The Devils of Red Dead Redemption: How a Video Game Shines a Light on America's Dark History

What can a video game teach us about American history, morality, capitalism, race, violence, and the myth of the Wild West?

This week, James is joined by Torre Olsen (author of Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past) to explore the moral grey areas of the Wild West by diving into the Red Dead Redemption video game franchise, and its powerful portrayal of good, evil, and American history. In discussing the fictional characters John Marston and Arthur Morgan, we reveal how a video game prompted players to consider what it means to be “good” or “bad” in a world shaped by violence, survival, and change.

We also discuss how Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 capture and depict key themes of American history – the decline of the frontier, the rise of federal authority, the death of the Old West, industrialization, the displacement of Native American communities, the Lost Cause myth, race relations, capitalism, gun culture, and the enduring appeal of outlaw mythology. 

How accurate are these depictions? And what do they reveal about America’s past, and our fascination with it today?

Whether you're a gamer, history enthusiast, or someone interested in moral philosophy, this episode offers deep insights into one of the most critically acclaimed video game series of all time.

Covered in this episode:

• The real history behind Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2
 • Arthur Morgan, John Marston, and Dutch van der Linde as tragic antiheroes
 • The historical inspiration for the Van der Linde Gang
 • Pinkertons, capitalism, and law enforcement in the American West
 • Native American history and frontier expansion
 • Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause mythology
 • How video games can teach history
 • Rockstar Games' portrayal of American society
 • The relationship between Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto
 • Why morality systems in video games matter

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: Why Red Dead Redemption Is More Than a Video Game

02:15 Tor Olson and the History Behind Red Dead's History

06:00 How COVID Lockdowns Led to a Historian Rediscovering Gaming

09:00 The Real American History Hidden Inside Red Dead Redemption 2

12:05 Dutch van der Linde, Arthur Morgan, and the Myth of the Outlaw

17:45 Freedom vs Civilization: The Closing of the American Frontier

23:20 Pinkertons, Capitalism, Policing, and Rockstar's Social Commentary

24:55 Native Americans, Race, and the Historical Accuracy of Red Dead 2

26:30 Confederate Monuments, the Lost Cause, and the Post-Civil War South

34:00 Arthur Morgan's Morality System and the Meaning of Redemption

40:45 The Real Outlaws Behind Red Dead, GTA, and America's Cultural Myths

Thanks to SOULFULJAMTRACKS for their tune "Dark Halloween"

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History's Devils is a history podcast exploring the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, dictators, war criminals, tyrants, demagogues, revolutionaries, cult leaders, conquerors, fraudsters, and other controversial figures.

History's Devils is hosted by James Crossland, professor of international history and author of:

Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, the Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart

The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism...

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Hello, folks, and welcome to History's Devils, a podcast journey through the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, and shithels. My name is James Crossland, and way back in 2010, I decided I was going to purchase a video game. A video game wherein I would play a world-weary gunslinger whose family have been taken by nasty government officials. In exchange for my family's freedom, I would have to set out on my horse, crossing deserts, forests, plains, in order to apprehend former comrades of mine with whom I once ran and committed many crimes as part of a terrifying gang called the Vanderlynd Gang. Now, this sounds like the plot of an above-average John Wayne Helmed Weston from back in the day. And as a distraction from the bleak realities of modern life, this game entitled Red Dead Redemption was seemingly just a bit of dumb, violent fun. However, about an hour into playing it, I and the four million or so other people across this planet who purchased a copy in the first month of or so of its release, we realized something. We realized we were not playing a game. We were experiencing a piece of art. We were not engaging in mindless digital violence, but traveling through a quite fully realized and richly detailed rendering of America in the dying days of the Old West. This was a virtual reality packed with fleshed-out characters, thoughtful, well-written dialogue, compelling plot twists, and astonishingly, for a game that has a guy pointing a sawn off shotgun at you on the front cover, there was also a hell of a lot of thought-provoking social commentary about 21st century America, everything from its gun problems to race relations, colonial history, immigration, policing, and even morality. The question of what makes a person good or bad. These are some of the many issues that my guest for this week's episode of History's Devils tackles in his book Red Dead's History, a video game and an obsession and America's violent past. Yes, get it in. Let everyone see it. It's a nice cover as well. Well worth showing off. Tor Olson, welcome to History's Devils.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Hey James, pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to come on the show. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

So this episode is going to be similar to a previous episode of History's Devils that I did with Chris Kempshall, the Star Wars historian, wherein we discussed Darth Vader. We looked at the development of a fictional devil and his legacy and impact and the various layers to that character as they've developed over time. Here we're going to be talking about the wider context of Red Dead Redemption and how it speaks to a chapter in America's history, a quite fraught chapter, which still has resonances through to the modern day. But we're also going to be looking at the two protagonists of the Red Dead Redemption games, because there are two games. That first game that I played back in 2010, you play the aforementioned World Wharry gunslinger John Marsden. And then in Red Dead Redemption 2, released in 2018, which was a prequel, storyline-wise, to what happened the events of the first game, you play Arthur Morgan, who I think most people would agree is a more complex character than John Marsden. I think that's fair to say. Certainly beloved by gamers the world over. They're both tragically flawed characters, and they both sit in this violent purgatory between being good and evil. So we'll talk about their characterization. But before we get into all that, I I just want to address something because to the minds of some folks who are listening, they're now saying these guys are going to intellectualize a fucking video game. Like, like that's that's weird. That doesn't make any sense. Here's the thing, Tor, you taught a university class on this. I don't I don't know, maybe you still do. You turned it into a book. Genius, absolute genius. Uh tip of the hat to you. Uh where did you come up with this idea? What did you hope to achieve by using Red Dead Redemption as both a source and a basis for a book?

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Yeah, yeah, it's a crazy story. I could not have predicted it myself, uh, to be honest with you. Um so I very much grew up as a video gamer, uh, came of age in the 1990s, and uh had a gaming PC that I was closer friends with than any other human being. Uh, spent a lot of time playing Doom and Quake and Half-Life and StarCraft and Warcraft and all that good stuff. But um, when I got to college, uh, which was in 2000, I came to the realization that I couldn't continue my obsessive hobby of video gaming and succeed at university. So I made this fateful decision back in 2000 to quit gaming for what I assumed would be forever. Uh, and I literally took 20 years off from the hobby. Very adult. I know, it was very serious. I just, you know, I thought I was doing big grown-up things. Uh and I kind of did, you know, like I got obsessed with history uh as a as a university student and decided to go to graduate school and earned a PhD in history and then became a college professor um in 2013. I started the job that I hold now, which is at the University of Tennessee in uh the United States. And um now, however, in all these two decades when I took off from gaming, I knew I just kind of got a little, you know, I knew that in the background, video gaming was blowing up in ways that I could not even have imagined back in the 1990s. Um I learned, you know, just kind of secondhand in those, in those, in that time period, how the video game industry had come to eclipse both movies and music combined in terms of revenue. Uh, that's the the number of gamers in the United States was just exploding through the roof. That's so much of the stigma and taboo that accompanied video gaming when I was a kid was really fading away. And that, you know, you were kind of a weirdo in the 2020s if you didn't play video games, that's like a high school or college student. The inverse was true. Revenge of the nerds. Yeah, it's really revenge of the nerds for sure. And so, so, and and I heard, you know, like just secondhand, again, in these decades when I had when I was not gaming, about how historical games in particular were really growing in influence and popularity. And that so many students at a college or university who took a history course or were majoring in history, many of them came to that academic field of study because of passions that they had uh discovered on the video game screen by playing Assassin's Creed, by playing Civilization, or by playing Red Dead Redemption, right? Either the first or the second one. So when you, uh, James, were playing the you know original Red Dead upon its release, I wasn't thinking anything of it. And even when Red Dead 2 came out in uh in 2018, it was, you know, I saw the advertising, but it was meaningless to me. I didn't have a platform, didn't have a gaming system. Uh but what tilted everything and got me back into this, because I'm very much back into it now, I've got to confess, in every way possible, um, was the pandemic. No doubt about it, right? COVID hits. By that point, I'm fairly established in my career. I'd published a first academic book. I had earned tenure at my university, and I was locked down at home. I had very little to do. And I made this fateful decision in March of 2020 to uh to buy a gaming PC once again, to, you know, just dip my toes back into the previously obsessive hobby that I'd had 20 years earlier. Just, you know, what else? It seemed like a good idea in March of 2020. And, you know, I could never have imagined that that decision would have an impact on my academic career in any positive sense, right? That I would be writing and teaching based on the games that I played as a result of that decision. But that is very much what has happened. I pick it up just for fun. You know, I'm just assuming this is a hobby. I heard it had good graphics and a good story. The idea that it was going to become some sort of, you know, professional pursuit was entirely unthinkable at the time. But I start playing this game and start following the Vanderlynd gang, Arthur Morgan's journey as they're fleeing from authority through the West, uh, through the Deep South and into Appalachia and the Caribbean. And again, this is a game set in 1899, right? James, as you mentioned, is the prequel to Red Dead Redemption, which is set in 1911. And um, I was stunned playing this game, not just at the visuals, of course, you know, it's a visually beautiful game and astoundingly, you know, realistic in its depictions of wildlife and horses and mountains and you know, all this sort of stuff. But um, what really struck me and surprised me was how frequently the game would reference and allude to big historical topics that are very frequently taught in college classrooms. Um, like, let's say, warfare between the U.S. Army and native peoples, uh, the the hunting for bison and the extinction or near extinction of the bison in the late 19th century, uh, the memory of the Civil War, how Southerners, both black and white, remember the Civil War in the 1890s, uh, questions of African American rights in the New South in the 1880s, 1890s, the women's suffrage movement. Like, if you played these games, you know, like I'm describing key moments in either the plot line or kind of you know side quests uh within it. I wasn't expecting that. I don't know why. I just had low expectations coming in. And of course, the game is, you know, much too violent, much more violent than anything that took place in American history. Um, and it's often, you know, it's fictionalized. The names of people and places and institutions are almost entirely made up. But I quickly realized that this is not a stupid game. Like this is a fairly thoughtful game, you know, with asterisks to be sure. Um, I just I was, you know, I couldn't believe that tens of millions of people were engaging with 1899 America in this sort of, you know, um rather, you know, richly textured video game.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Yeah. And it's not just, it's not just, I mean, we'll we'll break down some of those, some of those elements that are reflected from from history, because they are they are very interesting. But the other thing that always struck me was the characterization and the way they they create this Vandaling gang, which is the kind of medium through which you explore this world, the the the this Vandaling gang, which is on the run. And the the the two people I've mentioned, uh John Marson and Arthur Morgan, they're both members of this gang. And they are presided over by the the leader of the gang, Dunch Vanderlynd, who is also a fascinating character. He's kind of a mix between a kindly father figure and Satan at his most manipulative and cruel. Yeah. And he he's leads this gang, which is themselves the way they are constructed, as this sort of idealistic troop of wanderers looking for a place where they can live communally and at full liberty, whilst also engaging in crimes to sustain this life of you know freewheeling indulgence. And this duality reflects the duality of Dutch Vanderlyn, who is presented to the player initially as this idealistic dreamer, but by the time you get to the end of Red Dead 2, he is the violent cult leader, basically, who's who's become thoroughly unhinged. And like I say, I mean, this is an example of how you scratch the surface of these games. There's a lot of complexity. But as you mentioned, the the fact that you've got over the course of two games, you go from sort of fictionalized versions of I I think I think probably the snow snowy bit at the start of Red Dead. I'm guessing that's the Dakotas. I'm not sure what that's meant. Somewhere up there, right? Rocky Mountains, yeah. Rocky Mountains, you've got Great Plains, Texas, you cross the Rio Grande, go into Mexico in the first one. Um, you've even got, as you mentioned, the deep south and all the hangovers of the Civil War.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

That's really what fascinated me. And because my primary training as a historian is as a U.S. Southern historian. I did my degree at the University of Georgia and I teach in Tennessee. And though the South is not the only thing I know about, it's the place that I've focused on most. And, you know, what I the stereotype that I heard was that Red Dead 2 is a Western. It's a it's a cowboy game. And yes, there it is a Western game, but it's also a Southern game. And in fact, so much of it plays out in the South. And I wasn't expecting a massive blockbuster video game to spend so much time on Southern history because it's, you know, it just it doesn't that that that there's no genre anymore of Southerns in the way that there are Westerns, genre of Southerns in the age of Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation and all of this stuff earlier in the 20th century. But after the the black freedom struggle, Southerns, at least of the romantic variety, they didn't really click. I mean, they were just, you know, they were really problematic and people just stayed away from them. Um, so when I'm in my first playthrough back in summer of 2020, when I'm in the state of Lemoyne, when I'm going to the city of Saint-Denis, which is obviously supposed to be a fictionalization of New Orleans, that's when it clicked in me that, like, me as a historian, I can bring something to this. That's when I decided to teach a class that used the foundation, you know, the fictional world of the games as a jumping-off point to explore the real history that the games allude to and, you know, represents try to represent. And so that's how the class started. And I taught it once uh for the first time and loved it. And the students were just so engaged, they were so excited, not just to talk about Red Dead, which is really not what we talked about all that much, but to talk about the Rockefeller family, to talk about the meatpacking industry in Chicago, to talk about real-life gunslingers like Jesse James and stuff like that. So after teaching the class, I decided, you know, like I gotta write a book that shares this adventure of the class with a wider audience. And that, of course, is how Red Dead's history was born. And I do have to make a plug since we're gonna be talking about Arthur Morgan a bit. The actor who played Arthur Morgan, Roger Clark, narrates my audiobook. And he does so in a voice that's very familiar to those who've played the games.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

So we mentioned that the game scope and how how that how they they reflect this era, and and as you correctly said, you know, it's a it's a western, but then we're also talking, we're not really talking about the old west. We're talking about 1899 to 1911. This is this is a this is not your 1870s, 1880s. So they do kind of they move things around a bit, don't they, in in the way they do it. And I guess that's just the nature of games development. Do you know? You mentioned that that they initially you didn't know too much about how the games were developed. I presume in the in the writing of the book, you would have speaking spoken to Rockstar, the folks who made this game.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

No? Nope. Uh no, I have not. I've never had any formal contact with Rockstar Games. However, since the book came out, uh, I have been contacted and had long conversations, um, especially with Dan Hauser, who is the co-founder of Rockstar and who left, who left Rockstar in 2020. He emailed me out of the blue and he said, Hey, Professor Olsen, I've read your book. I enjoyed it. Let's talk about it. So we had a long Zoom call. Uh, you know, and there were many, you know, of course, Red That 2 and 1, were made by massive teams of people, hundreds of creative minds, uh, thousands ultimately. But, you know, I think Dan Hauser has a very significant uh impact uh if one person had to be singled out as kind of you know the most significant uh creative influence on the game. So, you know, I got to chat with the guy who made the games, or you know, had that key role as one of the co-co-creators, co-writers. So now I know a lot more about how the games were made, but that was never the goal of the book in the first place. It was like, hey, you know, Rockstar is generally quite private and you know secretive about their creative process, which I respect. Let's emphasize much more what's the actual history that, you know, because that's something I do know about, having, you know, because of my training. But yeah, I know that I know they they put a lot of money and time and energy into the research.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Yeah. Which you kind of have to with historical games these days, the the amount of money that's involved, you know, they don't mess around.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

I know that they've relied upon trained historians, at least history majors from universities. Um, I don't know whether there were any PhDs involved or not, but I'm sure I know that they engaged good scholarship, you know, on some questions. They also engage a lot of movies and you know, fictionalizations.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Uh yeah, which you have to. Well, let's let's talk about that. Let's try to sort of sift through the myths and reality here. We've spoken about this on a previous episode of History's Devils, episode 14, we looked at Billy the Kid. The sense of freedom, open space, the lawlessness, the rule by revolver, these these sort of tropes of the old west are very evocative. And they're certainly tapped into in the Red Dead games. This sense of individual freedom, endless space and bounty is quintessentially American. In fact, sort of armed armed individuality. I mean, that's a part of American culture to this day, at least in some parts of the states. This idea of that freedom being threatened is a really central theme of Red Dead 1 and Red Dead 2. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the devil in the game is, and and this is the way they say the word in the game. And again, this speaks to how they thoughtful the game makers were about dialogue. The the gang members spit the word civilization. They say it like it's a cuss word. And civilization becomes it's almost like a character in and of itself, this idea that that that you know the time of the outlaw is passing, the Vandalin gang are essentially on the run from modernity. Beyond providing a thematic hook for the story, why is this idea of freedom, lawlessness versus civilization and conformity, why is it so provocative for what is an American, a very American game, speaking to very American themes?

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Right. Well, in a sense, it's a very American game, but it's also made by a whole lot of Brits, you know. So it's made by a lot of non-Americans, which is quite interesting. Um, but yeah, this basic storyline of the Red Dead games, especially the second one. I mean, the second one makes it very clear from like the splash text that opens the game, which is that, you know, essentially this era of unbounded possibility is coming to an end. The frontier is closing. This is like the basic plot line of the games, and it's one of the very oldest stories that Americans have told about the West. They're telling this story already in the 1800s, the late 1800s, which is really fascinating. And in fact, in my book, I pinpoint like the ground zero moment when that mythology was born, which was in 1893 with the Chicago World's Fair, this massive exposition. This historian, this guy named Frederick Jackson Turner, gives this astoundingly influential lecture called The Significance of the Frontier in American History. And in it, he says two things. Basically, he argues that A, you know, like this process of unfolding civilization into the West, which he really means white people coming in and taming non-white space, uh, you know, moving Native peoples out of the way, uh, bringing in their particular form of agriculture and settlement and all that, that this kind of repeating cycles of settlement, that that's like that's what defines American identity. That's what makes Americans unique, different from the Europeans and all that. That's his first argument. But then he argues that, well, but it's the frontier is closing. Like that experience is now coming to an end. This is 1893 that he argues this. He's saying that, you know, the West has been tamed. And he's really anxious about this because he really believed that like the frontier experience is not just what made Americans Americans, but kind of what made them great as well. Like what made them different and more democratic, small d democratic, more egalitarian, more individualistic, and all this sort of thing. Uh, and he's worried like what's gonna happen as a result of this. And he was not alone. So many folks in that era were super anxious about what was gonna happen when the country stretched from, you know, country meaning white settlement, uh, stretched from uh one from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I mean, I think the most classic example is Teddy Roosevelt. Like Teddy Roosevelt's mythology and his influence, you can find it in the Red Dead games in many ways. I mean, he's not mentioned by I'm surprised he doesn't show up, actually. Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Or some fiction or a version of him.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Yeah, that would have been great, actually. Well, you know, he too, he was very anxious about what he called over-civilization. And, you know, he's not he's a proponent of capitalism and big business, I mean, you know, regulated variety. Um, so he's not like Dutch Vanderly, and he wants like an empty space or anything. But but Teddy Roosevelt is so anxious uh about you know urbanization and about the extension of of uh of you know American control over the West because he's worried about what it means for masculinity, for what it means for American manhood, and particularly white upper class, middle upper class uh manhood. You know, he thinks that that men are being um that they're being emasculated by urban life, by city work, by by office work. And he wants to recapture, you know, some sort of lost sense of masculinity as he imagines it, uh, you know, by going out to Dakotas, by shooting a bison, by riding a horse.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Get fresh air, set fires.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

Yeah. So I mean, this this American fascination with a closing frontier, it's tied up with all kinds of other social issues that have to do with gender, that have to do with immigration, that have to do uh, you know, with capitalism and labor. Uh and it's really a messy stew of stuff. And the games, you know, the games recycle a lot of this mythology. I don't think they really critique it at all, the way that historians have very much critiqued the Frederick Jackson Turner mythology. Uh, I think the games, you know, and it's not it's It's not like a disastrous failing on their part. They're not the first to to recycle these old cliches, but uh but but they but they do. You know, I in my in my book I joke that like Frederick Jackson Turner, his name really belongs in the credits of this game, but you know, he's not there, of course, because I mean he's been dead for a hundred years.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

But it's still it still is I mean, it serves a function in the game of providing that that thing that you are constantly on the run from. And and that manifests in various forms. You mentioned the Pinkertons before, which again we discussed Alan Pinkerton in a previous episode of History's Devils. You know, the the the Pinkertons are the private security, law enforcement, the the what is it, the henchmen of the rich, basically, the capitalists. And they are envisioned in this game as almost the manifestation of that modern life that is or that law, that order, that that sense of constraint that is coming for the likes of Dutch van der Lind, uh John Marsden and Arthur Morgan. And it's an interesting when I was playing it, I I wondered particularly given the time period when these games are being made, how much how much the there's a critique there of policing, of private security, or am I reading too much into this? Is this just or is this just again leaning into that thing because the Pinkertons, I mean, they and we discussed this again in this previous episode, they they st they uh they've become heels in history. They've become bad guys to the minds of a lot of people because of things like Homestead Strike and things like that. Is that what's going on, or is there is there a deeper critique there, do you think, or even across the whole game of sort of you know, policing and heavy-handedness of government?

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Right, exactly. I mean, I think that all of the Rockstar games include a mild critique of corporate capitalism within their part of their brand, which is deeply ironic, given the fact that Rockstar Games is a massive multinational corporation that has its own labor disputes and you know, all the kinds of stuff that comes with corporate capitalism. But I've been spending a lot of time recently with the Grand Theft Auto games, which we can talk about later on if you're curious. Um, but you see this coming out in them um as well. Um, and there's a lot of critique of policing, too. Again, I mean, GTA is a lot of, you know, the police never emerge as the brave defenders of law and order. They're often corrupt.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

They're often There's a corrupt cop in at least every game. I I think there's you come across at least one corrupt cop.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Yeah, I think the I think the Hauser brothers must have had some tough run-ins with the law as teenagers, and they've been trying to take it out on you know the global police force ever since. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

Well, there's other there's other uh elements of the game or other characters, I guess, uh, and features I want I want to break down and their resonance. Um you mentioned before about the the the sort of violent shifting of the Native peoples off the land, the clearing of the land. Red Dead 2. I can't remember Native Americans turning up in the first Red Dead, but in Red Dead 2019.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Well, they do in really awkward ways. I mean, Dutch Vanderlyn has this like weird gang. Oh yes, yes, he does.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Yes, yes, he does. He surrounds it.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

It's much more tone-deaf, in my view, uh, than Red Dead 2. Red Dead 2, they hire lots of indigenous actors, and they, you know, they they take try to take care to represent uh Native peoples in a diverse and sensitive and nuanced light. I mean, there's shortcomings to the representation in Red Dead 2, but on the whole, you know, I think most Native players have been pretty impressed. I mean, you know, maybe that's just based compared to other video games, or uh, but I think that the the the takeaway has been largely positive.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah, I mean they're certainly represented as being the being, you know, good guys, I guess, in the story, uh beset by the the encroaching forces of capitalism and and and the state, just like the Vandalin gang. In fact, that's what leads to them forming an alliance. Another thing, when you mentioned the South, I I I think you're right. There's a lot of attention played to how they how they uh depict the South after the war. Yeah. And the there's so many little interactions you have with war veterans, with with people. There's a there's a there's a guy who who you actually in in one of the more you know really quite deeply layered side missions, you actually track down uh a former uh hunter of the enslaved who's who's now trying to basically act as if none of that ever happened and and go to ground. And and you know, really deep stuff that they're that they're hitting there. But then there's also a kind of tragic comic depiction um when you come across uh a gang called the Lemoyne Raiders, who are basically the sort of physical manifestation of the lost cause myth. These are these guys who are still running around acting as if the war is still happening and they still control the south, and all this. And they're basically presented as troublesome losers. In general, the the depiction of the South is kind of scathing, I I find.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Rockstar has a long history of mocking the South, going back from GTA uh upward to the present. And some of it's silly, you know, and just kind of ridiculous. But some of the depiction of the South is quite interesting and you know, quite thoughtful. You know, for example, like they have you frequently encounter these uh statues uh both in uh Rhodes and in Saint-Denis, that are these large public memorials to the Confederacy and to the Confederate cause. You know, they describe the Civil War as the war of northern aggression, right? Um, and what's really interesting is that in the 1890s, yeah, you would have seen tons of these statues coming up left and right. The only way that the game really messes up on this is that it depicts the statues as old. Like if you look at the textures of the statues in both cities, they are weathered, they are, you know, the bronze is oxidized, uh, they've clearly, you know, they're meant to look as if they've been standing there for several decades. And that's really not true. Uh the lost cause really, you know, the sort of memory cult of uh glorifying the Confederacy really hits uh uh its highest pace in the 1890s and 19 aughts. And I wish that the game had done more. I mean, I I get that it's tricky to teach this very complicated history on a video game screen, but if they'd made the statues brand new, and in fact, if they'd showed like workers like putting them together and like maybe the Lemoine Raiders showing up at like a ceremony dedicating one of these statues and talking about the mythology, even though the South actually won, you know, whatever. Um, I think that would have been uh that's a missed opportunity, right? The the developers could have done so much more to to teach that history. And you know, I I will say uh very clearly that I don't see Rockstar as um recycling any of the lost cause mythology. Like I don't see Dan as uh you know uh guilty of of that because ultimately the Lemoyne Raiders, they're your enemies, you're you're shooting the people that you can shoot without any consequences, really.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Um and and to complete the storyline, you gotta waste a lot of them. Well, well, let's talk about that because you you mentioned Rockstar and and their other great property, Grand Theft Auto, which started in 1997, which makes me feel really fucking old. Almost 30 years old. God damn it. And of course, I played the original one in high school. Oh, yeah, me too, me too. And and you know, everyone since, because it is they they are fantastic games, but they're well, I'll have to tell you about the class that I'm teaching this semester. Oh, we're doing we're doing GTA now. Well, that will be very interesting, particularly in this environment, because that the the sort of I guess the unique selling point of GTA, well, there's two unique selling points. One is they satirize the vulgarity of American life. I think that's the the the that's the comedy aspect. The other is ultra violence. That's the and sort of to a to a comedic extent. But beneath that, you know, that that that violence, I I think has always had uh there's satire to it as well. And I think Red Dead in general is a more mature property in the way it handles violence and not and and satirization of America.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

This is the way that uh this is what Dan Hauser told me when we had our Zoom call. He said that Red Dead Redemption is a tragedy with comic elements, and Grand Theft Auto is a comedy with tragic elements. You know, so they're very similar, but they're very different at the same time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Yeah, and they cater for similar and different players in in many ways. I mean, I I love both properties, but you you play through Grand Theft Auto and just go, you know, this is uh clearly absurd. In Red Dead, there is apparently a way to play it where you don't, you know, murder half of the half of the United States.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

But even then, well, it's I mean it's still like a quarter.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

The death tolls are incredibly.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

I did some research on this, right? Like even with a high honor playthrough where you are, you know, sparing any civilians, where you're only shooting the people who are shooting at you, who you have to complete. Arthur Morgan still racks up a body count of about 900 people. Uh, that's a lot of massive. Especially given the fact that there's only a handful of actual outlaws in 19th century American history that even kill 10 people. Yeah, you know? Yeah. So like the body counts are uh astoundingly inflated. And of course, this comes with the video game territory in a sense.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

As opposed to fishing, which is a big part of Red Dead. It's you can just sit there and just fish if you if you're so inclined. And you know what? Sometimes that's quite relaxing. But uh again, perhaps not as engaging as having a you know massive gunfight in in the high street of a of a western town. So yeah, there is that that thing of of gun violence which comes into it. The other thing which I and maybe I'm drawing a long bow here, but I this is a recurring leitmotif of rockstar games. Every rockstar game has aliens in it. Yeah. There's UFOs or there's alien encounters or something. And I feel like I mean, I A, it's a cool feature that happens, but I wonder if there's also a commentary there on the role of conspiracy theory in American culture and the extent to which, you know, that which is fundamentally unreal becomes real in a lot of American society.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Yeah, yeah, you know, I didn't I didn't dwell too much on the aliens in my book or in my new class that I'm teaching, but yeah, it is a recurring theme. Um and I think satire becoming real is, you know, uh a thing. I think it's a something it's something that is especially being ruminated on by the people making Grand Theft Auto 6. Because in the 13 years since GTA 5 came out, American society has changed a lot. And what was once considered bizarre is now pedestrian and daily, you know?

SPEAKER_01 32:41

So I wonder how they can well GTA games are always a kind of time capsule of the period because uh GTA 4 is a sort of post-9-11 tension, and then GTA 5 is very much it's it's all about sort of the absurdities of capitalism, and that's a commentary I I figured it was a commentary on the global financial crisis. And you're right, this new one is gonna come out into Trump's America. Uh God knows what that's gonna be like, but it's it's gonna be interesting, if nothing else.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Yeah, and it's so difficult not only to satirize a moment that you know many consider satirical already, but also to make it appeal to people across a very divided country. Because, you know, the gamers who love Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption have very different views about the world, you know, not just in terms of the liberal conservative binary, which I don't even believe in anyhow, but um just trying to make it appeal to different age ranges, different ideologies, different, you know, ethnicities, races, genders, all of this. It is no easy task to make a blockbuster game like that, which is probably part of the reason why it's been delayed so many times, not just because of the tech and the coding and the graphics. It's probably has to do with like, well, what's the message? What's the sort of you know, what is the meaning of this game?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

And how can how will it how will it play? You have to revise it every Monday morning, basically, because there's some some new drama. I'm not not jealous of that team, I gotta say. No. Um, well, let's talk a little bit about characters and the sort of the morality aspects and the and the the the devils, if you like, of this game. I mentioned Dutch Vandalin, but I want to talk more about John and Arthur. You mentioned before the honor system, which to explain that for those uninitiated, this is something where which which is one of the more fascinating mechanics of the game, where you basically, as the player, you get to decide how good or evil you're going to be in the game. You can either go on a kill crazy rampage and just you know murder everyone you see, which I think most people do at at least one stage, just for the shits and giggles of it, or you can play. I never heard, I felt too guilty.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

Really? Oh it's just the Puritan morality in me.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

I I I clearly am a nastier person because because I yeah, I I think you just gotta do it with a rock star game. But there is a more nuanced uh way to play the game, and I found I I I only scratched the surface of this because as much as I can enjoy a video game, I do not get into the the gaming community because there's a there's a lot of bad shit in there. And uh one one I I found like furious online arguments about the right way to play Red Dead Redemption 2. Um, and that's that you basically have to start as Arthur Morgan being uh an incredibly nasty right hand to Dutch Vandalin, killing who needs to be killed, beating up who needs to be beat up, stealing what what you feel like stealing. But then by the end, you get presented with missions where you can do the right thing, where you can, you know, help people out, where you can better society, where you can perform some sort of sacrifice, which ultimately you you end up doing. And when you play the game like that, it does add something to it. It really does, it becomes a cinematic experience where you are going through a character arc. This uh system is is fascinating. Uh mainly because I I mean I mean, on for a couple of reasons it's fascinating because it allows for you know continual playability and everything else, but I find it fascinating because it allows the player to engage in something that again you would not expect about on a game that's you know got a gun on the cover, but questions of morality, questions of what's right and wrong, questions of what makes a good and bad person. That's some heavy shit for a video game.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

But yeah, I think that when it comes to video game mechanics, the way that the honor system works in Red Dead 2 is really nuanced. All right, like it really there's many ways to play this game, which I think has made a lot of the fans really happy because they can enjoy it in in very different ways. However, when it comes to making sense out of outlaws and gunslingers, I do think that that linear sliding scale of good and evil is woefully incomplete for making sense out of the real life inspirations behind characters like Arthur and John. And in my book, I look at two very famous gunslingers, uh, being Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok, and I try to explain that this sort of sliding scale of good versus bad makes no sense for either one of them. There's so many other you need like multiple axes, not just a single one, to make sense out of these figures. And a lot of it has to do with politics. Politics is something really absent from Red Dead Redemption 2 and 1. Not that they don't, you know, they mention, you know, that there's a political world, but neither of the protagonists has a political identity. Uh, neither of them has real firm partisan beliefs. Um, even though in that in the 1890s, party politics is even more intense in many ways than today, uh, in that, you know, voter registration is very high, turnout is very high. People, it's very rare to find folks in the 1890s who didn't care about politics. Like they had pretty strong views. And once again, you know, the Democrats and Republicans were the two big parties, but there are significant third parties, like the populists, who are in the mix. And it just shocked me that Arthur, you know, he actually explicitly says he's apolitical. He says, Well, how would I vote? You know, like what a waste of time. Um, that would have been extremely rare because the actual gunslingers like Jesse James, who was a diehard Democrat, or Wild Bill Hickcock, who was a diehard Republican, both of those guys tended to shoot people who were from the opposing party. So much of the career of these gunslingers had to do with fighting political battles, whether it's Jesse James fighting the Civil War even after it was over, or Wild Bill Hickcock standing as a sort of defender of Republican-oriented big business in the West, uh, particularly Eastern big business. Um, that's what made those guys tick. And Arthur, you know, he just doesn't seem to care, even though he has views that would be quite uh eccentric and unusual, right? Like he's clearly he's clearly critical of white supremacy. Like he does not believe in white superiority. You know, he helps black characters all the time. He has close black friends. Um he's he often speaks to that's you know, thinking it's bullshit. You know, he's you run into the eugenics uh uh you know, sort of pamphleteer in Saint-Denis, some guy, you know, handing out uh pamphlets about you know race science, quote unquote. And Arthur's like, this is bullshit, you know, and he gets in a fight with him. So like because of those fairly eccentric views among a white man, you know, a lot of white men, I mean definitely most were firm believers uh in you know racial superiority uh in that period. So that the fact that Arthur is, you know, not that would have gravitated him toward politics as well. It would have just innately made him a political creature. But I understand that Rockstar didn't want to make him one party or another because it would have made him problematic to play. Yeah, and of course the parties are very different than today than they were then.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Yeah. I I mean I guess that's the rub, isn't it? That you've got to somehow create these characters in a world where you you you want to play them, you want them to be likable, um, d irrespective of their flaws. And so you have got to make them a bit of a political table arassa for that for that reason. It goes to what you were saying before about the difficulties of producing GTA 6 and making sure that this is a game that speaks to a to a divided America. Uh, I'm sure the same thing was in the back of their heads when they when they put this guy together. You mentioned the the historical basis of some of these figures. I'm wondering if the Vanderling gang has any kind of historical analog that you can that you can think of. Are they are they Jesse James and his boys or what?

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Jesse James and his boys were a bunch of assholes. I mean, like they were basically clan members, uh, you know, and and the the Vanderlyn gang is really it's a very multicultural group of folks. Uh maybe even unrealistically multicultural, in that, you know, they have lots of women, they have lots of African-American members, there's Native members, there's immigrant members, Mexican-American. What I see as the closest inspiration behind the Vanderlyn Gang is Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall gang. Um, that, in terms of timing, in terms of location, is gotta be the inspiration behind it. Right. So there's a famous movie, of course, fictionalization, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from 1969. But there was indeed a real Butch Cassidy. And he and his gang are probably best known for robbing a train in 1899, literally that year, which provoked the uh the owner of the railroad to hire the Pinkertons to pursue them.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

Which for those who have not played the game, is kind of the storyline of they rob a riverboat, don't they? Oh no, no, no, they do rob a train. They do rob a train.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

I mean, the first once you get out of the mountains, right? That's the first big robbery. That's what gets Leviticus Cornwall on you and the Pinkertons, and that's fateful decision. So that you know, that has to be the rap, the single reference. I mean, there's many other outlaw gangs that could have been the inspiration, but here's the great irony, or you know, sort of uh interesting quirk, is that the um the Holandwall gang, they're all Anglo-speaking white men. There's no, you know, rainbow coalition within the real-life outlaw gang. But I, you know, I and I really respect that Rockstar wanted to make a game that reflected the diversity of America in 1899. Because of course the West, and the South certainly, is this stew of lots of different people, you know, whether they're Chinese or Mexican American, Eastern whites, southern African Americans, or whatever, right? Like it's a it's a big mess of humanity. And the games do a pretty nice job in in conjuring uh that that complexity.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Really comes through, I think, when you're in uh Saint-Denis, which is the the fictionalized depiction of New Orleans, where you and the only city in the game, too. Yeah, but but it's so well realized in that you've got suddenly people are speaking French, not just French, there's people speaking Spanish as well. It's it's cosmopolitan. You have new uh Chinese as well, uh Chinese uh gun shop. Um, there's even in in a in a wonderful nod to Anne Rice, which I appreciate as a fan of her novels, there's even a vampire in in Saint Denis. It's fantastic, right? Yeah, I again like there's this there is that that interesting melding of of they're taking the past, they're they're trying to incorporate uh America as as you know liberal America would like to see see itself today, and and everything else taking those liberal values, bringing them in. And it's it it makes for attention, but it also makes for just uh a game that can engage someone, as you mentioned at the top, someone who's who is uh you know, a t a a nineteen year old in the twenty first century can play this game and and find affinity with Gilded Age America or you know Teddy Roosevelt's America, wherever. However, we will look at it. Um, which leads me to just to finish this up here the the teaching of the game. I gotta ask this, just as this is me sort of from an educator's point of view. I mean, this is one of the greatest ideas for a course ever. I'm wondering, I'm I'm presuming students have responded well, if you're planning one on GTA, surely this is Oh, I'm not planning. It's currently happening.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Grand Theft America. So you'd start that in the 80s, presumably? Really a history of the US since 1980 to the present through the fictional lens of the GTA games. So, right, because the the G, you know, most people don't think of the GTA games as historical in the way that they do Red Dead, but you know, many of the earlier games are set in an earlier period, like Vice City in 86, San Andreas in 92. Um, but then a lot of the uh the other games that were set contemporarily are now so old that they do say something historical, right? They captured 2008 in New York, uh, 2001 in New York, you know, um, nine 2013 in Los Angeles with GTA 5. So yeah, I've designed this crazy class that basically replicates the Red Dead's history formula by looking at institutions that show up in GTA in pretty much all the cities, which I then use to spin out bigger stories about recent American history. So, like, for example, I look at container ports, container shipping and shipping containers uh as a fundamental part of the globalization of the American economy. I look at uh the finance districts, I look at venture capitalists like Devin Weston from GTA 5, or big big banks like Fleesa uh within the GTA franchise, and then think about how has finance uh transformed its role in the American economy and contributed to the growing inequality within this country. Um, I look at gun shops, ammunition, to think about gun capitalism in America and how we've come to have more than one gun per person in this country when it was much less than that 60, 70 years prior. Um, so I have a whole long list of topics that I engage, but basically it's a similar task. You know, to take the fictional representations of the game of GTA and then tell a bigger story that really helps make sense out of this contemporary moment that we live in. You know, a very divided and unequal America. How did we how do we get there? Uh GTA is obviously silly, it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, you know, but it's also a really granular satire of American life and American cities that I've been actually surprised at how much I can do with the games to help tell those bigger stories. Yeah. And it's fun. I mean, my class has 214 students in it this semester. I can imagine.

SPEAKER_01 46:44

It's a hell of a lot of mocking. Uh but but I again, you know, it's it's a good way to engage people. And I think also beyond teaching the the moment uh about about you know where we are today and using history to reflect on that, there is that that again that I keep coming back to this the interesting characterization in these games, the way in which they create these these characters who you as a player can can choose how you want to interact with this world, choose how you want to interact with these moments. There's something in that which I think is really quite powerful and quite unique. And I do wonder, I mean, they've talked about I rumors that that there's going to be more customization in the GTA 6, and again, more like an artificial yeah, yeah, more freedom to choose how your character actually acts in this environment. And they they tip dip their toes into the water a bit there in GTA 5. I think that you know, you could play three characters, one of whom is a complete psychopath, the other is you know, sort of washed up criminal who just wants to sit by his pool, and the other is just this young guy trying to get ahead in a in a brutal world. And so you got these, you already got these variations on on characters and themes, and I do wonder if they're gonna play with that a bit more in GTA 6. I hope so, because I think when you look at the characters that they had in in the Red Dead games, and hopefully there'll be a third Red Dead game, but to date, you know, John Mars or Arthur Morgan, I I yeah, there's gotta be. Um But John Mars and Arthur Morgan, these these two guys who are, as you say, on the one hand, they're kind of they're kind of clean slates politically, but on the other hand, you have this opportunity to to take them through this world and decide whether or not they're gonna be good or bad. And one thing I did want to get your thoughts on, because this always struck me as very interesting about both games, and spoilers for those who have not played them, but I'm sorry to say that both Arthur and John do not survive their respective games. And there are gamers who have tried emphatically to to to make it so that they somehow live, so how they somehow, you know, John can fight off the entire US Army or whatever, corners him at the end. But no, the point is you're meant to die. Like they they do, I I think that's kind of the point, isn't it? These men, despite the the redemption in the title, they're they're not they're not the they don't get their lives back after a life of crime. They they they kind of have to die as part of the process, which again is very deep for a video game.

SPEAKER_00 49:17

Yeah, yeah, I I hope they that Rockstar continues that trajectory, you know, not necessarily killing off characters, but by by painting unique characters that you know are not just do what you will with them, you know. Like that's what I loved going back to The Witcher 3. I love that you plays Geralt of Rivia, like who has this really unique individual personality that you see reflected in multiple ways. And I love that Arthur is, you know, also this, you know. I mean, yes, there's some wiggle room, but like not so much that it blows up the writing of the game.

SPEAKER_01 49:49

You still have a character there, uh a realized character. I I was thinking when you mentioned The Witcher, you know, obviously they made a TV show of that. Last of Us, they've also made a TV show, and I'm looking at it and going, why bother? I I don't get it. Like the the the games are a show. I'm not sure, you know. God knows if they'd ever make a Red Dead game. I mean, why not, given that they've made the others? But I again, if they did, even then I'd be like, I mean, I'd watch it. Uh sorry, a Red Dead film or what or TV series, I'd watch it, but I'm not sure that I'd see the need for it because yeah, these the cinematic in the first place. They like films, yeah. They're they're very cinematic. Anyways, this has been a fascinating conversation. Um, anything to to plug the throw throw the book up one one last time. Go on.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

Yeah. Check out Red Dead's history, came out uh summer of 24, so it's like a year and a half coming on two years old. The audiobook version by Roger Clark is a real you know highlight of it. Um, and stay tuned for uh I'm working on a new book and uh contemporary history and all the all the headaches that come with that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Thanks again for having me, James. This is a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 50:58

Thank you, thank you, and uh thank you, dear listener, for tuning in. Uh, make sure that you keep listening, smashing buttons, like him, subscribing, doing all that stuff on the YouTube, the Spotify, wherever it is you find us. And we'll see you next time for another edition of History's Devils.