Lately I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption as the bad kind of cowboy, since I played the entire narrative of the game as a good guy and, as I said, the game really makes a strong offer to you to have a go at being bad.

The interesting thing about being bad, especially in the end-game when the narrative has essentially finished, is the rather glaring lack of context for your actions. Okay, perhaps your avatar, Jack Marston, has some daddy issues and a perhaps justified hatred of the law, but I’ve been rolling into towns and slaughtering everyone in them. As is standard with this kind of game, there are no children, but I’ve been shooting men, women, and dogs, at will.

Yes, the game acknowledges my badness by sending posses of lawmen after me (who I generally also kill), but that leads to nothing worse than, well, a temporary death or going to jail for, you know, ten seconds or so. I even got the “Dastardly” achievement by capturing a woman, tying her up, and dropping her in the path of a train. She exploded into a shower of bits and pieces, but after that I was left feeling like I hadn’t really done anything.

In particular, once I’m acting outside the narrative and, mostly, outside the other explicit challenges or “desires” the game provides, the feeling of game changes – or I might say the feeling of the game absents itself. At that stage the game veers toward a state of being purely a system, as if you could more or less replace each element on the screen with a primary colored block and have a similar experience – which is to say it moves toward meaninglessness.

We either need other people (multiplayer games) or narrative (most single player games) in order to contextualise our actions and make them meaningful. Maybe it’s time for me to take RDR online and scrape a bit more meaning into play.

So I “finished” Red Dead Redemption this afternoon. In the tradition of these games, of course, you don’t really finish them, you just wind up the major narrative and then can continue to play/live in the world as you wish after that. A nice feature – though subject to the problem of why you should “go on living” when there’s no more narrative to unfold. Something I’ve probably written about before, or ought to in the future.

Anyway, I guess it’s spoilers from here.

So part of the end of the game is that your avatar, John Marston, is killed by the long (rather crooked) arm of the law. After his death, you find yourself in control of his son, Jack, instead – briefly as a boy riding back to see his dead father, and from then on as an adult who clearly “grew up like his daddy.” There’s a bunch of stuff I could say about this, including that Jack’s voice is extremely annoying and that I resent playing an avatar who was a little shit as a kid, but there you go.

The main thing this speaks of to me is that it’s a rather clever way the designers have allowed players to reconsider their playing of the game. It’s especially the case, I think, that the transfer of control to Jack gives players “narrative permission” to play in a more evil way than John did. After all, he has cause to be pretty anti-law and order, and he doesn’t have his family being held hostage and so on as a way of keeping him on a leash – nor does he have the same level of narrative context for his actions.

As such, I found myself experimenting more with the evil side of the game. That amounted to shooting a bunch of people in the head for no reason. The game responded as expected – a bounty on my head and a loss of “honor points”. It played out at its best, though, in a final quest to get revenge for my father’s death. In the process of this you meet his killer’s wife, his brother, and the killer himself. In keeping with my interpretation of Jack, I maimed and then killed them all. I did feel a little disturbed by the process, but it was also exciting – more so killing his wife and brother than the guy himself, since the game didn’t necessary telegraph it as an option in the same way.

In the end, the game acknowledges this clean slate option you get in controlling Jack through one of the numerous “achievements” in the game, this one called “Nature or Nurture?”

A brief consideration this evening of people who believe in things. Well, who believe very strongly in things. Religions are the most obvious category of this kind of thing, but other beliefs, particularly concerning ethics, fit this too, like (ethical) vegetarianism or (ethical) environmentalism.

Something odd, perhaps, about those of our beliefs that we hold very strongly is that we often don’t act on them, or even act much like we really believe them. Take me being a vegetarian for example. If I believe that killing sentient animals for food is so very wrong, then why am I so willing to exist in a society where that’s the norm?

To me this is probably more of a problem for people of strong religious persuasions. The “problem” of hell is the best example, I guess. If I strongly believed (or “knew”) that my friend, who is not of the same religious persuasion, or even denomination, as me is going to hell (to burn eternally in a pit of fire etc.), how could I just let that happen? And what about everyone else in the world? Can I really think it’s okay to stand aside and let them suffer?

Some of this comes down to a kind of willful ignoring of the situation, of course (I’d put myself in that camp in terms of vegetarianism). Some of it might well come down to “well, they deserve to go to hell” kind of reasoning. But really, these don’t seem like particularly good reasons. Maybe “don’t rock the boat” is in there too, but does it outweigh eternal torment for others, or unethical killing of sentient beings? Surely not.

So really, although there’s coverage of the shocking beliefs and practices of fundamentalists of all kinds (from PETA to terrorists), it’s actually somewhat surprising to me that there are so few people acting on their deeply held beliefs.