ISS 210 Society, the Individual, & Video Games (W3)

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

Sara Humphreys

Western American Literature, Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2012, pp. 200-215 (Article)

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https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2012.0048

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/482192

Rejuvenating “Eternal Inequality” on the Digital Frontiers of

Red Dead Redemption

Sara Humphreys

At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, Horace Greeley appar- ently proclaimed, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” 1 General James Sanks Brisbin’s 1881 treatise on how to be prosperous in the West affirmed the efficacy of Greeley’s advice (18) but also speculated, “When the West is settled, what then?” (17). Frederick Jackson Turner confirmed Brisbin’s anxieties about the closing of the frontier in 1893 by stating that because the US Census could not confirm a geographical line that indicated where civilization ended and the frontier began, west- ern expansion and, therefore, the frontier no longer existed. However, Turner also argued that because the frontier “has been fundamental in the economic, political and social characteristics of the American people and in their conceptions of their destiny,” the frontier lives on as a set of ideals that define a certain type of American masculinity labeled as the “rugged individual.” 2 Embodied by the cowboy figure, the rugged individual comprises a paradoxical combination of atavistic coarseness and violence with preternatural abilities to navigate and benefit from the neoliberalism that is euphemistically described in frontier narratives as progress and freedom. This paragon of masculinity enters American cul-

Western American Literature 47.2 (Summer 2012): 200––15

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ture in the Progressive Era, in which predominantly white, middle-class men traveled to dude ranches in order to learn how to face the multiple challenges brought to bear on economically and socially privileged white masculinity by, for example, suffragette and labor movements (Pettegrew 22–23). This exceptionalist version of masculinity has waxed and waned in popularity over the last hundred years but has continued to “make the man,” to paraphrase Lee Clark Mitchell.

This essay extends Mitchell’s argument about the role of the fan- tastical West in producing American masculinity by arguing that since the 2008 economic collapse, the popularity of the rugged cowboy has greatly 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 extends and, more important, rejuvenates what Owen Wister trumpeted in The Virginian (1902) as “the eternal inequality of man” (108).3 In this way, the hierar- chy of national identities—which is informed by racial, gendered, and economic status and comprises the cultural field of the United States— can remain entrenched thanks, in part, to the articulation of frontier ideologies in RDR.

As Marston, players are only able to move through the plotlines suc- cessfully if they resolve the crises they encounter—called “missions”— which include the main plot action and the participatory action between player and game. For example, Marston is saved by a small ranch owner, Bonnie MacFarland, after he confronts his former gang at Fort Mercer, where he is shot and left for dead. When he wakes up at the MacFarland ranch, Bonnie explains that his treatment cost fifteen dollars, a signifi- cant sum, and he promises to repay his debt, which he does by becom- ing Bonnie’s ranch hand. He goes on patrol with her, breaks horses, and herds cattle, but these missions are not part of the main plot, which is composed of John’s quest to save his family and land by killing his for- mer gang members at the behest of government law enforcement. These filmic sequences occur as part of an overall chapter titled “New Friends, Old Problems.”4 In order to effectively progress through the game, play- ers must successfully complete missions that follow the genre conven- tions of the popular Western, which also means that these missions depend on the main characters, including Marston, to stay true to their rugged individualism and frontier hardiness.

The narrative systems of open world games enable players to engage with the game on many levels rather than simply follow a linear narrative path.5 Similar to a novel, there are multiple storylines—possibly in the hundreds—which creates a highly immersive experience. Video games link multiple mediums, such as sound, image, text, movement, and space, in a fictional world through which players perform their respec-

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tive roles. In particular, an open world game offers a complete diegetic universe in which the player can come to life as a character. The rules and regulations of these various narrative media, including those con- ventions dictated by literary figures, forms, and devices, are all part and parcel of open world games and require critical attention from humani- ties scholars, explains Ian Bogost:

Instead of focusing on how games work, I suggest that we turn to what they do—how they inform, change, or otherwise par- ticipate in human activity. … Such a comparative videogame criticism would focus principally on the expressive capacity of games and, true to its grounding in the humanities, would seek to understand how videogames reveal what it means to be human. …

… Functionalist questions about videogames—what they are, or how they function—are not invalid or even unwelcome. But equally, or dare I say more important questions exist: what do videogames do, what happens when players interact with them, and how do they relate to, participate in, extend, and revise the cultural expression at work in other kinds of arti- facts? (53–54)

Video games are more than simply entertainment for teens and “imma- ture” adults; they are another form of cultural expression that profoundly influence the development of cultural, racial, political, social, and na- tional identities. Open world games possess the narrative complexity to narrativize “myth models,” which are the “powerful, paradigmatic myths that serve as models for the construction of similar myths, such as the myth of the noble savage that informs other, parallel, or derivative myths of primitivism” (Bal 4). The frontier is certainly a paradigmatic myth that has been used to model derivative myths of American exceptionalism and neoliberal ideals in American popular culture, from space Westerns to vampire stories. In an open world game, the frontier myth takes a particularly powerful form as a “locus of symbol and action and of image and (embodied) motion” (Behrenschausen 335). That is, video games are not simply “a set of eyes fixed on a screen” but also a bodily performance of the game action, which creates a much more powerful connection between the narrative and player and perhaps reopens arguments con- cerning the function of narratives to shape reality (336).

In Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976), Paul Ricoeur argues that narratives have the ability to produce physical or behavioral actions from the reader because textual action and lived experience are difficult to define and separate. So difficult, in fact, that we require modifiers and modal auxiliaries to help separate fact from fiction; for example, if we are being told a story that does not have the proper modifiers that categorize the story as fact or fiction, we

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will ask, “Is that true?” Based on Ricoeur’s assertion that factual or fic- tional narratives are the main conduits through which humans interpret the world, the ability of open world games, like RDR, to engage multiple levels of literacy, including symbol, film, image, and performance, has major social and cultural implications. This essay addresses these impli- cations and asks how a video game set at the closing of the frontier has become a best-seller. What is the appeal of this game for its primarily American audience? 6

The United States in the early twentieth century and early twenty- first century have much in common: both periods invented the frontier as a space where history and myth coalesced to create a cohesive, excep- tional, and normative nation that could be imagined as a reality (Moos 2). In this space, the voices of counter-publics, such as the labor move- ments of the Progressive Era and the present-day Occupy Movement, can be actively dealt with in a way that acknowledges that the nation is economically and morally bankrupt but simultaneously quashes these claims through a representative spokesperson in the form of the cowboy, who must be individualistic but also conformist. This ontologi- cal paradox enables him to narrate and make sense of social, cultural, racial, and political contradictions (Mitchell 27). Marston often com- plains bitterly about the injustice of the government or railway compa- nies, yet he conforms to their demands, albeit under pressure. He enacts Teddy Roosevelt’s masculine ideal of frontier hardiness, which requires the frontier/cowboy hero to “preserve his life and the lives of others,” even if he does not always agree with the ideological underpinnings of his mission (Riis 84). Indeed, the cowboy figure has primarily oper- ated to create epistemic stability and preservation in times of upheaval, according to Mitchell:

To wonder why cowboys were translated into such mythic sta- tus (“the Cowboy”) or to ask why the West emerged when it did is to enter into vexed historical terrain. The simplest explana- tion involves the collective response to industrial capitalism: the West once again as escape valve for eastern tensions and psychological pressures. … With the transition to an urban economy and the pressures of a newly modernized society, the allure of a more stable, agrarian working culture is not hard to imagine, perhaps especially since the frontier had come to seem irrevocably closed. In an era of massive immigration, urbaniza- tion, and production-line labor, the West could be imagined as the “premodern world that Americans had lost.” (26)

The cultural work of the American frontier in the early twentieth century that Mitchell outlines here continues in digital frontiers as a means to quell anxieties that white male privilege (borne out of early twentieth- century frontier ideals) is foundering under the strain of the post-2008

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financial collapse. From the rise of the Tea Party to the 2012 Republican Party presidential primaries, the framing of an authentic US identity in terms of whiteness, rugged masculinity, and heteronormativity per- vades public life. As Vincent Cheng explains, contemporary western nations “still cling to notions of authenticity and authentic identities” (3), even in the face of criticisms that normative US masculinity is path- ological to its core and has allowed for crimes to be committed against those deemed different from the norm (Pettegrew 19).

Bound up with the cowboy figure are ideologies of property and ownership, explains Victoria Lamont; in the late nineteenth century, there was an “entrepreneurial fantasy of limitless economic expansion” and a “discourse of private property” in the West that firmly entrenched corporate hierarchies of labor and ownership (378, 381). Marston, a for- mer outlaw who proves himself an honest cowboy, must defeat rustlers, herd cattle, break horses, and save a small ranch from bankruptcy. In order for Marston to return to his property, he must repair the fractures in property ownership that occur across the landscape of New Austin, which is the fictional state in which the game is set. Most of the prob- lems for the residents of New Austin are caused by corporate railway and ranching interests in the East that are supported by the government and enforced by the Bureau of Investigation. Marston and Marshal Leigh Johnson solve the various problems (via missions that the player must win) caused by big business and government, but they also work for the government and the railway, respectively.

Further, in RDR the government and railway bring rapid technolog- ical change to the West. Marston and the Marshal awkwardly use tele- phones and see motorcars being transported by paddleboat, which mir- rors the economic instability and technological advancement—in terms of the movement from an industrial economy to a digital economy—that the United States (and many western nations) are currently experienc- ing. RDR naturalizes the disparities between rich and poor, the deple- tion in standards of living, and, most important, it sustains perpetual mourning for a lost way of life while offering no alternative except a mel- ancholic state. Marston mourns the closing of the frontier, which paral- lels the loss of property and status that many present-day Americans have suffered and may continue to suffer. According to RealtyTrac and cnbc.com, one in every 611 housing units in the United States in July 2011 was repossessed. Even though these statistics are down slightly from the previous year, this reprieve, of sorts, is only due to interventions from the federal and state governments to stave off foreclosures (“States with the Highest Foreclosure Rates”). These statistics indicate that the nation and its privileged, property-owning citizens have suffered a traumatic wounding. If, as Amy Kaplan, Lora Romero, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler theorize, the US home is a fetishized space that encompasses both the

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familial home and the nation, then the steady rate of foreclosures have materially damaged the structural integrity of the American symbolic order: the “ragged edges of the Real,” to draw from Cornel West, have been exposed (520).7 Indeed, this multifaceted loss of material and spiritual property, or to draw loosely from Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), this sublime loss of everyday stability has fractured exceptionalist ideologies and, as a result, has placed the US subject in a state of flux between mourning and melancholia. Arguably, the entire nation has been in a continual state of mourning since 9/11, and the collapse has encouraged this perennial mourning, which is a pathological state (much like melancholia) that can afflict a national group (Volkan 90). Vamik Volkan argues that entire social groups can be invested with entitlement ideologies through which certain cultural groups will violently try to mitigate the loss they have suffered by taking back what they feel is rightfully theirs (104–5).

The question is, then, why do the majority of US citizens (save for the non-violent Tea Party and Occupy Movement) passively accept fore- closures, job losses, and economic disparity, among other social facts, despite nationally entrenched promises of entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Perhaps the high tolerance for inequality and loss, even the loss of homes—one of the prime symbols of national stability and privileged identity—can be linked, in part, to the idea that the strenuous life, replete with suffering, is a necessary part of fulfilling normative US identity. On the digital frontier, RDR resuscitates white, middle-class, heteronormative identity in the form of those who own small ranching operations and homesteads and, through these repre- sentations, teaches its players that suffering, loss, and rapid techno- logical change are simply part of life. RDR naturalizes and, therefore,

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depoliticizes the economic downturn. This digitized frontier operates as a safety valve for the pressures brought to bear on US citizenry by the continued repercussions of the 2008 collapse.

RDR operates successfully as a type of twenty-first-century safety valve that relieves the pressures of a failed neoliberal economy, because the participatory nature of video games offer epistemic and ontologi- cal stability. A video game engages the player on multiple levels: as a performer, a reader, and a viewer who must decode the game’s diegetic universe in order to progress through the various levels. If the player can decode each “mission,” or plot conflict, successfully, then he or she can move to another mission and one step closer to the climax of the story. In each of these plots, the player as Marston must, if necessary, violently defend the edicts of neoliberalism. RDR, therefore, is not fulfilling a nostalgic dream of American identity through the “was” of the West but operates as a cultural placeholder of “authenticity and attribution” (Foucault 365).

Marston (like other rugged individuals in the game) groups, defines, and differentiates himself from the various characters he encounters with the authority invested in him through his status as a white, hetero- normative, rugged individual: the cowboy. Similar to Foucault’s defini- tion of the “author,” whose function is “[ever] present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being[,] … indicat[ing] the status of [a] discourse within a society and a culture” (369), so too does Marston as the cowboy/outlaw map the contours of normative identity and its attendant ideals of property and ownership through his interactions with various stock characters, namely Bonnie MacFarland and Marshal Johnson. The Marshal and Bonnie are the two main characters with whom Marston interacts in New Austin, before he

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meets with characters who facilitate his journey into Mexico, where the plot shifts more drastically toward issues of colonization, immigration, and border politics.

The initial missions at Bonnie’s ranch depict a political landscape that, in many ways, is reminiscent of the class struggles that occurred in Johnson County, Wyoming, in the late nineteenth century while also articulating longings for the myth of a Jeffersonian natural space. Marston desires the “real West” where people can be practically free from governmental control (“This Is Armadillo”).8 While Marston is the idealist, Bonnie is a materialist, responding to Marston’s idealism sar- castically: “Where did you get that romanticized drivel out of ? Novels ? Those days are long gone, if they ever existed. … Businessmen are the new cowboys.” In this metafictional exchange, the frontier is both mythic, in Marston’s view, and historically grounded through Bonnie’s reference to the eastern corporate ranching interests that want to drive her family from their land.

Bonnie is a curious character in the narrative. She is not a woman masquerading as a male figure, but is a type of masculine female. Bonnie is not “the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity [that exists] in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing” (Halberstam 1). Rather, Bonnie, as the pants-wearing ranch owner, is insightful and resourceful, understanding that the motivating force behind civilizing the frontier is profit. Marston poetically states as he explains his final goal that he must “end one life so another can survive.” Bonnie, in turn, translates Marston’s frontier romanticism into historical materialism, noting sardonically that “civilization is a beautiful thing, Mr. Marston” (“Political Realities in Armadillo”).

Marston does not answer to the foreman of the ranch, except to receive pay for keeping the peace; instead, he receives his orders from Bonnie, who is grateful to him not because she can be his signifying term, but because her own ranch hands are not as productive as he is: they are not as masculine and, therefore, capable as he is. Bonnie and Marston’s relationship is not romantic but economically based. Marston owes Bonnie money and his life, both of which are intertwined. However, I do not want to suggest that RDR is a feminist text, because it is not. Rather, Bonnie is simply the female masculine version of the rugged individual.

Bonnie performs as a rugged individual out of necessity: her brother fled east and her father is frail. She is a cowgirl entrepreneur, represent- ing, in part, a “modern congruence between masculinity and liberal individual feminism,” but she is also a signifier of rugged neoliberalism (Pettegrew 63). Unlike the other female figures in the game, such as the pastor’s daughter Jenny, who believes God will save her from dying of tuberculosis, Bonnie evolved into her rugged individualism through her work on the frontier. Once a young lady educated by a governess,

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she is now a masculine female who does not cry or exhibit sentimental emotions: she yells at her employees and barks orders. Therefore, she is not masquerading or “playing” at being male; rather, she enacts rugged individualism to dominate others in her employ.

However, when she enters the domestic sphere, Bonnie may still wear pants, but she defers her rugged individualism to please her father. She serves Marston and her father tea as Marston learns the MacFarland fam- ily history, which involves more suffering than triumph. Bonnie’s father lists the misfortunes he and his family have faced on the frontier, includ- ing drought and small pox, both of which led to the deaths of several MacFarland children. Despite the hardship, MacFarland claims that he wouldn’t live anywhere else, and considering that New Austin is an avatar for the US national sphere, this assertion is hyperbolically patriotic.

Marston wins the MacFarland patriarch over with his honesty and forthrightness, causing him to ask Marston to break horses and, as pay- ment, receive one in exchange. While they ride out to the pasture, the conversation continues: MacFarland asserts that technological changes, government interference, and “anything else that civilizes a man” are worse menaces than any outlaw (“Wild Horses, Tamed Passions”). Marston agrees, and this would seem to be a genuine act of resistance against neoliberal ideals by two specimens of frontier masculinity, but Bonnie’s pleas for the men to stop talking politics and “enjoy the ride” put an end to the conversation. Bonnie’s position as a domestic, civiliz- ing force gives her the authority to assert her manifest domesticity, to use Amy Kaplan’s phrase, and depoliticize the conversation, thereby subordinating dissention to propriety.

However, once Bonnie is away from her father’s presence, she resumes her role as employer. Bonnie does not follow the model Annette Kolodny sets in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (1984) of feminine responses to the frontier: she is not a cultivator. Bonnie is interested in getting work done around the ranch, at which Marston excels, even surpassing Bonnie’s foreman. In fact, RDR can be called a game in which players do not play but work, perfecting their role in the economic marketplace as labor. The lack of “play” in most video games indicates that these games are a form of social control, thereby reversing role-playing, which “performs critical social and psychological functions while being formally divorced from social reality. As cultural critics like Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, following on work by Mikhail Bakhtin, have shown, simulative play, like carnival, allows the glimpse of rearranged social systems while not directly impacting the systems themselves” (Golumbia 182).

In contrast, argues David Golumbia, current role-playing games (RPGs) demand that players fulfill tasks before being able to attain the ability to reach another level in the game. In RDR, a player can manipu-

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late a role to counter the goals of the game; for example, Marston can shoot Bonnie’s cowboys, but he will have a bounty on his head and will not be able to progress in the game effectively. Therefore, punish- ment for countering the narrative is part of the game play, but to work Bonnie’s farm properly is to gain access to a rifle that is required to suc- cessfully complete other missions.

RDR restricts actions that go against the code of honor that is part and parcel of the cowboy figure. Further, hierarchies of labor are kept in place as Marston completes the tasks he needs to in order to regain his property. As Mitchell reiterates, Westerns enact forms of social control and RDR is not an exception. Because RDR incorporates performativity into its narrative matrix, it can create an immersive experience for the player that is not only akin to reading but forms a new kind of literacy:

The player pursues something like what a consumer of genre fic- tion pursues, namely knowledge of the complete future extent of the narrative and its details, and as in a generic mystery novel, the reusability of such a generic narrative is circumscribed (which is not to deny that many players, like mystery novel readers, enjoy replaying sequences whose details are well-known to them). This resemblance of FPSs [First Person Shooters] and other games to genre fiction accounts in part for the attraction of narratologi- cal methods for game analysis. But what is missing in most FPS games is the rest of the material one finds in the typical nar- ratives read by those who value literature, which is to say, the complex individual and relationship identifications that make literature not simply a sequence of events but a version of human engagement. Few people play computer games for their narrative richness or for their resemblance to the complex human events at the representation of which novels, films, and even television have always been adept. (Golumbia 186, italics added)

Golumbia’s commentary was clearly produced before open world games had reached a level of graphic and narrative sophistication where, indeed, “complex individual and relationship identifications,” “narrative rich- ness,” and “complex human events” are the norm. While RDR is clearly a Western, it is also a bodily experience in which events are not simply read and seen but also done. The player holds a controller and presses a complex set of buttons in a certain order to control Marston’s actions while reading the instructions located at the top left of the screen, which act as an omniscient narrator and a map (to the lower left of the screen) that allows the player to know where Marston is in the frontier landscape. These overlapping activities that are necessary for the player to success- fully engage with the game are “powerfully performative … with both intersubjective and interobjective dimensions” (Behrenschausen 336).

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This performative frame that governs the relationship between game and gamer leaves the player much more susceptible to the ideo- logical stance of the game in question. While games like RDR are usually criticized for extreme violence (which is a convention of the Western genre), the more pressing point is the ability of open world games to move beyond the register of print or film narrative interaction and into the register of performance and performativity. Performativity moves beyond Cartesian duality and explores how the body and mind func- tion to connect a person with his or her epistemological and ontological reality. There is no simple distinction between “really doing or being and not really doing or being” (Loxley 145). That is, a performer in a play may be asked to read a newspaper as part of a performance, but if the actor really reads the newspaper, has he or she stopped performing? (145). Therefore, when a player, male or female, takes on the masculine role of John Marston, he or she is highly susceptible to the ideologies at play, so to speak, in RDR.

These ideologies are centered on conforming to neoliberal values, which require the correct performance of rugged individuality. Indeed, neoliberalism and the frontier mythos cannot be separated, as noted by David Harvey’s description of how US neoliberalism invaded Iraqi economic policy: “[Paul] Bremer [head of the Coalition Provisional Authority] invited the Iraqis, in short, to ride their horse of freedom straight into the neoliberal corral” (3). These kinds of analogies speak to the power of the frontier as a means to narrativize the discourse of neo- liberalism.

RDR is part of the narrative apparatuses that dramatize neoliberal- ism through one of its most powerful conduits: the popular Western. Marston’s adventures as a cowboy hero at Bonnie’s ranch enforce ideals concerning labor hierarchies and natural ability that is reminiscent of the Virginian’s role as the natural aristocrat, whose ability to gain eco- nomic independence depends on his performance as the rugged individ- ual. However, unlike the Virginian, Marston is a former outlaw who has recuperated and become part of the mainstream. His face is a testament to his initial recuperation: heavily scarred, Marston has participated in the Western genre convention of convalescence. Whereas Mitchell argues that the convalescence scene displays men being restored to their male bodies, I believe there is more than gender recuperation at stake in RDR and likely other versions of the popular Western.

To convalesce is to move from one ontological and epistemologi- cal state to another: from sickness to health, figuratively and literally. This process reverberates with Wendy Brown’s question regarding why those who do not benefit from the neoliberal project do not simply opt out of neoliberalism and pursue an “emancipatory democratic project?” (391). When Marston confronts Bill Williamson at Fort Mercer, he is an honest homesteader, who is shot by those who destroy private property

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and corporate interests: the outlaws. His recuperation requires that he “attaches” his wounding not to the government policies and corporate greed that created the outlaw through economic disparity, but to his former gang, who Marston will now pursue in the “less kind way” (“Old Friends, New Problems”).9 While political and corporate interests are responsible for the economic turmoil and physical violence in New Austin, this suffering is displaced by Marston’s role as a bounty hunter and lawman. That is, property crimes are enacted by rustlers and out- laws who must come to justice, which depoliticizes the suffering of, for example, the MacFarlands.

Upon leaving the MacFarlands, Marston joins Marshal Johnson on a number of missions that are designed to repair the fractures to private property while recognizing the overall importance of corporate interests. There is one mission, in particular, that highlights the ways in which neoliberalism manages to depoliticize the suffering of those who are clearly harmed by corporate greed, while simultaneously sustaining hierarchies of identity that privilege rugged and white masculinity. In the first mission, Marston and the Marshal have a discussion that maps out the relationship between the Marshal and his employers, which depo- liticizes the game’s action and places authority into an amorphous space of unknowability. The scene opens with the Marshal answering a tele- phone, a signifier of civilization that connects him to his employer, the railway company. He cannot figure out how to use this newfangled tech- nology and hangs up, saying to Marston, “If it’s important, they’ll send someone down to take care of it, like they did with you,” and Marston replies, “Suddenly, the world is full of ‘theys’” (“Justice in Pike’s Basin”). This exchange locates Marston and the Marshal as company men, and yet they are clearly representative “rugged individuals.” Further, Marston notes an important epistemological shift in terms of where power is

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located: no longer the domain of religion and other forms of local authority, the “world is full of ‘theys,’ ” the nameless, faceless corpora- tions that govern the lives of the characters in RDR.

In the middle of the conversation, Eli—an overweight, buck-toothed, lazy-eyed deputy, who represents a failed version of the rugged individ- ual—interrupts and frantically announces that the Bollard twins “and a couple of Mexicans” were seen stealing “Mr. Gulch’s livestock.” From there, the film ends and game play begins as Marston, the Marshal, and his moronic deputies ride to Pike’s Basin to deal with the rustlers. One of the features of Rockstar’s open world games is the dialogue that occurs while the player travels from one mission to the next. In this case, MacFarland’s complaints about government corruption are reiterated, but the Marshal resigns himself to the inevitability of domination by government, corporate interests, and rapid technological change:

MARSHAL: I ain’t for all this government interference. MARSTON: Believe me, Marshal, neither am I. MARSHAL: I try to keep the federal boys happy. I mean we

need all the help we can get, but what does a city boy, who’s never forked a bale of hay in his life, know about a state like New Austin?

DEPUT Y: Nothin’, I reckon. MARSHAL: All this Manifest Destiny hogwash. Tamin’ a wild

land; bringin’ modernization and betterments to the West. It’s only made the rich, richer and the poor, poorer, and it’s killed a way of life.

Once the Marshal and Marston reach Pike’s Basin, they kill all the rustlers upon whose shoulders the fault for ruptures in ownership and property rest. The “interference” by government and corporate interests that the Marshal bitterly complains about becomes part of the discur- sive landscape, along with the cacti, and does not produce political resistance and action. The status quo—no matter how reviled—remains.

Eventually, however, players meet with the government agent from the Bureau of Investigation, Edgar Ross, who initially puts Marston on the train to New Austin in the opening film of the game. Ross is an embodiment of modernity, who drives a motorcar and shoots automatic weapons, and would seem to be the figure of neoliberal oppression, but he is not. As a lone individual whose mantra is “everyone pays for what they have done,” Ross is able to displace responsibility for Marston’s death and the deaths and/or suffering of other characters through empty platitudes that encode the ideals of suffering and corporate capi- talism.10 No one is sure who will pay whom, but Ross as the agent of Ideological State Apparatuses will ensure that payment is made in full. Those who live in New Austin must bear “all the weight of the suffer- ings produced by capitalism,” which means, by extension, that most US

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citizens, except the owners of the means of production, must bear this weight as well (Brown 395).

I admit that I have presented a rather negative portrayal of RDR in terms of its representation of a mainly white, masculine, heteronor- mative world that resuscitates the “eternal inequality” that has served neoliberalism so well.11 Perhaps there are cultural and social benefits to working one’s way through a game and figuring out the narrative paths that will lead to greater glory and profit, but I am more hopeful that open world games—which are controlled and produced by a few cor- porations—can create counternarratives that resist the ways in which a game like RDR supports exceptionalism, neoliberalism, and even white supremacy. What if there was a game about frontier life analogous to Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, for example? What kind of diegetic universe and, in turn, reality would such a game supply its players?

Notes

1. Whether Greeley actually made this statement is up for debate, but of its fame, there can be no doubt.

2. I follow Judith Halberstam’s lead in using the term masculinity as a way to describe a certain set of behaviors and affects that cannot be “reduce[d] down to the male body and its effects” (1).

3. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to Red Dead Redemption as RDR for the remainder of the essay.

4. The entire game is organized as chapter sequences and tends to follow the classic plot sequence of the popular Western, which is borne out of a blend of classic realism and frontier romance. Marston gains experience as a trustworthy ranch hand, a reliable lawman, and dedi- cated family man.

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5. Open world games are vast digital spaces in which players can roam through highly realistic spatiotemporal settings.

6. As of July 2010, Red Dead Redemption had sold 1.528 million cop- ies in the United States as compared to 300,000 in the United Kingdom. Clearly, the US gaming community has an appetite for this version of the frontier myth. For more on this topic, see “List of Best-Selling X-Box 360 Video Games” on Wikipedia.org. And for current sales records for RDR on multiple video game platforms, see the “Game Database” page on vgchartz.com: http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Red+Dea d+Redemption.

7. See Amy Kaplan’s “Manifest Domesticity” in No More Separate Spheres, ed. by Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (2002); Lora Romero’s Home Fronts (1997); and Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s “Raising Empires Like Children: Race, Nation, and Religious Education” in American Literary History 8.3 (1996): 399–425.

8. There is no set form to quote video game dialogue yet, so I will cite the chapters within which the dialogue appears.

9. At one point, Marston defends his gang by claiming they were like “Robin Hoods,” stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, which certainly flouts neoliberalism.

10. John Marston dies and his son, Jack Marston, seeks revenge for his death in the final chapters of the game.

11. Admittedly, neoliberalism is a problematic term that takes differ- ent forms depending on the national context that it is associated with. In this essay, neoliberalism and neoliberal define an American ideal of the free individual, which can only be achieved via free market capital- ism (Harvey 3). Therefore, property, ownership, wealth, and individual rights are bound together.

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