Redemption Song

01/07/2010 in Words about games

If you listen to our regular podcast, you’ll know that I’m much more of a fan of storytelling in games than Lewie. While we both derive a lot of enjoyment from how a story is utilised as one of a series of ingredients a designer can use, and both of us can appreciate the way a good story is told, he tends to prioritise that nebulous quality of ‘having fun’ as a core element of gameplay, and I tend to be able to forgive slightly poor mechanics in favour of something that’s well-written.

This leads to us getting frustrated at each other. He skips cutscenes, and I don’t. I talk to every NPC in a world, and he seeks out the next mission trigger. And when I lent him my copy of Red Dead Redemption, I urged him to watch the opening scenes that really lay down for the foundation for the world. I told him that it was a really smart exploration of American attitudes at the turn of the century. He told me that it was a bunch of talking on a train. And hit Skip.

It’s this fundamental difference that I think underlines why we disagree on a lot games, and why, ultimately, I think he’ll find the ending of Red Dead Redemption both boring and unsatisfying, whereas I thought it brilliant and interesting. Neither of us are wrong, of course – but I’m going to try my damnedest to prove that I’m right.

Fair warning – the rest of this post after the break contains spoilers for the end of Red Dead Redemption. If you haven’t seen the credits roll, then you haven’t seen some of the stuff I’ll be talking about.

In any other game, the idea of John’s wife and son being kidnapped would add nothing more than a layer of intrigue and a motivator to progress through the story. I don’t think I’m too far off the mark by saying that the majority of players, after the death of Dutch, expected the credits to roll after a brief cutscene with Abigail and Jack at the ranch. But, as a rather welcome surprise, you’re placed in exactly the position John’s been working toward for weeks. It’s sedate, it’s peaceful, and above all – it’s a vast difference from the guns-blazing assault on Cochinay just a few minutes before.

Beecher’s Hope is something to be treasured. John has been working throughout the entirety of the game for this moment, and allowing the player to experience it is a masterstroke – it allows both the feeling of the titular redemption to be played out, the slightly displaced nature of John in this setting to become readily apparent and allows an identification with the character that arguably wasn’t present throughout the earlier parts of the game. The player’s nature is to kill, kill and kill again, with the character’s motivations as firm afterthoughts. When presented with a town of fifty people, all of whom need to be slain before progress can be made, the player values that progress more than whether or not the character of John Marston would be comfortable with it. It’s a disconnect that we see in many game, but it’s thrown ever so sharply into light with the final scenes in Beecher’s Hope, where we realise that John, by our hand, has killed so many people just to be close to his family. It’s an emotional punch rather than a physical one, and it charges an even bigger emotional pot to spill over in just a few missions’ time.

Like any good tragedy – and make no mistake about it, Red Dead Redemption is a tragedy in the vein of so many Westerns – it can’t last. However, in order for John’s inevitable death to have any impact, we need to identify with what he’s leaving behind and understand why his death is tragic. It’s a problem that so many games face. How a player’s character dying be meaningful when they have died so many times previously and simply been able to restart?

Heavy Rain handled this rather well by ascribing death a meaning. Once a character died, there was no ability to restart and no arbitrary reason – the narrative continued along its way and every death was the fault of the player, meaning that there was a clear emotional tie between the player and the character. A death had more impact because it meant that you had failed as a player and could not recoup those losses. Red Dead doesn’t have that liberty – a player-controlled death is simply a stumbling block rather than a key event, and so to make that emotional tie, especially from a scripted event that can’t be controlled, the designer must create a strong tie between the player and the other characters that are so visibly affected.

Giving the player a second or two of Dead Eye in John’s final moments definitely feeds into this. The tiny sliver of hope when combined with the obvious fact that John is hopefully outnumbered just serves to finalise the impact – the player’s feelings mirror Jack’s when he comes across his father’s body in a way that they perhaps never did with John’s. While John seems to want to get away from his life while the player wants excitement (note that it’s possible to finish the game not having actively killed any of your three former gang members), Jack’s priorities are much clearer – simply to get revenge. The player and Jack both feel the same tie to John and while they may want it for different reasons, the character’s and player’s motivations match for perhaps the first time in Red Dead Redemption.

It allows a disconnect to happen between the player and John. No matter how you’ve been playing him, it allows John to remain John – another character in the scripted universe with his own motivations and ideals, with a full story that plays and concludes exactly how it was intended. As Jack, you can go onto a murderous rampage and be out for bloody revenge, opening up a new side to the game that as John may not have been considered. It allows for the sociopathic tendencies of Rockstar’s characters to be appropriately pigeonholed – while GTA IV’s Niko was slated for being written one way and – under the player’s control – acting another, those disparate tendencies are attached to John and Jack, and underline the final tragedy of them all; that Jack became just like – if not worse than – his father, and that in fact reflects exactly what the player wants to be.