College history professor Tore Olsson taught the world's first Red Dead Redemption American history class in 2021, at the University of Tennessee, using Rockstar's open-world epics to engage students on one of the most tumultuous periods in North American history. The class is a huge success, so much so that Olsson was inspired to write a book to bring his work to a global audience. Out in August, Red Dead's History looks like it could be a hit, and Roger Clark, who plays Red Dead Redemption 2 protagonist Arthur Morgan in one of the all-time great video game performances, has signed on to narrate the audiobook.
In an interview with IGN, Olsson discusses the book and delivers his verdict on Red Dead Redemption 2's historical "thoughtfulness", as he puts it. But he also reveals plans to repeat the trick with the Grand Theft Auto games in a new class and book that delves into 20th Century American history, using the likes of Vice City and San Andreas to educate on 1980s Miami and 1990s Southern California. And what does Olsson think of the upcoming GTA 6? Read on to find out.
You’re a historian who uses Red Dead to teach American history in a class you started in 2021. How has that gone?
It’s been a real adventure. And it’s a big experiment, too, in the sense that no other professional historian had tried to do anything like this before, which is shocking in many ways, because historians, we use pop culture all the time. We use film and literature and TV series, but a lot of historians have been reluctant to engage video games for various reasons. And I decided, well, no, I want to take this medium seriously, because it’s so dominant. Of course, I have my own personal history with this as well. I was a huge gamer when I was a kid, and now once again I’m a gamer, since the pandemic, which has shaped a lot of this.
It came as an epiphany when I sat down in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, and played Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time. I was only about 10 hours in, and all these historical nodes in my brain are firing left and right. I can’t turn off my historian identity when I’m playing. And I’m really genuinely surprised at how historically thoughtful the games were. I’m not so much obsessed with this question of accuracy that gets bandied around a lot, when you talk about historical video games. I’m more interested in thoughtfulness and the ways a game tries to capture the mood and the feeling and the range of options and the realities of a time period. And I thought the game did a surprisingly good job at that.
So I got to thinking, well, what have historians said about these games? About the Red Dead Redemption games? So I search in all the traditional academic venues I use and I found nothing. It was just complete silence from academics on this game. And I thought, well, someone’s got to start talking about it, maybe I should be the one! And I also knew among college-age students here in the U.S. and around the world, there’s a great deal of interest in these games. So I thought, why not start teaching an experimental class that uses the fictional content of the games as a springboard to engage the really big, towering dilemmas American historians are usually interested in talking about, like politics and race and gender and class and capitalism, all these big things, which the game often gestures toward, but they don’t go all the way. Of course not! That’s not the point of the game. But they gesture toward it. So I pick up where they’re gesturing toward and make that a much bigger reality for the students.
But it’s been great. The class has been very popular. Students sign up for it in much larger numbers than they do in other history classes. Seeing the passion and enthusiasm of the students in the classroom is what really prompted me to write this book, to turn the class into a longer book form so the wider world could share this adventure I took the students on. So the students were a big part of the inspiration behind this. Seeing how much this resonated with them, using their favorite characters and plot moments from these beloved games, and using them to explore actual big historical questions.
Have your students responded to that? Do you get the sense they’re taking it on more in this class than a traditional history class?
Oh yeah. The ability of the students to digest and soak up really complicated and intricate material is significantly higher in this class than in other classes, just because they’re emotionally present. They’re checked in, they’re dialed in in a way that’s not always the case in my big survey classes here at the university. Some students take history as a requirement, it’s something they’re kind of forced to do. But with this class we have a lot of students show up who are not required at all. They’re taking this as an elective. Many are not history majors, but people are coming from computer science and business and communications, and what brings them there is the love for the games, to be sure, but it’s also the curiosity and passion and thirst for real historical knowledge the games created in them. Video games are so powerful at instilling that curiosity and passion in people. The games themselves usually can’t provide the full story, but they can at least get people fascinated and interested in learning more about it. Video games are such a powerful tool for teaching in that regard.
In the book you talk about Red Dead Redemption’s historical accuracy. You talk about the characters and whether they existed in real life and some of the portrayals of certain groups such as the Pinkertons. When it comes to historical accuracy, how do you feel the game holds up? Has Rockstar done a good job of nailing it? What’s your verdict?
What makes the whole thing complicated is that almost all the names of people and places in the game are fictionalized. There’s no state of Missouri, or Nevada, or Louisiana. There are obvious moments when there are clear connections between Saint Denis in the game and New Orleans in America, or the Wapiti native group and the Lakota Sioux, which are undoubtedly the inspiration behind them. But then there are a lot of things that are just made up.
Ultimately, the game is very good at capturing the look and the feel of 1890s America. In terms of the visuals they really nail it. The architecture, the typefaces, the fonts, the fashion in many regards. So visually, I have very high marks to give to Red Dead 2 especially. Red Dead Redemption 2 is really in a league of its own compared to the first game. The first game is interesting and obviously got the conversation started, but the second game surpasses it in so many ways, especially historically.
However, there is also the question of the contours of everyday life, the kind of questions real Americans cared about in the 1890s, the kind of things that dominated their thinking, the limitations and possibilities in their lives, the social fabric of America. On that question the games are not as good. They’re not bad. They gesture toward a lot of big dilemmas. They don’t fully explore them. They don’t provide the context. And of course I don’t expect them to do so because they are ultimately an entertainment product. The goal is not to educate, but they do so by instilling curiosity.
For example, the Ku Klux Klan is featured, but there’s not really a dominant Ku Klux Klan in the 1890s. They’re dormant at that period. But they do shape the American South in the 1860s and 70s and then again in the 19teens and 20s. So for me, the fact that, yeah, there’s not really a Klan in the 1890s is not that big of a deal. I’m more interested in shedding light on the institutions of white supremacy that existed and functioned in these moments.
I didn’t want the book to be a sort of, let me ruin Red Dead Redemption 2 for you, showing how wrong Rockstar is. Because that’s not really the point. I really enjoy playing this game, and I know millions of people feel the same way. I want the book to serve as a companion to the game, that is going to enrich the play experience, and give it new meaning it may not have had before, to show the sort of background mechanisms and context the game just doesn’t have time to provide. When the game is played hand-in-hand with Red Dead’s History, it can be a powerful tool for getting a deeper understanding not just of this moment in American history, the 1880 to 1920 period, but the big dilemmas that make America what it is today, particularly dilemmas of capitalism and dilemmas of race. Because the game really touches on them much more than I was expecting, much more than any other comparable video games I’ve played.
What’s your view of the way characters speak in Red Dead Redemption 2? Is it the way people would have spoken at that time?
Certainly they nailed the element of this more polite, conversational style. You call people Mr and Mrs. Even within this gang, this group of outlaws, that they use this much more polite way of describing each other is, I think, fitting. I will say though that this is one of the subjects historians tend to be weak on, because we work with written sources from this period. We don’t have conversational evidence. I know in fact very little about the day-to-day interactions outside of the written documents I work with. So you have to use different kinds of sources to get at this, and it’s not something I’m well-equipped to judge on.
I know Rockstar relies on a lot of movies in how they flesh out the past. Movies like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which clearly influenced the southern elements of that game, and of course the smarter, more interesting westerns. And I know some of those movies did research on the sorts of patterns of speech of the period. People used the same curse words we use today, to be sure. You see plenty of f-bombs dropped in the 1890s, but not in the same context. It would have been probably rare. Generally, working class folks were less governed by the rules of politeness, which is why it’s interesting you see the gang quite formal with each other, given they’re not wealthy people, they’re not immersed in Victorian culture. But it’s still there in an interesting way.
You have a chapter dedicated to the Pinkertons.
They’re unusual because it’s like the one thing that’s not fictional.
Did Rockstar do a good job with the Pinkertons? Given they’re a real group we can make that direct comparison.
When it comes to critiques of historical accuracy, probably the biggest one I have of the game is that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a really great game about the early 1870s. However, it’s not set in the early 1870s. It’s set almost 30 years later, in 1899. So with the Pinkertons, the game really nails that they are these guns for hire for corporate capital. But in the 1890s, the Pinkertons are really involved in labor disputes more than anything. They’re involved in breaking up strikes and infiltrating labor unions. They’re really more of an urban phenomenon. They’re in rural areas, too, but it’s really organized labor and labor unions that are drawing them in, and employers are hiring them as mercenaries to try to disrupt workers from getting a fair shake in their operations.
So, the Pinkertons do hunt western outlaws, and they’re very famous for hunting western outlaws in the early 1870s especially. That’s when they chase down the James–Younger Gang, Jesse James and crew. That happens in 1875. They’re not doing much of that in the 1890s — with one exception. They do chase the so-called Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy’s gang, which was a western story. And indeed, if there’s a single historical set of actors who inspire this game, it is Butch Cassidy and his gang. They must be the closest inspiration behind the Van der Linde gang. The timing is kind of right, it’s late 1890s, the Pinkertons are there, the railroad is there, the railroad boss, the Leviticus Cornwall of real-life, is probably E. H. Harriman, who was the owner of this railroad that gets robbed, and he sics the Pinkertons on the gang. So, pretty good!
Arthur Morgan calls Agent Milton of the Pinkertons a ‘rich man’s toy’, and that is totally spot on. By the 1890s, the Pinkertons’ reputation and the reality of what they were doing was as a hired army for big capitalists. And Leviticus Cornwall, too, is a brilliant stand-in for some of these big figures, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, these titans of that time period.
Rockstar also has its Grand Theft Auto series, which is obviously set in modern times. But some of the games are set in the 80s, which is now 40 years ago. These games are famously parodies of American life. Do you see a point in time when what you’re doing with Red Dead Redemption could be done with the GTA games to inform students about American life?
I think that time has come right now. You’re actually describing what’s probably going to be my third book. I’m primarily a 20th Century American historian. The Red Dead Redemption books are a little earlier than my period of expertise. I’m really a 1900s American historian. I’m planning a new class and hopefully a new book that looks at 20th Century America through not just one game, but several games. And the real conclusion of this class will be in the Grand Theft Auto games set in Miami in the 1980s and in Southern California in the 1990s.
It’s funny, the last few weeks I’ve been playing GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas as a historian trying to do the same sort of treatment to them. In terms of the historical richness and complexity of the period, there’s so much to talk about, right? 1980s immigration, relationships with Cuba, organized cartels. And then the 90s, San Andreas especially is quite interesting because it talks about the African American experience in California, about the crack epidemic, which is a huge political moment. There’s a lot of historical meat to chew on there, to be sure.
The problem is, because those games were made nearly 20 years ago, they’re not quite as sophisticated as Red Dead Redemption 2. They rely on a lot of stereotypes. The misogyny of those games is also quite pronounced. If Rockstar released those games as is as the new GTA, they would have a lot of problems on their hands. Some elements of them have not aged that well.
Nevertheless, they occupy a very important nostalgic position for a lot of gamers. So because of that, I’d love to work with them. Like you said, they’re parodies. They work with a lot of stereotypes to make fun of America, but they also are creating America and views of America around the world. So they’re very powerful cultural artifacts. Very imperfect in many ways. But I’d love to do another class on 20th Century America that ends in that, but also integrates Call of Duty, and Call of Duty’s view of World War 2 and the Cold War. The Mafia games and their view of organized crime and Italian American and African American gangsters in the first half of the 20th Century. Another Rockstar game, LA Noire, is another interesting moment to shed light on mid-century American culture.
So I don’t think I’m done writing about video games. This was such a great place to start because Red Dead Redemption 2 especially is so big, so vast, and so popular — Rockstar recently claimed it’s the seventh best-selling video game of all time — so it’s a great moment because you have a rich game and it’s popular, you have a lot a lot of student and reader interest. But it’s inevitable that the GTA games are up next. I don’t think we have to wait 30 years to do this. I think we can do this fairly soon! But the new ones that are set in the 21st Century, like GTA 5 and likely GTA 6, we might need a little more time, at least as a historian. But I’m eager to see other academics wrestle with the content of these games.
The GTA 6 trailer shows Miami in the modern day. That trailer is remarkable because it takes viral moments from Florida. When the game eventually comes out, might it serve the purpose of presenting a snapshot of what Florida was actually like? Even though the trailer presents ridiculous moments, you can point to real-life moments that are almost exactly the same. You could perhaps point to the Florida Joker character and say this was inspired by a real person.
It looks like the game’s vision of Florida is ridiculous, but let’s be honest, a lot of Florida today is ridiculous! I am not a historian of Rockstar. I don’t study how they make their games. But I’m interested in their games. The trajectory to me seems to be telling more nuanced and subtle and sophisticated stories. I’ve studied most the transition from Red Dead Redemption to Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s really a world of difference in terms of the storytelling. The first game, the only real complicated, nuanced character is a white man. There’s not a lot of nuance and subtlety to the other characters. There are a lot of stereotypes they rely on. But in the second game that’s not true. Yes, the protagonist is a white man, but the people who surround him are fascinating, nuanced characters who show the difficult realities of being a person of color in 1890s America.
Their games are always going to be violent. They’re always going to be risqué in some way. That’s their trademark. But I think they’re moving ahead in telling more nuanced stories about people other than white men. The fact there’s a female protagonist in GTA 6, it seems to be moving in that direction. The arc is in a positive direction.
The audiobook edition of Red Dead’s History will be published by Macmillan Audio on August 6, 2024 and will be available at Audible, Apple Books, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Continue reading...
In an interview with IGN, Olsson discusses the book and delivers his verdict on Red Dead Redemption 2's historical "thoughtfulness", as he puts it. But he also reveals plans to repeat the trick with the Grand Theft Auto games in a new class and book that delves into 20th Century American history, using the likes of Vice City and San Andreas to educate on 1980s Miami and 1990s Southern California. And what does Olsson think of the upcoming GTA 6? Read on to find out.
You’re a historian who uses Red Dead to teach American history in a class you started in 2021. How has that gone?
It’s been a real adventure. And it’s a big experiment, too, in the sense that no other professional historian had tried to do anything like this before, which is shocking in many ways, because historians, we use pop culture all the time. We use film and literature and TV series, but a lot of historians have been reluctant to engage video games for various reasons. And I decided, well, no, I want to take this medium seriously, because it’s so dominant. Of course, I have my own personal history with this as well. I was a huge gamer when I was a kid, and now once again I’m a gamer, since the pandemic, which has shaped a lot of this.
It came as an epiphany when I sat down in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, and played Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time. I was only about 10 hours in, and all these historical nodes in my brain are firing left and right. I can’t turn off my historian identity when I’m playing. And I’m really genuinely surprised at how historically thoughtful the games were. I’m not so much obsessed with this question of accuracy that gets bandied around a lot, when you talk about historical video games. I’m more interested in thoughtfulness and the ways a game tries to capture the mood and the feeling and the range of options and the realities of a time period. And I thought the game did a surprisingly good job at that.
So I got to thinking, well, what have historians said about these games? About the Red Dead Redemption games? So I search in all the traditional academic venues I use and I found nothing. It was just complete silence from academics on this game. And I thought, well, someone’s got to start talking about it, maybe I should be the one! And I also knew among college-age students here in the U.S. and around the world, there’s a great deal of interest in these games. So I thought, why not start teaching an experimental class that uses the fictional content of the games as a springboard to engage the really big, towering dilemmas American historians are usually interested in talking about, like politics and race and gender and class and capitalism, all these big things, which the game often gestures toward, but they don’t go all the way. Of course not! That’s not the point of the game. But they gesture toward it. So I pick up where they’re gesturing toward and make that a much bigger reality for the students.
But it’s been great. The class has been very popular. Students sign up for it in much larger numbers than they do in other history classes. Seeing the passion and enthusiasm of the students in the classroom is what really prompted me to write this book, to turn the class into a longer book form so the wider world could share this adventure I took the students on. So the students were a big part of the inspiration behind this. Seeing how much this resonated with them, using their favorite characters and plot moments from these beloved games, and using them to explore actual big historical questions.
Have your students responded to that? Do you get the sense they’re taking it on more in this class than a traditional history class?
Oh yeah. The ability of the students to digest and soak up really complicated and intricate material is significantly higher in this class than in other classes, just because they’re emotionally present. They’re checked in, they’re dialed in in a way that’s not always the case in my big survey classes here at the university. Some students take history as a requirement, it’s something they’re kind of forced to do. But with this class we have a lot of students show up who are not required at all. They’re taking this as an elective. Many are not history majors, but people are coming from computer science and business and communications, and what brings them there is the love for the games, to be sure, but it’s also the curiosity and passion and thirst for real historical knowledge the games created in them. Video games are so powerful at instilling that curiosity and passion in people. The games themselves usually can’t provide the full story, but they can at least get people fascinated and interested in learning more about it. Video games are such a powerful tool for teaching in that regard.
In the book you talk about Red Dead Redemption’s historical accuracy. You talk about the characters and whether they existed in real life and some of the portrayals of certain groups such as the Pinkertons. When it comes to historical accuracy, how do you feel the game holds up? Has Rockstar done a good job of nailing it? What’s your verdict?
What makes the whole thing complicated is that almost all the names of people and places in the game are fictionalized. There’s no state of Missouri, or Nevada, or Louisiana. There are obvious moments when there are clear connections between Saint Denis in the game and New Orleans in America, or the Wapiti native group and the Lakota Sioux, which are undoubtedly the inspiration behind them. But then there are a lot of things that are just made up.
Ultimately, the game is very good at capturing the look and the feel of 1890s America. In terms of the visuals they really nail it. The architecture, the typefaces, the fonts, the fashion in many regards. So visually, I have very high marks to give to Red Dead 2 especially. Red Dead Redemption 2 is really in a league of its own compared to the first game. The first game is interesting and obviously got the conversation started, but the second game surpasses it in so many ways, especially historically.
However, there is also the question of the contours of everyday life, the kind of questions real Americans cared about in the 1890s, the kind of things that dominated their thinking, the limitations and possibilities in their lives, the social fabric of America. On that question the games are not as good. They’re not bad. They gesture toward a lot of big dilemmas. They don’t fully explore them. They don’t provide the context. And of course I don’t expect them to do so because they are ultimately an entertainment product. The goal is not to educate, but they do so by instilling curiosity.
For example, the Ku Klux Klan is featured, but there’s not really a dominant Ku Klux Klan in the 1890s. They’re dormant at that period. But they do shape the American South in the 1860s and 70s and then again in the 19teens and 20s. So for me, the fact that, yeah, there’s not really a Klan in the 1890s is not that big of a deal. I’m more interested in shedding light on the institutions of white supremacy that existed and functioned in these moments.
I didn’t want the book to be a sort of, let me ruin Red Dead Redemption 2 for you, showing how wrong Rockstar is. Because that’s not really the point. I really enjoy playing this game, and I know millions of people feel the same way. I want the book to serve as a companion to the game, that is going to enrich the play experience, and give it new meaning it may not have had before, to show the sort of background mechanisms and context the game just doesn’t have time to provide. When the game is played hand-in-hand with Red Dead’s History, it can be a powerful tool for getting a deeper understanding not just of this moment in American history, the 1880 to 1920 period, but the big dilemmas that make America what it is today, particularly dilemmas of capitalism and dilemmas of race. Because the game really touches on them much more than I was expecting, much more than any other comparable video games I’ve played.
What’s your view of the way characters speak in Red Dead Redemption 2? Is it the way people would have spoken at that time?
Certainly they nailed the element of this more polite, conversational style. You call people Mr and Mrs. Even within this gang, this group of outlaws, that they use this much more polite way of describing each other is, I think, fitting. I will say though that this is one of the subjects historians tend to be weak on, because we work with written sources from this period. We don’t have conversational evidence. I know in fact very little about the day-to-day interactions outside of the written documents I work with. So you have to use different kinds of sources to get at this, and it’s not something I’m well-equipped to judge on.
I know Rockstar relies on a lot of movies in how they flesh out the past. Movies like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which clearly influenced the southern elements of that game, and of course the smarter, more interesting westerns. And I know some of those movies did research on the sorts of patterns of speech of the period. People used the same curse words we use today, to be sure. You see plenty of f-bombs dropped in the 1890s, but not in the same context. It would have been probably rare. Generally, working class folks were less governed by the rules of politeness, which is why it’s interesting you see the gang quite formal with each other, given they’re not wealthy people, they’re not immersed in Victorian culture. But it’s still there in an interesting way.
You have a chapter dedicated to the Pinkertons.
They’re unusual because it’s like the one thing that’s not fictional.
Did Rockstar do a good job with the Pinkertons? Given they’re a real group we can make that direct comparison.
When it comes to critiques of historical accuracy, probably the biggest one I have of the game is that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a really great game about the early 1870s. However, it’s not set in the early 1870s. It’s set almost 30 years later, in 1899. So with the Pinkertons, the game really nails that they are these guns for hire for corporate capital. But in the 1890s, the Pinkertons are really involved in labor disputes more than anything. They’re involved in breaking up strikes and infiltrating labor unions. They’re really more of an urban phenomenon. They’re in rural areas, too, but it’s really organized labor and labor unions that are drawing them in, and employers are hiring them as mercenaries to try to disrupt workers from getting a fair shake in their operations.
So, the Pinkertons do hunt western outlaws, and they’re very famous for hunting western outlaws in the early 1870s especially. That’s when they chase down the James–Younger Gang, Jesse James and crew. That happens in 1875. They’re not doing much of that in the 1890s — with one exception. They do chase the so-called Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy’s gang, which was a western story. And indeed, if there’s a single historical set of actors who inspire this game, it is Butch Cassidy and his gang. They must be the closest inspiration behind the Van der Linde gang. The timing is kind of right, it’s late 1890s, the Pinkertons are there, the railroad is there, the railroad boss, the Leviticus Cornwall of real-life, is probably E. H. Harriman, who was the owner of this railroad that gets robbed, and he sics the Pinkertons on the gang. So, pretty good!
Arthur Morgan calls Agent Milton of the Pinkertons a ‘rich man’s toy’, and that is totally spot on. By the 1890s, the Pinkertons’ reputation and the reality of what they were doing was as a hired army for big capitalists. And Leviticus Cornwall, too, is a brilliant stand-in for some of these big figures, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, these titans of that time period.
Rockstar also has its Grand Theft Auto series, which is obviously set in modern times. But some of the games are set in the 80s, which is now 40 years ago. These games are famously parodies of American life. Do you see a point in time when what you’re doing with Red Dead Redemption could be done with the GTA games to inform students about American life?
I think that time has come right now. You’re actually describing what’s probably going to be my third book. I’m primarily a 20th Century American historian. The Red Dead Redemption books are a little earlier than my period of expertise. I’m really a 1900s American historian. I’m planning a new class and hopefully a new book that looks at 20th Century America through not just one game, but several games. And the real conclusion of this class will be in the Grand Theft Auto games set in Miami in the 1980s and in Southern California in the 1990s.
It’s funny, the last few weeks I’ve been playing GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas as a historian trying to do the same sort of treatment to them. In terms of the historical richness and complexity of the period, there’s so much to talk about, right? 1980s immigration, relationships with Cuba, organized cartels. And then the 90s, San Andreas especially is quite interesting because it talks about the African American experience in California, about the crack epidemic, which is a huge political moment. There’s a lot of historical meat to chew on there, to be sure.
The problem is, because those games were made nearly 20 years ago, they’re not quite as sophisticated as Red Dead Redemption 2. They rely on a lot of stereotypes. The misogyny of those games is also quite pronounced. If Rockstar released those games as is as the new GTA, they would have a lot of problems on their hands. Some elements of them have not aged that well.
Nevertheless, they occupy a very important nostalgic position for a lot of gamers. So because of that, I’d love to work with them. Like you said, they’re parodies. They work with a lot of stereotypes to make fun of America, but they also are creating America and views of America around the world. So they’re very powerful cultural artifacts. Very imperfect in many ways. But I’d love to do another class on 20th Century America that ends in that, but also integrates Call of Duty, and Call of Duty’s view of World War 2 and the Cold War. The Mafia games and their view of organized crime and Italian American and African American gangsters in the first half of the 20th Century. Another Rockstar game, LA Noire, is another interesting moment to shed light on mid-century American culture.
So I don’t think I’m done writing about video games. This was such a great place to start because Red Dead Redemption 2 especially is so big, so vast, and so popular — Rockstar recently claimed it’s the seventh best-selling video game of all time — so it’s a great moment because you have a rich game and it’s popular, you have a lot a lot of student and reader interest. But it’s inevitable that the GTA games are up next. I don’t think we have to wait 30 years to do this. I think we can do this fairly soon! But the new ones that are set in the 21st Century, like GTA 5 and likely GTA 6, we might need a little more time, at least as a historian. But I’m eager to see other academics wrestle with the content of these games.
The GTA 6 trailer shows Miami in the modern day. That trailer is remarkable because it takes viral moments from Florida. When the game eventually comes out, might it serve the purpose of presenting a snapshot of what Florida was actually like? Even though the trailer presents ridiculous moments, you can point to real-life moments that are almost exactly the same. You could perhaps point to the Florida Joker character and say this was inspired by a real person.
It looks like the game’s vision of Florida is ridiculous, but let’s be honest, a lot of Florida today is ridiculous! I am not a historian of Rockstar. I don’t study how they make their games. But I’m interested in their games. The trajectory to me seems to be telling more nuanced and subtle and sophisticated stories. I’ve studied most the transition from Red Dead Redemption to Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s really a world of difference in terms of the storytelling. The first game, the only real complicated, nuanced character is a white man. There’s not a lot of nuance and subtlety to the other characters. There are a lot of stereotypes they rely on. But in the second game that’s not true. Yes, the protagonist is a white man, but the people who surround him are fascinating, nuanced characters who show the difficult realities of being a person of color in 1890s America.
Their games are always going to be violent. They’re always going to be risqué in some way. That’s their trademark. But I think they’re moving ahead in telling more nuanced stories about people other than white men. The fact there’s a female protagonist in GTA 6, it seems to be moving in that direction. The arc is in a positive direction.
The audiobook edition of Red Dead’s History will be published by Macmillan Audio on August 6, 2024 and will be available at Audible, Apple Books, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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