The Long Tutorial, or, In Defense of Snow: Red Dead Redemption 2
Allright, let’s look at a few opening scenes in videogames.
In Super Mario Brothers the player begins on the left hand side of the screen and walks forward learning quickly to jump on top of enemies, smash some bricks, grow by eating a magic mushroom, and avoiding obstacles. In Doom the player begins with a gun in their hand, moves through non-orthogonal hallways, encounters demons and possessed soldiers, and learns quickly to shoot anything and everything in sight. In Borderlands the player is dropped off a bus, met by a robot, given a gun, and then shoots their way to the town of Fyrestone. In Final Fantasy 7 the player controls Cloud Strife who jumps off a train, fights some guards using a sword literally as tall as he is, fights a giant robotic scorpion, and then fights his way out of a power plant before it blows up completely.
These openings, apart from being iconic, are all selected because they are the opening levels/sequences in some of the most memorable, popular, critically acclaimed, and foundational videogames of all times. Each of these games has been, or is considered a landmark game that either established a franchise of sequels, or else re-established their respective intellectual properties in the cultural zeitgeist. And while no game should be measured solely by its opening, it’s largely because of these opening sequences that we’re still talking about them.
It’s a tad shame that people rarely talk about the opening of Red Dead Redemption 2.
It’s also a shame that when they do talk about it, it’s almost always in the negative.
Red Redemption 2 is without hyperbole one of the greatest videogames ever made. It’s still too early to throw around words like legacy and impact because those can only ever be declared long after a game has “cooled” in the culture. But, having played enough of the game already, and having read multiple reviews for it, having listened to plenty of dudes celebrate it’s magnificence in casual conversation, and having listened to my girlfriend describe her escapades while playing the game for hours on end into the early morning instead of sleeping(or drinking water), it doesn’t take too much to understand something.
Red Redemption 2 is freaking rad.
And yet, within that same breath, I’m reminded over and over again how many times I’ve heard the complaint about the snow, or, more accurately, the introductory snow levels.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably one of the greatest games with a misleading title because the game is actually a prequel to the original Red Dead Redemption which was released in 2010. Red Dead Redemption 2 was released in 2018, that space of time being typical for Rockstar Games Development and also, this is really important, revealing that if you give production teams with proven track records the time they need, they will make great art.
They’ll also force their employees to “crunch,” causing an untold amount of unnecessary stress and psychological trauma, to say nothing of alienation from one's professional working environment. But…hey, look, a side quest involving escaped Circus Animals!
How cool is that?!
Red Dead Redemption 2’s plot is about the gang that John Marsten, the protagonist of the first game, was sent to hunt down. The familiar faces are there (Bill Williamson, Javier Escuela, and of course Dutch Van Der Linne) but the player is introduced to and controls a character named Arthur Morgan. The very beginning of the game shows the gang fleeing into a blizzard into the mountains following an ambush by Pinkerton agents in the town of Blackwater. John is missing, several people are dead, there are whispers (provided to the character in dialog options) that Dutch acted erratically, and now the gang has to find some way to survive until they can make a fresh start.
This means that the next several missions (six to be exact (I counted) take place in the region known as the Grizzlies. Geographical liberties being what they are in Red Dead Redemption 2, trying to say “where this is” in terms of the United States is, honestly, a waste of time. It’s in the mountains, there’s snow, there’s pine trees and elk. That’s all the player needs to know. It’s most likely supposed to be the Appalachian mountains, with some visual inspiration from the Western Rocky Mountains. Either way, the player will be expected to navigate through the snow.
And I mean LOTS of snow.
When I began writing this essay, I meant it to be both a defense of the snow levels, as well as a chance to explore them intellectually as structural devices within the game. This plan was only slightly disrupted when I went online looking for snow-haters (or Snaters(nobody actually calls them that(except me))) and instead found an article published on The Gamer on 6 March 2021 by Stacey Henley titled, “The Snow Is The Best Part Of Red Dead Redemption 2, Actually.” This article was effectively what I wanted to say in my own essay, and it had the benefit of being short (something my essays have a tendency of, well, not being).
Henley writes in the early paragraphs of her article why the snow sequences had the dramatic reaction they did to players who’d been waiting patiently for the next Red Dead videogame. She writes:
The reason it drags so much on a replay is because we know how long it lasts, and we’re acutely aware that once we get through a couple of hours of it, we get to actually be a cowboy again. But the first time around, we don’t know that. Half the game could be up in the snow for all we know. We came to Red Dead Redemption 2 expecting a rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ action fest, and the snow immediately pumps the brakes. We look back on Arthur Morgan now as one of the best written modern video game characters, but it’s easy to forget he posed a significant risk for Rockstar. Though you can still go through the game shooting everyone you come across, Arthur is a far more sensitive character than John Marston, far more contemplative on his place in the world, and far more aware of the consequences of his own violence. In many ways, Arthur is a man out of place, and the snow mimics that.
Arthur is not who we expected, and those early moments trudging through the snow add to this sense of displacement. The gang is out of sorts, suffering wounds and casualties, and just had riches slip through their fingers. They’re lost. Like cowboys in the snow, they don’t belong there. Arthur is lost too, of course, on the inside. He is quickly established as Dutch’s right hand man and the gang’s muscle, but he grows to distrust Dutch’s insistence on sticking to a selfish plan, and throughout the game reflects on what his role as ‘the muscle’ means for his life and his legacy. It’s not just in the gang where he feels his time is running short either; as the turn of the century approaches, Arthur is unsure whether there is a place for his kind in the world anymore. By dropping us into a place he so clearly does not belong in right at the start, Red Dead Redemption 2 has us thinking about the concept of being ‘out of place’ immediately.
I have to be honest, the first time I ever played Red Dead Redemption 2 I experienced the emotional and intellectual reaction that Henley writes almost verbatim. I played Red Dead Redemption when it was released in 2010 on my Playstation 3, like most millennial gamers probably did, so a deep well of nostalgia was already established for the franchise. I was also someone who grew up watching a lot of John Wayne westerns because my Dad liked John Wayne. This is to point out that cowboys and Westerns were a sort of formative media experience for me. The appeal of Red Dead Redemption was playing a gunslinger in the old west. It didn’t matter that John Marsten’s story was constantly subverting the genre and reminding players that most popular conceptions of Westerns were because of penny-dreadful novels and television series that became fodder for jingoistic, post-World War content.
It didn’t matter because I could shoot and skin rattlesnakes, damn it.
I immediately interrupt this thought to point out, though, that rattlesnakes rule and are vital to their ecosystem, so please don’t actually shoot them in real life unless they pose an immediate risk to your safety.
Moving on.
Playing the first few missions of Red Dead Redemption 2 and discovering the amount of depth Rockstar had packed into this new game (and not just the number of Cigarette cards you can collect (or trying to register the over 100 mammals and birds (and don’t even get me started on the freaking fish))) was almost traumatizing.
The snow, however, became a sort of psychological balm.
Red Dead Redemption 2 places Arthur in the mountains with the tasks of rescuing a woman from the O’Driscolls (a rival gang) after they killed her husband, hunting deer for food and learning how to stalk prey, following Javier Escuela and helping him find John, chasing and hogtying a rival gang-member, attacking the O’Driscoll’s hideout, and then eventually robbing a train. These missions, when observed in order, demonstrate a videogame that is trying to steadily progress a player into the world and mechanics that will be second nature by the time they’re (looks at PS5 screen) at least 35 hours into the game.
Each level teaches the various mechanics players can and will use throughout the rest of the game. Looking at the first mission, when Dutch, Micah, and Arthur stumble across the cabin that holds Sadie Adler, the player is taught several verbs: riding, sneaking, shooting, exploring, fighting, leading (my horse), and eating. Arthur will ride his horse alongside Dutch to the cabin and then sneak into a hiding place. After the quick firefight where Arthur shoots his gun for the first time in the game, he joins Dutch and explore the cabin looking for fresh supplies. He will also physically fights one of the O'Driscoll gang members in the barn after shooting several of them in the initial fight. If he incurs any wounds during any part of this he can simply eat something or drink a health-restoring beverage.
Though nowhere near as iconic or exciting as killing a bunch of dudes in Fort Mercer, Arthur’s quest to just find food and shoot enemy npcs is preparing the player up for later moments like when Micah goes bonkers and shoots up a whole damn town.
A few moments of consideration for these opening sequences reveal a deep concern for game design because it teaches mechanics through organic gameplay rather than simply instructing a player through training messages that would disrupt the “flow.”
And I ain’t even got to the narrative bits yet.
The snow levels, like Henley pointed out, show a new character that is uncertain about their place in the world. Arthur is not John Marsten. That’s an obvious statement but it’s worth repeating and emphasizing. Arthur is not John Marsten, and his story is entirely different. When players met John they didn’t know his backstory and they didn’t know anything about the gang. From the first few lines of dialog, John Marston acts as a man driven by a conviction, and even when he’s at a loss at what to do next he still knows what direction to go. This is because John’s motivations are to get his family back and try to live for them; he knows where his life and future are.
Arthur, by contrast, is unsure of where his place is in the world other than the gang, though by the time the snow levels are complete a growing doubt is beginning to settle in. Arthur doesn’t know where he’s going or what his future will be because his trust in Dutch is beginning to waver. Arthur’s conviction is solely driven by his identity as a member of the gang, and the gang is beginning to change and splinter in ways he cannot reconcile. In that same breath Arthur has no real connection to the world outside of the gang because, by his own admission, he’s a killer and thief who has no connection to anything society values or respects.
Arthur’s actions at the opening levels are as much a narrative tool as a ludic design. Arthur does what he’s spent a lifetime doing: he helps the gang because that’s what he knows.
As of this writing, this is my third attempt at playing Red Dead Redemption 2, and while the snow levels were a massive impediment the first time around, when I began the game this time, I slowed down. I let myself study the landscapes and the mechanics I was learning. I paid attention to the small interactions between characters. I actually bothered to learn the details of hunting and skinning pelts, which is arguably one of the most difficult parts of the game and one of the reasons I stopped playing the last two times.
The opening section of just about any videogame is supposed to prepare the player for the rhythms of the remainder of the game, and also establish its general aesthetic. Looking at the Shinra reactor section at the beginning of Final Fantasy VII the player learns the controls and comes to an understanding of what the game is and is going to be about. Players didn’t complain nearly as loud as they have about the opening of Final Fantasy VII as they did about Red Dead Redemption 2, but that’s almost certainly because they weren’t entering the previous game with any expectation the way they were with the latter.
Though, to be fair, Cloud’s attack on Shinra has him fighting a giant robotic scorpion.
Arthur hunts some deer.
I wanted, more than anything else, for this essay to be a defense of the snow, not just because this section gets more hate than it actually deserves, but because hindsight and analysis shows it for what it is. These opening sections are a great introduction to the game narratively and mechanically. Red Dead Redemption 2 buries the player up to their knees (figuratively and literally) not to stifle their movement, but to prepare them for a game that’s about being mired in quagmire and haunted by failure.
A gang of criminals hiding out in the mountains with dreams of Utopia was never going to end well. Dutch’s dreams of the West have the integrity of a snowflake in his grasp: it melts before it ever has a chance to land. The bitterness of the cold is a great foreshadowing of the tragedies that will befall Arthur and Dutch, and an excellent design to engage the player who will watch these tragedies unfold.
And, I suppose, an excellent reminder to players to slow down and take their time when hunting deer because, all too soon, that three-star pelt will drop to a single star if they rush too quickly to draw their guns.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.25.2024
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