Patrick Stokes is a professor of philosophy who specializes in continental philosophy, existential philosophy, and the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. In this episode, we discuss the themes of nostalgia, freedom, choice, and consequences in Red Dead Redemption 2.
00:25:45.420He's just like, no, I've got to play the good version.
00:25:47.540So I didn't even know, actually, until I finished afterwards, that there was actually a bad ending you can get as a result of making unpleasant decisions.
00:25:55.240But, yeah, I just can't bring myself to do it, which says something about, you know, the power of immersion in games, the way in which you are actually kind of immersed in this world, you know, or at least particularly in some kind of games, right?
00:26:08.160You get sucked in in a way where very often in games you end up doing absolutely horrendous things because the game mechanics force you to or they, you know, reward you for doing so.
00:26:18.340And we tell ourselves, oh, yeah, well, that's okay.
00:26:22.560But then when you find yourself with genuine choices like this, you do actually get a conscience kick in and you do actually, you know, choose the good over the bad, which is really kind of intriguing.
00:26:34.100Now, I think it's whenever I play Red Dead Redemption 2 or even any like another immersive video game is, you know, Grand Theft Auto, which Rockstar Games made both of these games.
00:26:49.020With Red Dead Redemption 2, yeah, like the choice means like, okay, there's some instances where you have to like kill people that you probably don't want to.
00:26:58.540That's part of Arthur Morgan's story development.
00:27:01.480There's lots of choices and you have the option to do the good thing.
00:27:04.720But there's certain parts of the game where because of the people he's around, particularly this guy named Micah, who's just a terrible, terrible person,
00:27:14.440And that made me think about the role of friendship and friends and the influence they have on you.
00:27:19.780Sometimes, you know, like I think Aristotle would have something to say about this.
00:27:23.580Like, yeah, if you walk around with a bunch of outlaws who are doing terrible things, like you might end up making yourself do terrible things.
00:27:32.020I mean, for Aristotle, that's kind of the core of friendship is, you know, or the highest level of friendship is not there just entertaining each other,
00:27:39.360but is actually trying to make each other better sort of people.
00:27:42.060And, yeah, in that sense, you could say some of the people that Arthur's around are not good for him in that respect or are not his friends in that respect.
00:27:48.580Mind you, I don't think Micah's ever really his friend.
00:28:21.160You feel kind of like, oh, gee, I don't know.
00:28:24.300But it's an interesting thing because it does actually throw you out of the straightforward kind of, yay, I'm doing this, that games normally require you to have.
00:28:36.220Which is really interesting because, I mean, the thing with game mechanics and the way in which they force you to do things that if you did them in real life would be horrendous is that, in some respects, games are actually kind of like porn in that they invite you to endorse what's going on on screen, right?
00:28:55.240Insofar as you're meant to enjoy it, you're meant to be sort of endorsing what's going on.
00:28:58.820And games like this can make you sort of go, oh, yeah, I have to do this thing for the mechanics, but I really don't want to.
00:29:05.640And that tension is really interesting to me.
00:29:07.700The idea that there's this tension between what I have to do to win the game and what I, as an actual real flesh and blood person, would choose to do in the same sort of situation.
00:29:16.820That disconnect is really interesting.
00:29:18.760We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:30:00.880So, you know, Sarch talks about, you know, if your alarm clock goes off in the morning, you are, in fact, free to turn it off and keep sleeping or to get up and go to work.
00:30:15.180He calls these guardrails against anxiety, if you like.
00:30:18.940They're like these things we put in place to force ourselves to believe that we have to act in a certain way because that takes the responsibility of freedom off us.
00:30:27.100You know, and it's an interesting thing that, you know, philosophers of the existentialist tradition are always regarded as almost philosophers of radical freedom.
00:30:34.760And a lot of the philosophers who came after them who were really critical of them said, yeah, they've totally overblown how free human beings are.
00:30:42.140But at the same time, those philosophers are all like, freedom's not always nice.
00:30:47.300Freedom is actually a really unpleasant situation to be in.
00:30:51.220It's probably better than the alternative.
00:31:16.140But I mean, maybe Dutch, maybe he wasn't.
00:31:18.880Like, maybe he kind of fooled himself thinking he was really free, but he wasn't.
00:31:21.260Yeah, I mean, you could say that in some ways, their freedom ends up kind of entrapping them in an interesting sort of way because they're trying to live outside of the structures of polite society.
00:31:33.260But, of course, the world catches up with them.
00:31:35.380And that's a big part of what's going on in this.
00:31:37.300So they rob a train belonging to an extremely wealthy business guy, and he sends the Pinkertons after them.
00:31:43.320And so their whole world sort of gets encroached upon.
00:31:46.040So the idea that they have this freedom, well, they're not free from consequences.
00:31:49.640They're not free from the results of their actions.
00:31:52.940And you could say, well, that's true of everyone, right?
00:31:55.160Nobody actually has kind of freedom from consequence.
00:31:57.600Nobody has a freedom that doesn't entail bad things can happen as a result of that freedom.
00:32:03.020And the idea that just living free without a care in the world and without any kind of, you know, commitments or responsibilities isn't really true because the world just ensnares you in that way.
00:32:13.060Yeah, that's a common, you know, this whole story is driven.
00:32:15.560They're just constantly doing these missions to get money.
00:32:17.820If we just get a little bit more money, we'll finally be able to make this Tahiti thing happen.
00:32:23.180And of course, it never works out that way.
00:32:24.880The snare gets tighter and tighter around them.
00:32:28.660Yeah, and also just contingency happens, right?
00:32:31.460I mean, one of the things that's kind of cool about the game is even though it's got a really nice narrative structure to it,
00:32:36.460it's also very good about the fact that just totally random stuff happens that throws your plans out or whatever.
00:32:42.540So, I mean, there's one whole chapter where they end up, the whole landscape is fictionalized, I should say this.
00:32:47.200It's set in the US, but it happens in fictional states that clearly represent real parts of the American geography, but they're not actually real states.
00:32:54.940And at one point, their ship is caught in a storm and they end up in what's clearly meant to be Cuba.
00:32:59.260They don't call it Cuba, but it's meant to be somewhere like Cuba.
00:33:02.140And so there's this idea that just radical contingency can happen.
00:33:05.040Things get in the way and you end up literally shipwrecked.
00:33:07.200Yeah, I remember when that part of that, when that happened in the story, I was like, this is so random.
00:33:12.700It was like, I'm on a tropical island.
00:33:15.520And the missions there are just bizarre too.
00:33:18.160I mean, it was fun, but it was kind of off, it was off the beaten path.
00:33:21.740Yeah, and it's interesting too, the way you get thrown into this stuff in a kind of, you know, in media res, right?
00:33:27.780You're thrown right into the middle of it.
00:33:28.920You wake up and you're on a beach and you're like, I have no idea what the hell's going on here.
00:33:41.820That way, you're sort of walking around looking for stuff.
00:33:44.620But it's really well done the way it does that, that it throws you into that.
00:33:49.460The other thing it does really well too is the way some of the characters die.
00:33:53.700Yeah, you have some deaths that are kind of scripted, dunamant sort of deaths where somebody dies in a way that makes a certain kind of narrative sense.
00:34:01.620But then you have other characters who are just walking along and suddenly get their head blown off.
00:34:25.500She was like, oh, God, what happened then?
00:34:27.040But it's interesting that it's, you know, there's this quote from de Beauvoir that I really like, which is at the end of her book, which is a whole book describing her mother's death.
00:34:35.400At the very end of that book, there's this paragraph where she says, everyone's death is an accident for them.
00:34:42.880That is, for everyone, their death is this totally contingent, random thing that just appears out of nowhere.
00:34:48.980Now, even if there's already a lead up to it or whatever else, what she means is there's a sense in which death is this unwelcome alien visitor that just disrupts our lives.
00:34:57.840And sometimes in Red Dead Redemption, that's how death appears.
00:35:01.000It just emerges out of nowhere in these sudden, shocking kind of ways.
00:35:07.420He gets a tuberculosis diagnosis in the game.
00:35:12.040And what's interesting, the way they did the mechanics on this or the story, it was really good.
00:35:17.440Because I remember when you start, you're playing it, and then at a certain point in the game, you start noticing Arthur coughing, just like a little bit, not much.
00:35:24.560And I remember when that first happened, I thought, oh, I should get some medicine because maybe it'll make me feel better.
00:35:29.140I had no clue that he had tuberculosis, but then it gets progressively worse, and then there's the point where he gets the TB diagnosis.
00:35:38.280Like, you find he actually, oh, man, this guy's got to, he's going to die.
00:35:41.200How does that TB diagnosis change Arthur Morgan?
00:35:45.500And then how can his experience, knowing he's going to die, teach us about, you know, Kiergaard's idea of the certain uncertainty of death?
00:35:55.820It really puts this amazing note of finitude in the game, which is really quite sort of powerful.
00:36:04.660And, I mean, firstly, it's an amazingly brave choice because TB is such a common way to die in that era.
00:36:11.380I think there's something like, you know, a fifth or whatever of all humans who have ever lived have probably died of TB.
00:36:17.120Kiergaard actually died of a form of tuberculosis.
00:36:20.680He died, not the lung version like Arthur has, but he died of what's called Pott's disease, which is like a, basically tuberculosis that gets into the spinal column.
00:36:28.820And, you know, so it's a very, very common sort of thing.
00:36:31.380So it's also kind of interesting in that it suddenly introduces into the narrative this really profound awareness of finitude.
00:36:39.140And that's already there in the game, right?
00:36:41.000Because we know that this world is running out.
00:36:42.740We know that the way of life these people live is running out.
00:36:45.660But suddenly you as the main character, your time is also running out and you're not going to outlive the characters around you or not all of them, which is really kind of intriguing.
00:36:55.580And it does create this real sort of focus almost that there's, you know, your time is actually coming to an end.
00:37:02.640You've got to do these things, but you're going to get progressively weaker as you go along, less capable of doing it.
00:37:06.840And that's kind of, you know, really interesting.
00:37:11.440And, yeah, you mentioned Kierkegaard on what he calls certain uncertainty.
00:37:16.120That is, he says that the thing about death is that every single one of us is going to die, but exactly when it can happen is completely open-ended, right?
00:37:25.000You could die in the next five minutes.
00:37:26.280You could die, you know, 50 years from now.
00:37:28.360Now, it's totally open-ended and, you know, therefore you can't simply buy into the sort of, you know, live every moment as if it's your last thing.
00:37:36.940What you have to do is the even more complicated thing of living every moment as if it's both your last and the first in a long life to come.
00:37:44.360So making every second count, but making every second count in a way where it could go either way.
00:37:49.120Now, in the case of Arthur, though, he's got this sort of end point that's looming.
00:37:53.680Of course, he could die any time between now and then, and that's just the nature of Arthur's existence.
00:37:58.360But there is something to be said for what Kierkegaard says about death being the schoolmaster of earnestness, that death isn't about wondering about what the afterlife is going to be like, but it's about concentrating you on how you live here and now in the mortal moments given to you.
00:38:15.240And I think that's an interesting thing in a game that, as I say, has like, you know, 60-something hours of scripted gameplay.
00:38:20.780You do, I think, end up really counting your moments once that TB diagnosis has happened, right?
00:38:28.140That you know this is actually going to come to an end and it's going to come to an end before too much longer, which is, yeah, really, really poignant and really powerful.
00:38:36.160And then there's that moment with the nun that you mentioned where he says to the nun, it's, again, a pivotal moment for the character.
00:38:41.580I don't think he says this anywhere else.
00:38:55.680Is he afraid of dying itself and not existing?
00:38:59.120Is he afraid of what's going to happen to the people that he cares about?
00:39:02.200Like, what is it about death that made Arthur Morgan afraid of it?
00:39:06.160Yeah, there's at least three different ways in which we fear death.
00:39:08.920So there's, as you say, there's the death, the fear of what will happen to my survivors, who will carry out my projects, that sort of thing.
00:39:16.120I've elsewhere referred to it as a who will feed my goldfish fear of death.
00:39:19.600Then there's this fear of non-existence as such.
00:39:23.940So the fear of just not there being nothing it's like to be me anymore.
00:39:29.400Kathy Behrens, who's a Canadian philosopher, has done some really good work on that.
00:39:32.140And then there's also, I guess, the fear of what comes after death, which is real enough for many people.
00:39:37.880But then we know from Arthur, he doesn't think there's anything there.
00:39:40.780And he said, you know, but although there's that, he does actually say, what is it?
00:39:43.780He says, you know, that I'm assuming hell will be extremely unpleasant.
00:39:47.580And if it's not, I'll feel like I've been sold a bill of goods.
00:39:50.540So, yeah, there's this interesting sort of attitude to the possibility of damnation where I don't, none of the characters really seem to believe it, but it's kind of there in the background.
00:39:59.920So, okay, death can make, is like the school of earnestness.
00:40:03.640And it seems like Arthur, he becomes earnest after he gets his TB diagnosis.
00:40:09.320Like, and I think he, I think this is like the, I think this is the redemption part.
00:40:11.760This is like where Red Dead Redemption becomes Red Dead Redemption is he's, he realizes the Tahiti thing.
00:40:19.020They're never going back to the way things were.
00:40:21.700And he, I guess there's a moment he just decides, I gotta, I gotta make the best of what I got right now.
00:40:27.440Yeah. And, and again, that scene with the nun, I think is so kind of pivotal there because she basically says to him, you know, you have to take a risk and take a risk on love because he's, she says, you know, you're, every time I see you, you're a happiness when you're doing what are essentially loving sort of things.
00:40:45.300And that moment where she says, you know, take a risk that love is possible, that interestingly actually kind of reminds me of another Danish philosopher, a guy called K.E. Lustrup, a 20th century Danish philosopher who talks about things like trust and mercy and sincerity as what he calls sovereign expressions of life, right?
00:41:04.200They're not things that we do necessarily.
00:41:06.600They're things that life almost imposes on us and we can either allow them to operate, allow trust to work in the world and open things up, allow sincerity to work in the world, or we can kind of get in their way and spoil them.
00:41:18.220And that in a way is kind of almost what she's saying to Arthur is just, just, you know, give the goodness that you are aware of in the world.
00:41:24.960Give that a chance, give love a chance to sort of, you know, express itself in the world and do some good things.
00:41:32.720It involves him taking, again, to use some Kierkegaardian language, a leap.
00:41:37.040And that leap was he turned against Dutch and he was going to help out John Marston who picks up Red Dead Redemption 1.
00:41:45.880And that story, I think it's called, I call it like Arthur's Last Ride, where he gets the key from Abigail for the money that Dutch has been hoarding.
00:41:55.700And he says, I got to go, there's one more thing I got to do.
00:41:59.940And it just, it destroys me every time I watch it.
00:42:03.460You know, he gets on his horse, put on the hat, like it's just done cinematically, it's done fantastic.
00:42:08.880And there's this song, it's like very soulful, like that's the way it is.
00:42:12.960And he's just riding on his horse and you, he starts hearing voices from, you know, his past, like the story that you've just played through of him, people just saying, you're a good, you're a good man.
00:42:27.200Or you got to try to do the good thing.
00:42:29.900And you could tell like this, like that, like it just, that's the part that destroys me.
00:42:34.340Like that's the, when I start, that's when I start crying like a baby.
00:42:36.420It's like this guy, he's trying to redeem himself at this point.
00:42:42.620And it's, yeah, again, this idea that there's all this stuff that makes up a life.
00:42:49.180And that death, and we know he's riding to death.
00:42:51.560We know that whatever happens next, he's not going to survive.
00:42:53.400But that's just clear from the narrative, you know, trajectory of the thing.
00:42:57.180As he's riding there, you do get that sense, which I think is really kind of pervasive of death as being the thing that fixes whatever you were, right?
00:43:05.340That when you die, that's the end of possibility.
00:43:07.660That whatever you were, that's fixed at that moment.
00:43:10.500And that's all the stuff that he's carrying with him to his death is these things he's done.
00:44:03.100Is there any existential, is there a reason, do existential philosophers have something there that can explain like why that hits you so hard?
00:44:11.920I think because that's all anyone can do, right?
00:44:14.940You know, there's a sense in which, there's some sense in which every life's a failure, right?
00:44:19.020Every life, you know, leaves something undone or leaves something unfinished.
00:44:22.160But all you can do is say that you, you know, did your best, so to speak.
00:44:27.260And yeah, that is, I think, a sort of a powerful moment.
00:44:31.120But also, as I say, the fact that it's a narrativising of the life at death.
00:44:35.560And so it's a summing up of everything that there is.
00:44:44.420You don't get to, you know, go back and replay some things.
00:44:47.820And yes, okay, you can actually just restart the game if you want, but it's an awfully long way to go.
00:44:54.160I had a student a few years ago, actually, who was doing a thesis on permadeath in games, right?
00:44:59.900The way in which in some games, the game mechanics are such that if you die, that's it.
00:45:03.920You can't play the game anymore, right?
00:45:05.420It's not very popular for obvious reasons, but it's an option.
00:45:08.280And it does neatly sort of symbolise the fact that death is actually a one-and-done thing.
00:45:12.320That, you know, once it's over, it's over.
00:45:14.860And I think that is one of the things that makes that scene so powerful.
00:45:19.260So you've written a lot about the themes of nostalgia and loss in Red Dead Redemption 2.
00:45:24.600We've kind of been talking about that, how it just, the past is always, is very pervasive in this game.
00:45:29.560There's pictures, the characters are always talking about the past.
00:45:33.760How else did you see this idea of nostalgia and loss appear in the game?
00:45:38.520Yeah, I think there's this interesting kind of, as I say, double nostalgia in it almost.
00:45:46.020That, you know, on the one hand, these characters are living in a world that's already haunted by loss and already haunted by death and by the dead.
00:45:54.260The dead are really present in this game.
00:45:55.980And yet there's also a sense for us in which these characters, if they had lived, would now be dead.
00:46:00.080And so I'm kind of reminded here, actually, of Roland Barthes talks about this, this famous photo of Lewis Powell, who was one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination plot, who was captured alive.
00:46:12.100And there's this very famous photo of him sitting in shackles on the deck of a Union ironclad ship and staring directly into the camera.
00:46:21.000And Roland Barthes talks about this in his book, Camera Lucid, and he says what's powerful about this is, at least in part, the fact that we have a sense he is going to die and he has already died, right?
00:46:31.900We know this is a man who's waiting to die, but also we know that he is, for us, long dead.
00:46:35.820And that kind of layering, if you like, you know, as I say, gives a certain kind of poignance to these moments.
00:46:45.660But there's also just, as I say, the fact that these characters are all longing for a past that's already irrecoverable to them, that's already gone.
00:46:55.920I've said at one point that it's kind of like the old elegiac poems that you get in, say, the old English, like, you know, the Beowulf type old English poetry corpus.
00:47:07.300You know, there's a poem called The Wanderer, which, you know, has this whole passage where it's like, where is the horse and where is the rider?
00:47:12.740Which Tolkien then picks up and uses, right?
00:47:14.860Remember that line gets used in The Two Towers.
00:47:17.900You know, there's this sense of looking at the world and going, oh, man, well, where did everyone go?
00:47:25.240You know, and it's actually quite nice when you see that in the old English poems, things like there's a poem called, or known to us as The Ruin, where the poet is clearly standing in what we would now recognize as the old Roman baths in Bath in England.
00:47:37.460And saying, look at all these stones, look at all these pools, what happened to the people who made it?
00:47:41.740They've all gone, a thousand years have passed, and they've all disappeared.
00:47:45.320And, of course, for us, that poet has also disappeared.
00:47:49.280And that's the sort of thing that, that sort of, as I say, double poignancy that I think is so well done in Red Dead Redemption, that you've got characters who are already lost, pining for something else which is already lost.
00:48:01.300And there's a few characters who have some, maybe a bit of awareness about this pining, like John Marston had this line where he said something like, you know, we've been talking about the good old days, and maybe they weren't as good as we remembered.
00:48:18.740And, like, we weren't the people that we said we were either.
00:48:22.360And I thought that was really a very, like, some great self-awareness.
00:48:26.540Yeah, I mean, one of the things I really like about Kerk Gore is that he's so attuned to the human capacity for self-deception, right?
00:48:35.320He's so attuned to the way we tell flattering stories about ourselves, about, you know, and part of that's telling stories about the past, that the past, because we narrativize the past, you have to, to make sense of it, right?
00:48:47.560To make sense of anything, you have to narrativize it.
00:48:49.420But to tell a narrative, you have to cut detail out.
00:48:51.680You have to trim things in a way that serves the narrative.
00:48:54.920If you don't, then you just get a massive, unintelligible detail.
00:48:58.620And so there's always a sense of falsification involved in the way we tell the past, because we have to tell it as a story, rather than simply living it as it's happening.
00:49:06.520What's that famous quote there from Kerk Gore?
00:49:15.320The full quote is something like, philosophy is perfectly correct when it says that life can only be understood backwards, but then it misses out the next, the corollary that life has to be living.