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?”

I watched an episode of 30 Days a couple of days ago which had a pro-choice woman go and live in a Christian “new mothers” center which was decidedly “pro life”. The episode itself wasn’t always engaging, but it did make me think about the abortion debate for an extended period and I wondered, aside from my knee-jerk, liberal, pro-choice sentiment, what I really thought about the issue.

I expected to settle this pretty quickly with a bit of reading this evening, but the fact is that it just isn’t an easy question to take a stand on. As you might expect, most people pin it to sentience, with the idea being that a fetus is sentient at around 22 weeks or so. Interestingly, Roe v. Wade discusses it in terms of “viability”, which refers not to sentience but to the “capacity to have a meaningful life” (whatever that means).

The sentience angle is regarded as important because it’s something where you can say that the fetus is an ethical being (or something) in its own right, rather than just a “thing” or just an almost generic growth inside the mother. Then I read a bit of Christian fight-back, which countered with the idea that we don’t just kill people when they’re in a coma or asleep. Leading to the step of saying, well, they had to have been sentient beforehand, and there needs to be some expectation that they will be again.

That seems more or less fair to me (there was more counter-argument from the Christian camp, but I thought it unconvincing). But the sentience thing still doesn’t precisely sit right with me either. It still feels more like the argument is (not so?) secretly from “potential” rather than actual state (as with Roe v. Wade). I mean, a baby just born doesn’t really have much going on beyond our own emotional attachment to it and its enhanced potential to turn into a ‘proper’ human being – it wouldn’t understand or be especially put out by its death, especially if it experienced no pain.

But arguments from potential seem fraught with difficulty, because I don’t see how you make an informed argument about when potential begins. All of which is to say, despite thinking I had a confident (and obvious answer) to the question, I find myself uninformed and uncertain of what I think about it. All of which suggests I need to read more and think more, and even then may well not be any more certain anyway.