REVIEW | Boss Fight Book’s Red Dead Redemption

When I was in Portland, I stopped by a few book shops to pass the time and got into conversation with a shop owner about Boss Fight Books. He mentioned that he had contributed to the Kickstarted of this small publisher who wanted to make books about video games, and after the company succeeded in publishing several sessions of books, the store owner bought batches for the store. One of these was a review of Red Dead Redemption by Mark Margini.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m constantly thinking about Red Dead. I started playing RDR2 during a really tough time in my life, and it was the mythic balm for an otherwise panicked mind. I never even really liked Westerns prior, always being in the Sci-Fi & Horror camp until this era, which prompted the constant viewings of cowboy films, llistening to Marty Robbins and Colter Wall, and learning how to ride a horse. Even now, I catch myself falling into my “Arthur-voice” as a kind of self-soothing reflex, whether I’m with old friends or complete strangers.

I find the whole of the series to be very literary and contemplative, though I've rarely seen satisfying analyses of the themes, mechanics and many meanings of the game. Any video essay I’ve viewed has always felt pulpy, and the closest I’ve gotten to satisfying writing on the matter has been lists of books and movies that have similar tones to the game. That is until I began reading this book.

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. I had read the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic installment prior and figured the book would touch mostly on the production of the game with interviews from members of the creative team. Rather, I got what I didn’t realize I needed. A post-colonial interpretation of the original Red Dead Redemption game that ties the text into the wider genre of Westerns, deconstructs the various tropes integrated in the game and even touches on RDR2’s story and characters. The book references pop culture, historical events and different philosophy when thinking about Red Dead Redemption. Or perhaps more accurately, Mark Margini uses Red Dead Redemption as a vehicle to explore masculinity, violence, myth and more.

“This isn’t a book about the West. It’s a book about the “West” that lives in the imagination of Easterners, myself included, and it’s a book about one video game in particular that has brought that space to life for millions of players: Red Dead Redemption.”

Also the writing is just really good. For example, take this paragraph at the end of Margini’s chapter on Death. The author compares killing and dying in games like Dark Souls and Mario and how dying is Red Dead Redemption has a mocking quality with its huge text slapping DEAD on the screen that reduces John Marston’s demise as pathetic or otherwise unheroic. He also describes the effects that the CPU-intensive Euphoria has on the presentation of death in the game as being spontaneous, clumsy and somtimes comic.

“Like the Western, the most cinematic genre of all time, the game wants to remind us that death will not be cinematic; it will be, in the end, a matter of sheer matter, sheer logistics, and maybe even sheer chance, like a wagon wheel crunching over the belly of a hapless drunk. Or like a cowboy shot down in the middle of a town he barely knows, fighting for a cause he doesn’t believe in, wondering when, if ever, his body will get to rest.”

Along with diving deep into the lore of the game, Margini also paints a rich portrait of the Wild West and the place we have for it in the American psyche. How the Western is America’s way of justifying itself to itself and how the classical cowboy represented rugged individualism, exceptionalism and the legitimacy of expansionism. This notion gets complicated in the 60’s during the Vietnam war with the advent of the anti-Western or revisionist Western that sought to interrogate these notions and dismiss the restrained violence of the high noon duelist with the indiscriminate shootouts of opposing gangs leaving massive civilian body counts in their wake.

I have a couple chapters to go, but I’m excited to see what’s left. Honestly though, I knew I was going to like the book when the author described playing it when he was younger and his dad saw him playing it. “He couldn’t look away when I showed him a new game with a cowboy at the center of the screen, galloping with a real sense of weight, into sun-soaked plains of endless space. Years later he would still refer to it as “that game with the horse.”