The Historical Environment as Aged Icon (in Red Dead Redemption 2)

As far back as Roosevelt or Owen Wister and his novel of western grit and masculinity, The Virginian, the West has been charged with an evocative sense: as virtue, as place, as image. What we see in games such as RDR2 is how the aged veneer of the built environment and various objects authenticates the centrality of the past as not just being ‘long ago,’ but as continuously old: they were never new because they were from long ago. The use of buildings in videogames in such a way conforms and confirms how many people locate and think of the past as an aged icon. New is now; old was then.  The objects that appear old are construed as old. The use of an aged icon within the built environment locates the past as distant while at the same time decreases the authenticity of the actual item. The distance here then is to differentiate us from an older era; however, it also equates the past with age in itself. A marker not known to those who would have existed within that world as objects would present as new and not timelessly old.

For purposes of time, this paper will primarily engage with the built environment within RDR2, a game situated within an era, the late 19th century American West,  that is at its supposed end, and by the nature of that definition, old and dying. The marketing department at Rockstar must love the turn of the clock as much as most love to decadize and periodize history as ending with a 0 or two: To quote an early trailer for the game: “America 1899, the end of the Wild West era…” While only 30 or so odd years are meant to contain the era smothered between the Civil War and 19 double aught, that 30 years of reach is done and dusted with the impending rampage of civilization in 1900 according to the game, and the structures that maintain and contain the ideas and meaning of the ‘old West’ and the imagined past, what I refer to as aged icons, are shown as having aged themselves – they are falling apart, dilapidated, or contain the death and destruction of an era that is presumed to have had little order or control over the social and political affairs of its society or the coming civilized world. (Lee) It is this presentation of the historical artifact as built environment,  and how these games choose to re-present that past locked in with how they choose to construct the built environment that is the focus of my paper today.

Confronting distance

The loci of the past on the present is difficult to distinguish with its blurred memories, imposition of position upon narratives, and how we are often wont to simply view the past as different whether or not we feel the pull of Hartley’s message that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Pealing ourselves from the breadth of culturally embedded ideas of the past that often structure the historical eras as fundamentally different is further problematized  by maintaining some distance from the past. The strangeness and familiarity of the past is something that historians confront continually, and they look to both familiarize the past through approximation – to make distant ideas familiar -- or confront the familiar or banal with distanciation – to separate ourselves from the indistinguishable or seemingly everyday. These are merely tools to understand the familiarity and the compelling strangeness of the past.

Fiction in general, and video games in particular, have a role in confronting and conveying the past and also use the tools of approximation and distanciation to confront and present the past as meaningful and digestible. That the historical and the fictive can be mixed is obvious to many in this room, but just how that is done, how the past is approximated, or altered to tell the narrative is what I look to investigate (White, 153). The idea of a fictive truth, an element in between or containing truth and fiction, that appropriately connects a meaningful narrative of the past – a place in between what we know and want to convey, can be a valuable, though misplaced tool.  The aged icon looks to create a distance from that world of the late 19th century American West to let us know that while we are taking part in the world (as Morgan or John), we are separate from it as indicated by the passage of time portrayed through the aged icons.

Various mediums often confront historical distance differently than video games situated in historical moments, yet they all presuppose an intentionality to convey ideas of the past. For example, in a non-video game context, how American slave plantations have chosen to exhibit and explain slave quarters on their property. Recently, several sites, including Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, have included slave quarters as add-ons to their larger tours of the plantation house, but the structures of the slave quarters themselves are often refurbished, newly constructed, and perchance have windows; they contain little of the actual horror of slavery, what one scholar calls the Santa-clausification of the plantation environment (cite). In other circumstances, sites have been purged of any traits or character that might present any sense of decay or age. For example, David Lowenthal describes efforts in Victorian England where “restorers…scraped medieval churches and cathedrals clean of the debris of time and neglect, so as to perfect their divinity (Lowenthal, 6 fab). In each instance, there was a purposeful act to cleanse the built environment of the past it had inherited.

The cleansing and reshaping of the built environment is a way to confront historical distance and confirm our premeditated relationship to the past. We hardly relate the past as it was, as if it was, and when writing narrative that historical distance must be shaped to capture the player in the moment . Those creating video games confront these issues in a slightly different sense than the examples above as the designer is both the creator of the image and the source of the identity being created. How then does a game such as RDR2 confront the complexity of the American West through its built environment?           

How  meaning is created through signifiers

The characterization of the building’s exterior and interior announce the ingratiating of the old as old, visually told. RDR2 also uses the past as a reference point to let us know that the world is not only old, but violent. The built environment of RDR2 conveys, to use a line from Pierre Nora, “maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs" (rehid, 23). In  RDR2 the buildings are a derivative of old, while inside many, especially on the periphery – or in the vernacular, the frontier – are filled with death and mayhem. The structures that are part of the ‘frontier,’  serve to exist as ‘old’ examples of the late 19th century and the concomitant struggle to survive. In order to convey a ‘rigorous climate,’ a harsh landscape, and a difficult life, the game embodies hardship through dilapidation. The dilapidation, and often mayhem and death at the edges of these built environments, also serves to let us know that this was long ago. The mayhem being insidiously located within an aged icon is there to verify the antiquity and separateness of a world that no longer exists and exists outside of our own world’s conception of what might have been and what a proper civilized world looks like. The death within these aged and dilapidated structures further serve to approximate an era, yet merely distances one from any cultural reality.

The use of the aged icon also tends to particularize the past as something less or as a time when people and their surroundings were not just different, but uniquely pre-‘modern,’ taking Hartley’s adage to its ultimate, ahistorical end.  In this way, as Pheobe Kropp demonstrated when discussing the invention of Olvera Street in Los Angeles, “historic built environments are most notable when they become stages for dramatizing the meanings of the past in the present” (pp. 13-14, CA Vieja). Within the game world of RDR2, the buildings are often there to visually confirm what has already been applied to the narrative structure, further reinforcing the West as a separate era clearly distinguished from our own, reminding the player that the West is dying or dead.

 Veneers

The overall environment and the ability to immerse a game player into the space and place within video games is essential to the gaming experience. The “veneers” that are created to occupy that space within historically situated video games establish and re-enact historical moments that ultimately reinforce ideas about the past; however, any relation of the built environments to authenticity or to any order of simulacra matter less than what is meant through the embodiment of the built environments. (Veneers, 227). It is these embodiments with a means to interpret the environment, but on the terms prescribed by the game itself, that give life and narrative focus to the many objects within the game.

The built environments within many games claim a high degree of authenticity merely by their intoned specificity and detailed features. This is seen in many aspects of games where authenticity is ascribed to objects merely because they did exist and the games visual artists have taken the time to detail all aspects of said objects. In the case of RDR2, this means objects such as cigarette cards and guns as much as it does to the structures contained within the built environment.

The exterior and interior spaces of the built environment within RDR2 speak to not just the immersive effects of the visual portions of the game but the intentionality of drawing players beyond an experience of simulacra but to an environment that speaks to authenticity. This is also just as true to the outdoor environment of the game, which seems a virtual patchwork of plagiarized work from Albert Beirdstadt. Yet, I digress, though only mildly, for it is all part of the same engineered process of building an environment that appears, feels, and comports to the imaginings of the Old West. All of it being some part of “memetic accuracy” that blends fact, fiction, and what Beverly Southgate refers to as fabulation, but maybe something of the fictive is more appropriate as it still lends itself to a use of the real with a blending of the imaginative: Collapsing what is thought to be real and what is merely memory. But more to the point, the dramatic use of imagery “calculates specific distances of time and space…for particular aesthetic and political ends (Julia A. Thomas, rehid, 160).

The iconic West

These ends reverberate within a mythic sense of the old West. But to make the Old West old in RDR2 is to make it feel authentically old. Mostly this is done by aging buildings that appear to have degraded beyond any 5, 10, 20, or even 30 year life span that could have been generated in the settling beyond the 100th meridian. The aged buildings beyond lines of significant settlement connote the hardship, struggle and the presumed cultural hardiness of the “pioneer generation”; they authentic an era resounding with seasoned individuals by the passage of time (Wrobel, 145, 145). And yet, this belies, what David Wrobel argues was a West promoted as already settled and tamed in the late 19th century – as partial advertisement cum ruse to entice settlers to this purported settled region.

The image of the hardy pioneer setting up their homestead resonates loudly within Americans’ cultural understanding of the “Wild West”. This is not a new image, but the question for how to situate and approximate the distance of the era is something that RDR2 confronted, in part, by aging an environment to let us know that it was old: while we played the game from the perspective of living in the era, time was stretched through aesthetic choices that clued us into the separation of time and provided the appropriate cultural cues to substantiate the American West as rugged, difficult, and clearly creating the exceptional Turnerian man for those that could survive the violence and cataclysm that would consume many.