a transmedia reading education

“…En este breve repaso a las referencias a obras literarias de RDR2, resulta imprescindible mencionar otro tipo de clásicos a los que se evoca e incluso se menciona en el juego: los clásicos medievales y, más concretamente, la literatura artúrica. Existen diversas aproximaciones al estudio de los paralelismos entre la épica caballeresca y la épica del western como género cinematográfico (Pérez Rubio, 2002;Quesada, 2007;Humphreys, 2012). El hecho es que en RDR2 puede observarse una determinada narrativa de la hazaña en un mundo decadente (cambiante en valores y modos de vida) y además en el juego, a través del joven Jack Marston como lector de novelas de caballería, se realizarán diferentes referencias a la Materia de Bretaña (los caballeros de la Mesa Redonda, Lancelot, etc.)…”

Struggling with Simulations: Decoding the Neoliberal Politics of Digital Games

“…Like most inquiries, this is not the first discussion of neoliberalism and popular games; although it differs from existing scholarship in several important ways. Previous criticism relies on ideological (Barrett, 2006, Humphreys, 2012 and governmentality readings (Baerg, 2009;Voorhees, 2012), two perspectives criticized for ignoring differences between neoliberal policy and theory (Crouch, 2011). An ideological approach treats neoliberalism as a false belief system that views competitive individualism as the ideal basis for organizing society, 3 while a governmentality approach focuses on the techniques, strategies, and technologies that governments use to create ideal citizen subjects.…”

Struggling with Simulations: Decoding the Neoliberal Politics of Digital Games

“…Following an overview of the criteria for case study selection, assemblage theory returns in the context of existing scholarship on neoliberalism and digital games. By insisting on the primacy of representation (Barrett, 2006;Humphreys, 2012), or of simulation based forms of meaning (Baerg, 2009;Voorhees, 2012), previous literature downplays political contradictions existing within popular games. Conversely, assemblage approaches to play (Taylor, 2009;Pearce & Artemesia, 2009) provide a more flexible utopian methodological framing, situating representation and simulation as components with the capacity to coincide or contradict.…”

“…Central to Red Dead Redemption's marketing campaign was an insistence that the game could actually simulate "what life in the west was like" (Rockstar Games, 2010). Humphreys (2012) picks up on this point, identifying the game's relationship with frontier mythology and corresponding connection to neoliberal thinking. Partly extending, but also complicating this analysis, 75 I will show how Red Dead Redemption's relationship with neoliberalism is complex and contradictory, relying on a political discordance between the represented narrative and the simulated ludic system.…”

“…He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the 75 For Humphreys (2012), Red Dead Redemption "is part of the narrative apparatuses that dramatize neoliberalism" (p. 210), creating a situation in which representation subsumes simulation, rather than corresponding to or conflicting with it.…”