The Failure of Character in Red Dead Redemption

As all the “game of the year” dust settled, Red Dead Redemption emerged as one of the big winners for 2010.  I had managed to miss the game on its release, and though the promise of an open world western setting held some appeal for me, I was still unwilling to pick it up… until now.

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Rockstar’s reputation with open-world games was not as shiny in my mind as it seemed to be in the minds of so many others.  I had dabbled in GTA 3, Vice City, Vice City Stories, and even Chinatown Wars and found them all wanting.  There are several technical, gameplay, and design reasons for this, but in the interest of a more focused examination I would like to submit one key reason for why this might be: Character.  I never cared about any of the characters in those games, not least of which were the main protagonists.  Red Dead Redemption seemed poised to buck that trend.

(It’s important at this juncture to point out that I don’t believe a protagonist needs to be likable in order for me to enjoy a game or film or book.  But I do think it’s important that I care about them; and caring about a character and liking them is not necessarily the same thing.  An important distinction.)

In Red Dead Redemption we’re presented with John Marston, our hero, and the character through which we will be interacting with this world.  Marston is presented to the player as a man with a dark and deadly past out on a quest, albeit coerced, to right some of his previous wrongs.  He’s set up to be the hero of this story, and though you can chose to be a do-gooder or a right bastard in various ways throughout the game, the word redemption is in the title and there’s precious little that player can do about that.  That’s why I find several of Marston’s actions so disconcerting. 

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Like it or not, Marston is the good guy here.  Even if I could have molded the main story into something more ethically dubious, I wouldn’t have made that choice (I’m one of those paragon players, I can’t help it).  And he does seem to be designed by Rockstar to be the sympathetic hero.  Yet several times I was force to act in ways that contradict the kind of character they’ve created.

The first sign that something wasn’t right happened when I, as John, was made to help a scheming and lying snake oil salesmen peddle his wares to a gaggle of unsuspecting idiots.  The man was a charlatan, John even said as much, and yet there he was pretending the salesman’s tonic was a wonder of modern science.

Just as the bad taste of the tonic event started to fade I was introduced to the grave robber.  He was a despicable and disgusting character in my estimation as well as John’s, and a character that didn’t deserve his help.  But help him he did.  At the same time he was condemning the grave robber as the worst kind of unsavory character, John was helping him move a trio of corpses for monetary gain.

The way other characters reacted to my actions as John Marston didn’t always make sense either.  Early in the game I noticed a man dragging a woman into an alley.  He then brandished a knife and stabbed her to death.  Sadly it was too late for me to save her but it wasn’t too late for me to deliver justice upon him.  Because I didn’t have a lasso (which I didn’t even know was in the game at the time), I unholstered my gun, aimed, and shot the man dead.  Justice done.  Except in the eyes of the game I was now a murderer with a warrant out for my arrest.  The street was suddenly swarming with deputies all trying to shoot me, and succeeding.  I was now the bad guy for ending the life of a cold blooded murderer.  What happened to “bring ‘em in dead or alive”?

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Red Dead Redemption strikes me as an odd duck of a game that doesn’t really know what story it wants to tell.  It seems to dwell in a kind of limbo between a fixed linear narrative and a more open-ended story that changes dynamically based on the choices of the player.  As a character, John Marston is a bit confounding at the least and downright schizophrenic at worst.  He’s a disjointed, confused, and far from unified creation.  I don’t always dislike the man, I just find it hard to care about him, or the world he inhabits.