Video Games as Literature? Realist Discourse in Red Dead Redemption 2

The present essay wishes to explore the link between video games and literary discourse by considering the case of Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the worldwide blockbuster game regarded as a milestone in the Western genre, as well as a contemporary reframing of the nineteenth-century mythology of the American frontier. However, as a theoretical focus on narrativity and storytelling may suggest, Red Dead Redemption 2 also represents a specimen of narrative work in its own right. In fact, Red Dead Redemption 2 indirectly adapts literary techniques and tropes typical of realist fiction, in its complex and subtle portrayal of late-nineteenth-century American society. By means of a close reading of key video game missions set in what can be defined as a typical Gilded Age metropolis, Saint Denis, this essay proposes to reinterpret Red Dead Redemption 2 in light of the structural connections it shares with classic American realist works – whose authors range from Mark Twain to Henry James, from Stephen Crane to Theodore Dreiser. Indeed, Red Dead Redemption 2 mirrors three pivotal stages in the development of the literary discourse underlying realist fiction, namely: (a) the examination of an urban environment within the game setting; (b) the representation of stereotypes through non-player characters; and (c) the construction of a socio-cultural individuality through player actions. While representing a case-study of transmedia storytelling – or, more precisely, of storyplaying of the American lifestyle characterizing the Gilded Age, Red Dead Redemption 2 also employs a number of significant strategies comparable to the creation of literary fiction.