The Art of Manliness - The Existential in Red Dead Redemption 2

00:00:00.000 I think that, in moderation, they're a fine source of the kind of passive entertainment

00:00:17.780 we all need little doses of in our lives.

00:00:20.200 But for me personally, I rarely play video games because there's just too much other

00:00:23.620 stuff I'd rather do instead.

00:00:25.380 There is one notable exception to my ambivalence towards video games, however, a game which

00:00:29.600 I played for hours with thorough enjoyment and zero regret, Red Dead Redemption 2.

00:00:34.940 It's a video game that's more immersive and story-like than most others and even gets you

00:00:38.800 reflecting on the existential layers of life.

00:00:41.460 Here to discuss those deeper layers of Red Dead Redemption 2 with me is Patrick Stokes,

00:00:45.480 a professor of philosophy and a fellow fan of the game.

00:00:47.860 We combine two of my favorite things, Red Dead Redemption 2 and the philosophy of Soren

00:00:52.660 Kierkegaard in a conversation on the existential themes you can find in the game, like nostalgia,

00:00:57.740 freedom, choice and consequences, and the certain uncertainty of death.

00:01:02.860 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash rdr2.

00:01:06.580 All right, Patrick Stokes, welcome to the show.

00:01:28.800 Thanks for having me.

00:01:29.820 So you are a professor of philosophy who specializes in continental philosophy, existential philosophy,

00:01:35.460 particularly the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard.

00:01:38.540 How did you make the Dane with awesome hair the subject of your academic career?

00:01:45.020 He did have awesome hair.

00:01:46.820 That is one thing we know.

00:01:48.080 I think there's four drawings from life that we have of Kierkegaard.

00:01:51.660 He never sat for a photo.

00:01:52.680 He didn't quite live long enough for that.

00:01:54.020 But yeah, he did have absolutely magnificent hair and had the good sense to die at the age

00:01:58.460 of 42 before that started to go south on him.

00:02:00.560 So yeah, I got into Kierkegaard actually as an undergrad, which sounds like a really pretentious

00:02:06.060 thing to say.

00:02:06.840 But I sort of got to university not really knowing anything about philosophy, discovered

00:02:12.420 it more or less by accident, and got really taken by existentialism, particularly Jean-Paul

00:02:17.000 Sartre.

00:02:17.480 And that then led me to Kierkegaard actually, sort of looking at the footnotes to Sartre

00:02:21.980 where he talks a bit about Kierkegaard.

00:02:23.380 And he's just intriguingly weird.

00:02:26.060 He's a weird philosopher in many ways because he's an odd sort of guy.

00:02:31.280 He never actually held down a job or anything like that.

00:02:33.980 He lived off his father's inheritance.

00:02:35.560 He published all these books that were published under fake names, although the names weren't really

00:02:41.040 meant to hide who was behind them all.

00:02:43.600 They were there to sort of try and make you as a reader stop and think about, well, hang

00:02:48.320 on, where do I stand in relation to this?

00:02:49.980 Do I really want to believe a guy with a name like Hilarious Bookbinder or John of Silence?

00:02:55.920 How am I going to relate myself to these wacky sorts of pseudonymous names?

00:03:00.520 And I just sort of got into him because he's got this really kind of existential urgency to

00:03:06.560 him almost, right?

00:03:07.540 When you're reading philosophy, I mean, and this is actually, and Kierkegaard knows, this is

00:03:11.460 one of the attractions of philosophy is you can abstract yourself, right?

00:03:15.020 You can just sort of lose yourself in pure abstract ideas and all your problems and whatever

00:03:19.440 else sort of melt away.

00:03:20.840 What Kierkegaard's really good at doing is calling you back to the fact that, now, hang

00:03:24.560 on, you're a living, breathing, mortal human being sitting here reading this work right

00:03:29.860 now.

00:03:30.740 And, you know, he's not afraid to say to you, hey, is reading this book the best use of

00:03:34.780 your time?

00:03:35.200 Is thinking about this stuff the best use of your time?

00:03:36.960 Or should you be doing something else right now?

00:03:38.620 Well, that's one of the things I think is kind of wonderful and at the same time, slightly

00:03:42.920 terrifying about Kierkegaard is that you can always hear the clock ticking in the background.

00:03:48.500 Yeah, that's why I like him because he writes, it's funny.

00:03:52.020 He's sarcastic.

00:03:53.600 And I've said this on another podcast.

00:03:54.680 We did a podcast with Jacob Halland about the present age.

00:03:57.980 Oh, awesome.

00:03:58.400 Yeah.

00:03:58.720 Oh, Jake's great.

00:03:59.800 Yeah.

00:04:00.440 And we just talked, one of the things I said there is whenever I read Kierkegaard, I feel

00:04:04.980 like he's grabbing me by the lapels and he's just asking me, he's like, do you really believe

00:04:08.860 what you say you believe?

00:04:10.740 Like, that's how I feel.

00:04:11.820 And I'm like, oh man, I don't know.

00:04:13.420 Do I?

00:04:13.880 Do I?

00:04:14.540 Do I really want to will one thing?

00:04:16.060 Am I willing one thing?

00:04:16.980 I don't know.

00:04:17.960 And you feel discombobulated afterwards.

00:04:20.580 Yeah.

00:04:21.040 And yeah, and he can be genuinely laugh out loud funny.

00:04:23.500 He can be heartbreaking.

00:04:25.140 Some philosophers can write and some can't, right?

00:04:27.320 And if you can't write as a philosopher, that's not necessarily the end of the world because

00:04:30.700 you're not actually trying to write poetry.

00:04:32.420 You're not trying to write something for fun necessarily, but Kierkegaard considered himself

00:04:36.280 fundamentally a kind of poet.

00:04:38.380 He never actually, or maybe once or twice, he sort of briefly mentions himself as a philosopher,

00:04:43.000 but he always says, look, fundamentally, I'm not a philosopher.

00:04:45.480 I'm a kind of poet.

00:04:47.240 So besides being a continental philosopher, you're also a fan of one of my all-time favorite

00:04:52.200 video games.

00:04:53.220 It's Red Dead Redemption 2.

00:04:55.420 It's part of a series.

00:04:56.440 There's Red Dead Redemption 1.

00:04:58.000 Red Dead Redemption 2, it's so funny.

00:04:59.340 I'm not a gamer.

00:05:00.200 Like, I don't play video.

00:05:00.900 I'll play Fortnite with my kids every now and then.

00:05:04.100 But when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out, like I, every night, I was like, it was like I

00:05:08.580 was reading a book.

00:05:09.320 I'm going to go spend 30 minutes.

00:05:11.060 And it's funny.

00:05:12.000 I talked to other men my age, same thing.

00:05:14.980 They're like, oh man, that game is amazing.

00:05:17.320 I'm not a gamer, but that was awesome.

00:05:19.280 Another funny story.

00:05:20.340 I have a friend who's an anesthesiologist and he was doing work on this.

00:05:24.320 He was an older gentleman, probably late 60s, early 70s.

00:05:26.820 And he was there when this gentleman woke up from his surgery.

00:05:30.840 And the guy was like, oh man, I just had the most amazing dream.

00:05:34.920 And my friend Chris was like, oh wow, tell me about it.

00:05:37.660 And this old, this guy, you know, 70 year old guy just looked at him like, have you ever

00:05:41.460 played the game Red Dead Redemption 2?

00:05:43.400 And he was like, I was on my horse.

00:05:47.900 And I think it's just funny that this game has so much impact on grown men.

00:05:52.640 I'm curious, how did a continental philosopher end up being a fan of a third person shooter

00:05:57.180 video game set in the American Wild West?

00:06:01.400 Yeah, well, I'm in the same boat, Brett.

00:06:02.920 I'm not a gamer, really.

00:06:04.640 I've never had a game console at all.

00:06:06.820 That was always the thing that the cool kids had that I got to occasionally go around to

00:06:09.340 their house and play when I was growing up.

00:06:10.680 But I never sort of managed to have one for myself.

00:06:12.220 But what happened was COVID happened.

00:06:15.600 And I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, where we had one of the longest lockdowns, not entirely

00:06:21.340 all in one hit.

00:06:22.440 It was in a few different chunks of lockdown.

00:06:24.600 But we had really, really, I think it was 260 something days in lockdown.

00:06:29.560 And just before the first one of those hit, I'm like, well, if this is going to happen,

00:06:34.380 I'm going to go out and get a console.

00:06:36.680 Went for the Xbox rather than the PlayStation.

00:06:38.300 I'm still not entirely sure why.

00:06:40.000 But anyway, got that set up.

00:06:42.600 And of course, you get like the subscription thing where you can download a set number

00:06:46.100 of games for free at any given time.

00:06:48.000 Not for free, because you pay a subscription at any time.

00:06:50.420 And to my surprise, Red Dead Redemption 2 was there.

00:06:52.940 And I'd heard about it.

00:06:53.800 I knew it had heard all these sort of, you know, really gushy reviews of how great it

00:06:57.140 was.

00:06:57.960 And I thought, yeah, I'll give it a crack.

00:06:59.440 And the result, as I say, is you get, as you say, absolutely sucked into it for a very,

00:07:06.260 very long period of time.

00:07:07.480 Because there's something like 60 hours or so of gameplay, depending how you actually

00:07:10.660 play it.

00:07:11.120 And it does, as you say, you sort of alluded to there, in some respects, it's almost wrong

00:07:17.940 to call it a game.

00:07:18.820 Because while there are obviously game mechanics holding the whole thing together, in some

00:07:23.000 respects, it's more like watching a story or, you know, being led through a story.

00:07:27.320 You've got some control over it.

00:07:29.080 But it is really, really strong narrative.

00:07:31.820 And I mean, it's beautifully, beautifully done.

00:07:33.840 It is so, you know, just aesthetically beautiful.

00:07:37.180 And the performances are actually really astonishing.

00:07:40.280 Like, it's so well acted.

00:07:41.900 So as soon as I started playing it, you know, it's that first scene where they're up in

00:07:44.180 the mountains and characters dying.

00:07:45.920 I remember like going, wow, this is not at all what I expected.

00:07:49.660 And just being completely sucked in.

00:07:52.960 And it probably helped, of course.

00:07:53.900 This was happening during, as I say, the start of lockdown.

00:07:56.220 And so it's a period where we're thinking about death.

00:07:58.100 We're thinking about things like isolation.

00:08:00.080 And I just finished writing a book, which was about dead people online.

00:08:04.220 And so I was very much kind of in that space of thinking about the way in which death and

00:08:09.720 the past are mediated through digital spaces to us.

00:08:13.400 So it was just a really amazing confluence of things that all happened at once.

00:08:18.200 Yeah, I think you're right.

00:08:18.800 It's a beautifully done game.

00:08:20.100 And for me, you know, you do have the game stuff, the mashing buttons and shooting people.

00:08:24.420 But for me, I don't know if this is the same for you, but when I've talked to other people,

00:08:28.440 it's been the same.

00:08:29.720 That, you know, mash buttons and kill people, that was just to move the story along so I

00:08:34.540 could see the cut scenes and like follow these characters.

00:08:37.120 So that's how I played it.

00:08:39.180 Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:40.000 I mean, you can play other things that are as well sort of, you know, put together.

00:08:43.520 I play a bit of Sniper Elite sometimes, which again, really beautiful, well done, but couldn't

00:08:48.720 really care less about the story, particularly to the extent that it even exists.

00:08:51.940 Whereas this is really narratively well-made, well-constructed and just, yeah, incredibly

00:08:57.600 engaging and emotionally engaging.

00:08:59.940 I had, you know, my next door neighbor played it through and then he, you know, I was like,

00:09:03.580 I'm not going to spoil anything for you.

00:09:04.700 I'm not going to spoil anything.

00:09:05.780 And then every so often, I just get messages from him going, oh my God, oh my God, this

00:09:09.620 thing has happened.

00:09:10.440 He's just like so emotionally thrown around by it.

00:09:13.720 And I think that's a really common reaction to it.

00:09:16.580 It's the only video game that's made me cry.

00:09:19.280 Yeah, same.

00:09:20.200 I think, yeah, it's just, it is really quite just deeply moving.

00:09:23.480 Okay.

00:09:23.780 So we're going to talk about this.

00:09:24.840 What I love about this, that you're a philosopher and you love Red Dead Redemption too, is that

00:09:29.200 when I was playing this game, I was thinking, man, there's so many philosophical themes in

00:09:33.260 this thing.

00:09:33.820 Why?

00:09:34.240 There's got to be some philosopher or some philosophy students who's written about this.

00:09:39.240 And I Googled it and I found you.

00:09:41.560 So I want to talk about those philosophical themes.

00:09:43.480 So it's very existential, which I think is a, I think might be one of the other reasons

00:09:47.560 why it's called to you.

00:09:49.100 So for those who haven't played the game or it's been a while since you played it, let's

00:09:53.860 do spoiler alerts.

00:09:54.700 We're going to be talking about, I think the part of the story here.

00:09:57.560 So if you haven't played the game, you want to, you should probably stop listening and

00:10:00.420 go play the game.

00:10:01.540 But big picture, like what's the plot of, of Red Dead Redemption 2?

00:10:07.020 Sure.

00:10:07.420 So it's a prequel to the earlier game, Red Dead Redemption, which I still haven't played.

00:10:11.360 Actually, I have played Red Dead Revolver, which is the really old one, but I haven't

00:10:14.400 actually played the other one, but it's a prequel to that.

00:10:17.960 And it's set in 1899.

00:10:19.700 So you've got the Vanderlind gang built around the very charismatic figure of Dutch Vanderlind

00:10:24.920 who have all been sort of held around him for a very long period of time.

00:10:28.720 You play as the character Arthur Morgan, who for most of the game in the epilogue, you're

00:10:32.980 playing as John Marston, but you play as Arthur Morgan, who has been part of the gang

00:10:37.360 since he was a child or was a very young adolescent.

00:10:40.960 And so he's kind of, this has been his whole life.

00:10:43.300 And you've got this gang who are all very disparate people.

00:10:45.740 They all come from very different backgrounds, different sort of, you know, cultural and

00:10:49.180 linguistic backgrounds and so on, but who have been held together by this sort of gang ethos

00:10:53.440 for a very, very long time.

00:10:55.480 And there's this layering in the whole thing about lost time is probably the best way I

00:11:01.260 would put it, that it's a gang of people in 1899.

00:11:05.200 So they're living really on the cusp of the death of the Old West, right?

00:11:08.440 Their whole way of life is receding from them and they feel out of time.

00:11:13.740 They feel out of joint with the world.

00:11:14.980 The world just doesn't want them anymore.

00:11:16.360 There's no place for their sort of lifestyle anymore in the world.

00:11:19.860 And so they're already kind of, you know, yearning for a past that's already kind of behind

00:11:25.440 them.

00:11:25.680 And the past is really present in the game.

00:11:27.500 But of course, we're playing this game from the 21st century.

00:11:29.860 And so we're kind of looking at them as these characters who are already themselves long

00:11:34.240 in the past.

00:11:34.940 Of course, they're also fictional.

00:11:36.640 And that's something the game does just phenomenally well in so many ways.

00:11:40.360 I don't know if you noticed how many photos there are in the game?

00:11:43.340 Lots of photos.

00:11:44.120 When you start the game up, it's just like these Derek types or 10 photos like developing.

00:11:49.600 Yeah, exactly.

00:11:50.140 Right.

00:11:50.280 And they've all got dates and places on them, right?

00:11:53.200 So places that never really existed.

00:11:55.200 But, you know, they're these images that are already, if you like, records of the past in

00:11:59.420 the game world.

00:12:00.900 And that's, I think, this really profound.

00:12:02.740 And everyone in the game has all got photos of deceased loved ones or people are always

00:12:07.380 stopping to take photos.

00:12:08.840 You can go and get your photo taken in like a photographer's studio.

00:12:12.080 You can, there's one where you actually, one side quest where you have to go out and photograph,

00:12:16.340 kill and photograph a whole bunch of gunslingers. 0.93

00:12:18.720 Or sometimes they're alive, I think. 0.98

00:12:20.060 But so there's this kind of obsession almost in the game with the way in which the past

00:12:24.400 is present and visibly present.

00:12:28.760 You know, and there's always these ways in which the past is constantly interfering and

00:12:32.260 interrupting in the present in this game.

00:12:34.840 There's this whole thing about just, yeah, layered time is probably the best way I can

00:12:38.340 put it that is incredibly smart and incredibly engaging.

00:12:42.520 And at its best, yeah, really moving.

00:12:44.960 And I want to talk more about that, flesh that out.

00:12:48.620 But before I do, let's talk about this.

00:12:51.800 So we had the gang's leader, Dutch Vanderlind.

00:12:55.960 He's very bombastic.

00:12:57.400 He's larger than life.

00:12:59.120 And he's a philosopher.

00:13:00.780 From the get-go, he's always talking to this group of outlaws, but he calls them their family.

00:13:07.100 It's like, these are people he's taking care of.

00:13:09.600 He's kind of expounding philosophically to them.

00:13:12.560 How would you describe Dutch Vanderlind's philosophy?

00:13:17.260 Yeah, it's interesting because it's in some ways kind of pseudo-philosophy almost, right?

00:13:22.780 So he has a whole bunch of big ideas, Dutch, and they hold together a particular kind of

00:13:28.280 vision that he's got.

00:13:29.360 I would also say, too, he's a brilliantly, brilliantly rendered character.

00:13:33.120 Benjamin Byron Davis, who plays him, just has done an absolutely iconic job with the acting

00:13:37.940 and embodying that figure.

00:13:40.960 And what's captivating about the character in some ways is that he's the central figure

00:13:47.240 of the group.

00:13:47.940 He's got this real kind of charisma to him, but he also represents a kind of soteriology,

00:13:54.520 all right?

00:13:54.700 What I mean, which is a fancy word for saying salvation, right?

00:13:58.380 He's basically always promising them that, you know, he has a plan.

00:14:02.880 And that's the thing he says over and over again is, I have a plan.

00:14:05.860 And like, everyone's got to go along with the plan, keep the faith, keep doing what we're

00:14:09.440 doing, this is going to be the one more big job.

00:14:11.720 And after a while, this melds into the idea that the whole gang, having, if you like,

00:14:16.700 almost exhausted their time in their own world, will escape to Tahiti, all right?

00:14:22.680 And Tahiti becomes the afterlife.

00:14:24.660 Tahiti becomes this paradisical state of salvation that the gang will get to.

00:14:28.780 And you just need to keep faith and do this one bit last job and we'll get there.

00:14:31.800 And that's incredibly powerful and it's really effective at organising people.

00:14:35.860 He's almost a cult leader in some ways.

00:14:37.940 But then, of course, what ends up happening is there's something incredibly self-serving

00:14:42.420 about his whole attitude to all this stuff.

00:14:46.000 And over time, his actions start to become more and more disconnected from the kind of

00:14:53.540 moral identity and moral purpose that he's always sort of projected for the gang.

00:14:58.280 So he starts doing things that the gang wouldn't necessarily do, like killing civilians and

00:15:02.200 killing people out of revenge or in particularly sort of cruel ways.

00:15:07.000 And so over time, Arthur comes to sort of question Dutch's character and also starts to question

00:15:12.660 his judgment because he keeps making worse and worse decisions.

00:15:15.640 And then after a while, he starts doing things that are actively almost betraying certain members

00:15:19.000 of the gang, at which point it becomes clear that fundamentally Dutch is not out to lead 1.00

00:15:23.220 his flock into salvation.

00:15:24.220 He's really just out for himself.

00:15:25.360 I think that's a great way to describe it.

00:15:27.120 It's a pseudo-philosophy.

00:15:28.340 Like he talks philosophically, but when you look at it, there's really nothing there.

00:15:32.900 Yeah, which is kind of easy enough to do.

00:15:35.600 And if you're good at doing it, you can make a pretty decent living out of it.

00:15:38.720 But he's got that classic sort of air of the pseudo-intellectual who maybe knows a few

00:15:43.840 things.

00:15:44.200 He's maybe read a few things here and there.

00:15:45.720 He's well read.

00:15:46.980 But his ideas don't necessarily have what Kierkegaard, just to bring it back to Kierkegaard,

00:15:52.220 would call a life view.

00:15:53.540 I think the Danish is legal's unskool, sir. 1.00

00:15:56.060 That is an integrated view of himself that holds the whole thing together.

00:15:59.720 And that's why over time, as things change, his actions start to become inconsistent.

00:16:03.380 His judgment starts to go off because he doesn't have that life view that holds the whole thing

00:16:08.580 together in a stable way over time.

00:16:11.420 We'll go back to this idea of them trying to get back to this Edenic state.

00:16:14.640 Like that's a common theme when you're traveling to different missions, the characters talk to

00:16:18.880 each other.

00:16:19.620 And they're just constantly talking about, well, we just got to get back to the way things

00:16:23.160 were.

00:16:24.140 And it made me kind of think of Kierkegaard.

00:16:25.880 I don't know if maybe he talked about any of this because he's like a Christian philosopher.

00:16:29.280 Did Kierkegaard ever talk about our longing for returning to Eden?

00:16:33.660 Did that was ever a theme he ever talked about?

00:16:36.180 Yeah.

00:16:36.400 There's a couple of passing references where he says there's always this desire to go back

00:16:40.400 to a kind of primordial garden, if you like.

00:16:43.560 He does mention that, but there's also some really interesting stuff in Kierkegaard about

00:16:48.140 the idea of returning to a kind of a second immediacy or a second childhood, going back

00:16:53.020 to the past in a way.

00:16:54.500 But he says that's not the same thing as just, well, going back to a second child is not the

00:16:59.680 same thing as having never grown up, right?

00:17:01.820 So you can never really go back to a state of what he calls immediacy before you've started

00:17:06.400 to think things through, before you've started to think critically.

00:17:08.660 You can never really go back to that, but you can maybe get to a stage beyond where you

00:17:13.100 are now, where what was there in the past or what was best in the past is somehow taken

00:17:16.840 up into that.

00:17:18.360 And that does seem like maybe that's where the game is almost directing you is, you know,

00:17:24.240 you can't go back to the way things were.

00:17:26.280 And we as the viewer and as the player know that you can't go back to that past.

00:17:31.160 We know that for two reasons.

00:17:32.240 One, because we're sitting here in the 21st century and we know that the old west doesn't

00:17:35.500 come back.

00:17:36.060 And secondly, because we know what happens in Red Dead Redemption, the original game,

00:17:39.700 we know what happens 11 years later.

00:17:41.080 So that's a really powerful thing.

00:17:42.740 Again, a little bit spoilery, but we know which of the characters we're looking at is

00:17:47.640 dead, right?

00:17:48.780 We know which ones have actually died in the intervening years.

00:17:51.640 So, and which ones haven't too.

00:17:53.320 So there's a sense in which the idea that these characters have, that they can get back

00:17:57.920 to the past, they can get back to a great way that things used to be.

00:18:00.420 We know that that's not going to happen. 0.97

00:18:02.760 We know that's a fool's errand.

00:18:04.200 And so the question then is, well, what kind of redemption, what kind of salvation is available

00:18:09.060 to these characters?

00:18:10.260 Where can they go that won't be the way things were, but they will somehow complete that story

00:18:16.920 for them in a satisfying way?

00:18:18.400 Well, let's talk about one of those characters who I think figures it out.

00:18:22.060 And that's Arthur Morgan.

00:18:23.500 He's the protagonist.

00:18:24.480 He's the character that you play.

00:18:26.380 And I'm going to say he's one of my all-time favorite fictional characters.

00:18:29.880 I'm talking including books, movies.

00:18:32.820 He's up there with Augustus McRae from Lonesome Dove as one of my favorite characters.

00:18:37.500 I think part of it, Roger Clark, the actor who portrayed Arthur, just did a really great job.

00:18:42.320 The acting was top notch.

00:18:43.800 Which, what would you say about, so Dutch Vanderland had this kind of pseudo-philosophy about this.

00:18:49.220 We're going to get to this golden place where things were back to the way they were.

00:18:52.920 And it's amazing.

00:18:54.080 How would you describe Arthur Morgan's philosophy?

00:18:58.220 Well, Arthur, I think, is an interesting character because in some ways he does have a sort of a life view.

00:19:04.700 He does have a good sense of himself, but it becomes more and more kind of, more and more intention

00:19:09.060 with the world around him and with the people around him.

00:19:11.780 But he also, in some interesting respects, lacks certain kinds of insight.

00:19:16.600 You know, there's a really interesting moment there, a really pivotal moment, which we might

00:19:21.300 even talk about shortly.

00:19:22.320 But there's this moment where one character sort of says to him, you don't really know

00:19:25.200 yourself because you're actually happiest when you're helping people.

00:19:28.580 You're happiest when you're actually doing these good things. 0.98

00:19:30.760 You think of yourself as this nasty, hardened criminal. 0.82

00:19:35.620 And he has done horrendous things. 0.80

00:19:37.580 But that's not actually who you really kind of are.

00:19:42.120 Now, in existentialism, of course, and with the caveat that there's no real kind of like,

00:19:48.440 you know, there's no set of principles you have to sign up to to be an existentialist.

00:19:51.940 There's no one good definition of what existentialism is.

00:19:56.200 Existentialists tend to be very suspicious of the idea that you have a true self or a real self underneath

00:20:00.980 because fundamentally what you are is what you do.

00:20:02.900 And so in that sense, Arthur's right that the people he's killed and the things he's stolen,

00:20:08.020 that's him.

00:20:09.200 But the other things he does too, the ways in which he helps people, the ways in which

00:20:12.860 he makes good, you know, moral choices a lot of the time, the way in which he goes back

00:20:17.340 to save people at great risk to himself, those two are who he is.

00:20:21.820 And those two feed into him.

00:20:23.280 And this is why it's so interesting, of course, that you have an honor system in the game

00:20:27.140 where basically the decisions you make will not only affect your kind of honor status,

00:20:33.380 but they'll also affect what happens in the game up to and including the way in which

00:20:36.980 the character ends.

00:20:38.360 So that's actually quite a really, from a philosophy perspective, it's a really interesting mechanic.

00:20:43.880 It's a really kind of cool thing that these irreversible decisions happen based upon the

00:20:48.260 sort of moral choices you make in the moment.

00:20:50.600 Yeah, I want to flesh out the honor system.

00:20:52.140 I think that's a really interesting dynamic of the game.

00:20:53.840 But going back to Arthur's philosophy and his worldview, I think it's interesting throughout

00:20:58.000 the story, when people ask him, like, straight up, like, what do you believe?

00:21:01.940 He's like, I don't believe in anything, or I don't know what I believe in.

00:21:04.800 And I think that, yeah, you're talking about that nun.

00:21:06.680 He was having that conversation with the nun.

00:21:08.340 And, you know, he basically said, I don't know who I am or something.

00:21:12.260 And she said, well, yeah, that's the problem.

00:21:13.940 You don't know who you are.

00:21:14.780 And it reminded me of Kierkegaard, right?

00:21:16.460 Like, the self is the self relating to the self.

00:21:19.300 And I think Arthur wasn't really relating to himself completely.

00:21:23.840 Yeah, and I mean, that's, she echoes in some ways what the character Judge William says

00:21:29.780 in Kierkegaard's book, Either Or, who says to his young aesthetic friend, you know, you're

00:21:34.720 not even really a person.

00:21:35.700 You're just a bunch of stuff that happens.

00:21:37.040 That's kind of roughly what he says, you know, because you don't have that organizing

00:21:39.640 principle that holds you together.

00:21:41.320 I think that Arthur actually does.

00:21:43.300 I think Arthur does have a kind of a life view.

00:21:46.080 He does have an understanding of himself.

00:21:47.960 It's just that it's not always clear to himself.

00:21:49.540 There's an element there of almost self-deception.

00:21:52.840 There's an element of what Sartre would call bad faith, not bad faith in the sense of being

00:21:56.380 deceptive, but just in the sense of identifying with one aspect of yourself.

00:22:00.560 I'm a member of Dutch Vandalin's gang.

00:22:02.400 I do all these things.

00:22:03.920 And thereby denying the other aspects of yourself.

00:22:06.100 I help people.

00:22:07.120 I do all these other things.

00:22:07.840 And I have the capacity to do that.

00:22:10.400 And yeah, that scene with the nun is so kind of pivotal.

00:22:14.260 And not only pivotal, it's so well acted.

00:22:17.200 It's just so beautifully done.

00:22:20.440 And it in some respects is almost the, you know, the sort of emotional turning point of

00:22:26.400 the game.

00:22:27.500 We'll talk more about it because we got to lead up to it because there's a reason why

00:22:32.220 it's so poignant is because something happens to Arthur that makes it all the more poignant.

00:22:36.360 But yeah, but I think the reason I think a lot of people like Arthur Morgan is that

00:22:39.480 they can relate to him so much.

00:22:41.000 I mean, I think a lot of us think, well, look at my life.

00:22:43.980 Look at the things I've done.

00:22:44.920 They're terrible.

00:22:45.920 But then we don't look at the good we've done.

00:22:48.840 And for some reason, I don't know, we have a blind spot for the good things we do.

00:22:53.260 We just focus on all the bad stuff.

00:22:55.900 Yeah, sure.

00:22:56.260 There's a kind of perfectionism that can happen there, right?

00:22:58.760 Where we end up just so kind of focused on, you know, wanting to do things perfectly or,

00:23:03.300 you know, wanting people to see us in a certain kind of way that we ignore all the things

00:23:06.940 that probably do count in our favor already.

00:23:09.140 There's a story, actually, that one night Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher Wittgenstein,

00:23:13.900 basically called his friend over and just sat down and started reciting a list of all the

00:23:17.300 bad things he'd done and all his faults.

00:23:18.960 And she said to him, good God, Ludwig, what, do you want to be perfect?

00:23:21.440 And he looked at her completely nonplussed and said, well, of course I do, don't you?

00:23:26.480 And I thought that was kind of, that's an interesting sort of way of looking at it,

00:23:30.520 that, you know, perfection is not possible for humans.

00:23:32.200 And yet that is somehow built into our kind of expectation of the world that we will be perfect.

00:23:36.600 We will get everything we want.

00:23:37.700 And if anything is suboptimal, that's a problem that needs to be fixed.

00:23:43.280 So you mentioned choice plays a big role in Red Dead Redemption 2.

00:23:47.360 Tell us about that.

00:23:48.260 Like what, how does choice play in the game mechanics and in the, in pushing the story forward?

00:23:52.700 Yeah, so you can basically do a whole bunch of absolutely horrendous things if you want to,

00:23:59.560 right? 0.86

00:23:59.760 If you want to, you can just run around shooting people, cheating people. 0.97

00:24:04.260 You can continue to extort people.

00:24:06.480 There's, there's a few missions there where you're acting as a debt collector.

00:24:09.080 You can, if you want, let some people off or you can absolutely force them to pay you or you can beat

00:24:14.000 people up.

00:24:15.120 You can do all these things.

00:24:16.020 But what happens over time is that you start to get higher or lower honor, depending on the way in

00:24:22.860 which you've acted and the sort of choices you've made.

00:24:25.360 And also certain kind of story things branch off in different ways as a result.

00:24:29.800 And over time, the sort of interactions you have with other people are partly determined by

00:24:34.140 your honor quotient.

00:24:36.260 Now, some of that is actually about perception, I think.

00:24:38.240 So, you know, basically the idea is that, well, if you've built up a bad reputation, people are

00:24:41.760 going to treat you differently than if you've built up a good reputation.

00:24:45.600 But it's also about this almost, again, soteriological idea that if you're a good person, you'll go to

00:24:51.440 one kind of ending.

00:24:52.580 And if you're a bad person, you'll go to another kind of ending.

00:24:54.600 And I don't want to spoil the ending just yet because I know we're going to come to that in a moment.

00:24:57.000 But how the story ends for Arthur Morgan will depend upon what sort of choices you've made up to that

00:25:04.000 moment, which, again, is a really interesting thing.

00:25:07.440 Can I ask, did you get the good ending or the bad ending when you played it?

00:25:10.080 The good ending.

00:25:10.960 And I've played it twice.

00:25:12.520 Yeah, it was interesting.

00:25:13.360 This is kind of interesting.

00:25:14.260 Maybe it says something about me.

00:25:15.900 So the first time I played, I just did good, right?

00:25:18.400 It's like, that's just my natural inclination.

00:25:20.060 Like, I'm going to be the good guy.

00:25:22.020 But the second time when I was prepping for this episode, I thought, maybe I'll play it bad. 0.63

00:25:25.940 But then when that first choice came, when it was like, do you kill this guy or do you let him go?

00:25:32.080 I couldn't do it. 0.99

00:25:32.920 I couldn't kill the guy. 0.99

00:25:34.000 I had to let him go. 0.86

00:25:35.080 And I was like, I'm not an ubermensch.

00:25:37.620 What my conclusion was.

00:25:39.840 I saw an interview with Benjamin Byron Davis, who plays Dutch, and he said he can't black hat it.

00:25:44.040 He just can't make himself do it.

00:25:45.420 He's just like, no, I've got to play the good version.

00:25:47.540 So 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.

00:25:55.240 But, 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?

00:26:08.160 You 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.

00:26:18.340 And we tell ourselves, oh, yeah, well, that's okay.

00:26:20.500 It's just a game.

00:26:21.040 It doesn't really sort of matter.

00:26:22.560 But 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.

00:26:34.100 Now, 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.

00:26:42.980 I played Grand Theft Auto.

00:26:44.820 I can never get into it because basically you're just doing horrendous things all the time.

00:26:48.880 Yeah.

00:26:49.020 With 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.

00:26:57.100 That's kind of an interesting thing.

00:26:58.540 That's part of Arthur Morgan's story development.

00:27:01.480 There's lots of choices and you have the option to do the good thing.

00:27:04.720 But 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,

00:27:11.660 Arthur has to do bad stuff.

00:27:14.440 And that made me think about the role of friendship and friends and the influence they have on you.

00:27:19.780 Sometimes, you know, like I think Aristotle would have something to say about this.

00:27:23.580 Like, 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.

00:27:31.540 Yeah.

00:27:32.020 I 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,

00:27:39.360 but is actually trying to make each other better sort of people.

00:27:42.060 And, 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.

00:27:48.580 Mind you, I don't think Micah's ever really his friend.

00:27:50.640 No.

00:27:50.860 You know, Micah's always kind of unpleasant sort of character.

00:27:54.040 Played by the same guy.

00:27:54.960 I actually not long ago played L.A. Noire, which is like about 11, 12 years old now that game.

00:27:59.040 That's another great game.

00:27:59.800 Great game.

00:28:00.900 Yeah, yeah, but same guy.

00:28:02.320 Micah's the same guy who plays the dodgy psychiatrist in that one.

00:28:05.060 Oh, man.

00:28:05.500 But, yeah, almost unrecognizable.

00:28:07.580 But it's interesting, yeah, that you get these kind of moral choices that you're thrown into.

00:28:12.500 And there are, as you say, points in the game where you have to kill people that you think, did I really have to kill that guy?

00:28:17.720 He's not, you know, if I'm stabbing an unsuspecting stable hand.

00:28:20.740 Yeah, right.

00:28:21.160 You feel kind of like, oh, gee, I don't know.

00:28:24.300 But 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.

00:28:36.220 Which 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?

00:28:55.240 Insofar as you're meant to enjoy it, you're meant to be sort of endorsing what's going on.

00:28:58.820 And 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.

00:29:05.640 And that tension is really interesting to me.

00:29:07.700 The 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.

00:29:16.820 That disconnect is really interesting.

00:29:18.760 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:29:20.480 And now back to the show.

00:29:29.240 I think this idea of choice in the game is a good way.

00:29:31.840 Maybe we can't get too deep with this, but it might be a good way to explain Kierkegaard's idea, the concept of anxiety.

00:29:38.380 Because I think choice played a big role in that, right?

00:29:40.840 Yeah, for sure.

00:29:42.180 And anxiety for Kierkegaard is similar to what anguish is for Sarch or angst is for Heidegger.

00:29:49.440 This idea that there's a feeling of being free, right?

00:29:52.880 And you think, oh, yeah, being free is great.

00:29:54.300 It's wonderful.

00:29:54.960 You're unconstrained.

00:29:56.260 But freedom also entails responsibility.

00:29:58.440 You have to choose what to do, right?

00:30:00.880 So, 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.

00:30:08.900 But that's not how we experience it.

00:30:10.380 We experience this, oh, there's the alarm clock.

00:30:12.280 I have to get up.

00:30:12.820 I have to go to work.

00:30:13.600 I've got to do this stuff now.

00:30:15.180 He calls these guardrails against anxiety, if you like.

00:30:18.940 They'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.

00:30:27.100 You know, and it's an interesting thing that, you know, philosophers of the existentialist tradition are always regarded as almost philosophers of radical freedom.

00:30:34.760 And 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.

00:30:42.140 But at the same time, those philosophers are all like, freedom's not always nice.

00:30:47.300 Freedom is actually a really unpleasant situation to be in.

00:30:51.220 It's probably better than the alternative.

00:30:52.900 And indeed, there is no alternative.

00:30:54.140 According to Sarch, you have to be free.

00:30:56.260 It's not an option not to be free.

00:30:58.160 But freedom is strenuous.

00:31:01.140 Freedom is constant responsibility for everything you do.

00:31:05.240 And that's not always great.

00:31:08.220 Well, how do you think the guys in Red Dead Redemption 2 handle it?

00:31:11.000 Because they're outlaws.

00:31:11.840 And conceivably, they live outside the law.

00:31:14.080 They are free.

00:31:16.140 But I mean, maybe Dutch, maybe he wasn't.

00:31:18.880 Like, maybe he kind of fooled himself thinking he was really free, but he wasn't.

00:31:21.260 Yeah, 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.

00:31:33.260 But, of course, the world catches up with them.

00:31:35.380 And that's a big part of what's going on in this.

00:31:37.300 So they rob a train belonging to an extremely wealthy business guy, and he sends the Pinkertons after them. 0.96

00:31:43.320 And so their whole world sort of gets encroached upon.

00:31:46.040 So the idea that they have this freedom, well, they're not free from consequences.

00:31:49.640 They're not free from the results of their actions.

00:31:52.940 And you could say, well, that's true of everyone, right?

00:31:55.160 Nobody actually has kind of freedom from consequence.

00:31:57.600 Nobody has a freedom that doesn't entail bad things can happen as a result of that freedom.

00:32:03.020 And 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.

00:32:13.060 Yeah, that's a common, you know, this whole story is driven.

00:32:15.560 They're just constantly doing these missions to get money.

00:32:17.820 If we just get a little bit more money, we'll finally be able to make this Tahiti thing happen.

00:32:23.180 And of course, it never works out that way.

00:32:24.880 The snare gets tighter and tighter around them.

00:32:28.660 Yeah, and also just contingency happens, right?

00:32:31.460 I 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,

00:32:36.460 it's also very good about the fact that just totally random stuff happens that throws your plans out or whatever.

00:32:42.540 So, I mean, there's one whole chapter where they end up, the whole landscape is fictionalized, I should say this.

00:32:47.200 It'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.

00:32:54.940 And at one point, their ship is caught in a storm and they end up in what's clearly meant to be Cuba.

00:32:59.260 They don't call it Cuba, but it's meant to be somewhere like Cuba.

00:33:02.140 And so there's this idea that just radical contingency can happen.

00:33:05.040 Things get in the way and you end up literally shipwrecked.

00:33:07.200 Yeah, I remember when that part of that, when that happened in the story, I was like, this is so random.

00:33:12.700 It was like, I'm on a tropical island.

00:33:15.520 And the missions there are just bizarre too.

00:33:18.160 I mean, it was fun, but it was kind of off, it was off the beaten path.

00:33:21.740 Yeah, and it's interesting too, the way you get thrown into this stuff in a kind of, you know, in media res, right?

00:33:27.780 You're thrown right into the middle of it.

00:33:28.920 You wake up and you're on a beach and you're like, I have no idea what the hell's going on here.

00:33:32.380 I don't know what I'm meant to do.

00:33:33.580 I don't know what the sort of, you know.

00:33:35.480 So, of course, what you do in a game is you start looking for all things that you recognize from the earlier game mechanics.

00:33:41.080 You work out what to do.

00:33:41.820 That way, you're sort of walking around looking for stuff.

00:33:44.620 But it's really well done the way it does that, that it throws you into that.

00:33:49.460 The other thing it does really well too is the way some of the characters die.

00:33:53.700 Yeah, 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.

00:34:01.620 But then you have other characters who are just walking along and suddenly get their head blown off.

00:34:05.040 Yeah.

00:34:05.660 That's the one in, what, Rhodes?

00:34:09.780 Yeah, Sean.

00:34:12.000 Sean O'Brien.

00:34:13.160 Yeah, Sean O'Brien, the Irish character who just suddenly gets shot dead in the middle of the night.

00:34:17.200 And you're not expecting it at all.

00:34:18.900 I remember my wife was in the room when that happened, actually.

00:34:21.080 And we both just had this, like, involuntary jump reaction.

00:34:23.360 It was like, ah!

00:34:24.380 She wasn't even playing the game.

00:34:25.500 She was like, oh, God, what happened then?

00:34:27.040 But 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.

00:34:35.400 At the very end of that book, there's this paragraph where she says, everyone's death is an accident for them.

00:34:42.020 Right?

00:34:42.880 That is, for everyone, their death is this totally contingent, random thing that just appears out of nowhere.

00:34:48.980 Now, 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.

00:34:57.840 And sometimes in Red Dead Redemption, that's how death appears.

00:35:01.000 It just emerges out of nowhere in these sudden, shocking kind of ways.

00:35:04.800 Well, let's talk about Arthur Morgan.

00:35:07.420 He gets a tuberculosis diagnosis in the game.

00:35:12.040 And what's interesting, the way they did the mechanics on this or the story, it was really good.

00:35:17.440 Because 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.

00:35:24.560 And I remember when that first happened, I thought, oh, I should get some medicine because maybe it'll make me feel better.

00:35:29.140 I 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.

00:35:38.280 Like, you find he actually, oh, man, this guy's got to, he's going to die.

00:35:41.200 How does that TB diagnosis change Arthur Morgan?

00:35:45.500 And 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?

00:35:53.300 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:35:55.820 It really puts this amazing note of finitude in the game, which is really quite sort of powerful.

00:36:04.660 And, I mean, firstly, it's an amazingly brave choice because TB is such a common way to die in that era.

00:36:11.380 I think there's something like, you know, a fifth or whatever of all humans who have ever lived have probably died of TB.

00:36:17.120 Kiergaard actually died of a form of tuberculosis.

00:36:20.680 He 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.

00:36:28.820 And, you know, so it's a very, very common sort of thing.

00:36:31.380 So it's also kind of interesting in that it suddenly introduces into the narrative this really profound awareness of finitude.

00:36:39.140 And that's already there in the game, right?

00:36:41.000 Because we know that this world is running out.

00:36:42.740 We know that the way of life these people live is running out.

00:36:45.660 But 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.

00:36:55.580 And it does create this real sort of focus almost that there's, you know, your time is actually coming to an end.

00:37:02.640 You've got to do these things, but you're going to get progressively weaker as you go along, less capable of doing it.

00:37:06.840 And that's kind of, you know, really interesting.

00:37:11.440 And, yeah, you mentioned Kierkegaard on what he calls certain uncertainty.

00:37:16.120 That 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?

00:37:25.000 You could die in the next five minutes.

00:37:26.280 You could die, you know, 50 years from now.

00:37:28.360 Now, 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.

00:37:36.940 What 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.

00:37:44.360 So making every second count, but making every second count in a way where it could go either way.

00:37:49.120 Now, in the case of Arthur, though, he's got this sort of end point that's looming.

00:37:53.680 Of course, he could die any time between now and then, and that's just the nature of Arthur's existence.

00:37:58.360 But 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.

00:38:15.240 And I think that's an interesting thing in a game that, as I say, has like, you know, 60-something hours of scripted gameplay.

00:38:20.780 You do, I think, end up really counting your moments once that TB diagnosis has happened, right?

00:38:28.140 That 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.

00:38:36.160 And 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.

00:38:41.580 I don't think he says this anywhere else.

00:38:42.960 He says, I'm scared.

00:38:44.340 And that's kind of this really amazingly honest, raw confrontation with death that he's sort of always been putting off up to that point.

00:38:54.640 Yeah.

00:38:54.780 What do you think he's afraid of?

00:38:55.680 Is he afraid of dying itself and not existing?

00:38:59.120 Is he afraid of what's going to happen to the people that he cares about?

00:39:02.200 Like, what is it about death that made Arthur Morgan afraid of it?

00:39:06.160 Yeah, there's at least three different ways in which we fear death.

00:39:08.920 So 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.

00:39:16.120 I've elsewhere referred to it as a who will feed my goldfish fear of death.

00:39:19.600 Then there's this fear of non-existence as such.

00:39:23.940 So the fear of just not there being nothing it's like to be me anymore.

00:39:29.400 Kathy Behrens, who's a Canadian philosopher, has done some really good work on that.

00:39:32.140 And then there's also, I guess, the fear of what comes after death, which is real enough for many people.

00:39:37.880 But then we know from Arthur, he doesn't think there's anything there.

00:39:40.780 And he said, you know, but although there's that, he does actually say, what is it?

00:39:43.780 He says, you know, that I'm assuming hell will be extremely unpleasant.

00:39:47.580 And if it's not, I'll feel like I've been sold a bill of goods.

00:39:50.540 So, 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.

00:39:59.920 So, okay, death can make, is like the school of earnestness.

00:40:03.640 And it seems like Arthur, he becomes earnest after he gets his TB diagnosis.

00:40:09.320 Like, and I think he, I think this is like the, I think this is the redemption part.

00:40:11.760 This is like where Red Dead Redemption becomes Red Dead Redemption is he's, he realizes the Tahiti thing.

00:40:19.020 They're never going back to the way things were.

00:40:21.700 And he, I guess there's a moment he just decides, I gotta, I gotta make the best of what I got right now.

00:40:27.440 Yeah. 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.

00:40:45.300 And 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?

00:41:04.200 They're not things that we do necessarily.

00:41:06.600 They'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.

00:41:18.220 And 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.

00:41:24.960 Give that a chance, give love a chance to sort of, you know, express itself in the world and do some good things.

00:41:29.300 Which involves him taking a risk.

00:41:32.720 It involves him taking, again, to use some Kierkegaardian language, a leap.

00:41:37.040 And that leap was he turned against Dutch and he was going to help out John Marston who picks up Red Dead Redemption 1.

00:41:45.880 And 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. 0.98

00:41:55.700 And he says, I got to go, there's one more thing I got to do.

00:41:59.940 And it just, it destroys me every time I watch it.

00:42:03.460 You know, he gets on his horse, put on the hat, like it's just done cinematically, it's done fantastic.

00:42:08.880 And there's this song, it's like very soulful, like that's the way it is.

00:42:12.960 And 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.

00:42:27.200 Or you got to try to do the good thing.

00:42:29.900 And you could tell like this, like that, like it just, that's the part that destroys me.

00:42:34.340 Like that's the, when I start, that's when I start crying like a baby.

00:42:36.420 It's like this guy, he's trying to redeem himself at this point.

00:42:39.820 Yeah, it's really overwhelming.

00:42:42.620 And it's, yeah, again, this idea that there's all this stuff that makes up a life.

00:42:49.180 And that death, and we know he's riding to death.

00:42:51.560 We know that whatever happens next, he's not going to survive.

00:42:53.400 But that's just clear from the narrative, you know, trajectory of the thing.

00:42:57.180 As 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?

00:43:05.340 That when you die, that's the end of possibility.

00:43:07.660 That whatever you were, that's fixed at that moment.

00:43:10.500 And that's all the stuff that he's carrying with him to his death is these things he's done.

00:43:14.320 And look at that.

00:43:15.300 He is actually a good guy.

00:43:16.360 He has actually done good things.

00:43:18.700 There is a redemptive, as you say, possibility there.

00:43:21.400 And then, you know, it gets even more redemptive at the, I mean, it's just, it's sadder at the end.

00:43:25.620 If you do the good ending, right, there's a scene where Arthur has this final battle with Micah.

00:43:31.380 And then Dutch shows up and Arthur's just, he's got, you tell he's, the guy's about to die of tuberculosis.

00:43:39.560 And there's this scene where Arthur's on the ground.

00:43:43.480 He's looking up at Dutch and he says, I gave you everything.

00:43:47.220 Gave you everything I had.

00:43:48.700 And this is this line where he just says, I tried.

00:43:52.020 I tried.

00:43:52.680 That's all I can say.

00:43:53.160 I tried.

00:43:54.320 And for some reason, that's another thing.

00:43:55.580 I just like, it broke me when he just get this, this beaten down guy just saying, I just tried.

00:44:00.560 I don't know what it is about.

00:44:03.100 Is there any existential, is there a reason, do existential philosophers have something there that can explain like why that hits you so hard?

00:44:11.920 I think because that's all anyone can do, right?

00:44:14.940 You know, there's a sense in which, there's some sense in which every life's a failure, right?

00:44:19.020 Every life, you know, leaves something undone or leaves something unfinished.

00:44:22.160 But all you can do is say that you, you know, did your best, so to speak.

00:44:27.260 And yeah, that is, I think, a sort of a powerful moment.

00:44:31.120 But also, as I say, the fact that it's a narrativising of the life at death.

00:44:35.560 And so it's a summing up of everything that there is.

00:44:37.700 And the sense of, well, that's it.

00:44:38.720 There's nothing more.

00:44:39.420 Just whatever happens now, you are whatever you were.

00:44:43.200 And you don't get a do-over.

00:44:44.420 You don't get to, you know, go back and replay some things.

00:44:47.820 And yes, okay, you can actually just restart the game if you want, but it's an awfully long way to go.

00:44:54.160 I had a student a few years ago, actually, who was doing a thesis on permadeath in games, right?

00:44:59.900 The way in which in some games, the game mechanics are such that if you die, that's it.

00:45:03.920 You can't play the game anymore, right?

00:45:05.420 It's not very popular for obvious reasons, but it's an option.

00:45:08.280 And it does neatly sort of symbolise the fact that death is actually a one-and-done thing.

00:45:12.320 That, you know, once it's over, it's over.

00:45:14.860 And I think that is one of the things that makes that scene so powerful.

00:45:19.260 So you've written a lot about the themes of nostalgia and loss in Red Dead Redemption 2.

00:45:24.600 We've kind of been talking about that, how it just, the past is always, is very pervasive in this game.

00:45:29.560 There's pictures, the characters are always talking about the past.

00:45:33.760 How else did you see this idea of nostalgia and loss appear in the game?

00:45:38.520 Yeah, I think there's this interesting kind of, as I say, double nostalgia in it almost.

00:45:46.020 That, 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.

00:45:54.260 The dead are really present in this game.

00:45:55.980 And yet there's also a sense for us in which these characters, if they had lived, would now be dead.

00:46:00.080 And 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.

00:46:12.100 And 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.

00:46:19.720 It's a really powerful sort of photo.

00:46:21.000 And 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?

00:46:31.900 We know this is a man who's waiting to die, but also we know that he is, for us, long dead.

00:46:35.820 And that kind of layering, if you like, you know, as I say, gives a certain kind of poignance to these moments.

00:46:45.660 But 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.

00:46:55.920 I'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.

00:47:07.300 You 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?

00:47:12.740 Which Tolkien then picks up and uses, right?

00:47:14.860 Remember that line gets used in The Two Towers.

00:47:17.900 You know, there's this sense of looking at the world and going, oh, man, well, where did everyone go?

00:47:23.600 What's going on?

00:47:25.240 You 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.

00:47:37.460 And saying, look at all these stones, look at all these pools, what happened to the people who made it?

00:47:41.740 They've all gone, a thousand years have passed, and they've all disappeared.

00:47:45.320 And, of course, for us, that poet has also disappeared.

00:47:47.660 That poet's world is also gone.

00:47:49.280 And 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.

00:48:01.300 And 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.

00:48:18.740 And, like, we weren't the people that we said we were either.

00:48:22.360 And I thought that was really a very, like, some great self-awareness.

00:48:26.540 Yeah, 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?

00:48:35.320 He'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?

00:48:47.560 To make sense of anything, you have to narrativize it.

00:48:49.420 But to tell a narrative, you have to cut detail out.

00:48:51.680 You have to trim things in a way that serves the narrative.

00:48:54.920 If you don't, then you just get a massive, unintelligible detail.

00:48:58.620 And 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.

00:49:06.520 What's that famous quote there from Kerk Gore?

00:49:08.220 Everyone likes the Instagram quote.

00:49:09.900 It's like, you only live backwards.

00:49:13.240 Or what was that?

00:49:13.980 How does it go?

00:49:14.780 Yeah.

00:49:15.320 The 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.

00:49:25.240 Right.

00:49:26.160 And that then gets distilled into life.

00:49:27.620 It can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards.

00:49:29.740 So it's a repost to Hegel.

00:49:31.320 Yeah.

00:49:31.680 But it's a nice, pithy little, particularly in the sort of distilled version, it's a nice, pithy little quote.

00:49:35.280 I actually saw it once on, when we lived in Denmark, I saw it on the, printed on like the debit cards of a Danish bank.

00:49:41.100 So it seems like an interesting attitude to money, guys.

00:49:44.640 But okay.

00:49:45.260 Yeah.

00:49:45.840 Well, I think, yeah, I think Arthur finally realized that, right?

00:49:48.680 In that last ride, he's just like, I gotta, I'm moving to this thing.

00:49:51.380 This is it.

00:49:51.840 But that's, that's all I can do.

00:49:54.440 Yeah.

00:49:54.840 That's it.

00:49:55.220 You know, all you can do is just whatever's in front of you.

00:49:57.020 I mean, you know, you can't, yeah, you can't go backwards.

00:50:01.020 So as a philosopher, I'm curious, what do you make of playing video games in general?

00:50:04.440 And a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 in particular?

00:50:07.580 I mean, Red Dead Redemption 2 is very particular, which is an interesting thing.

00:50:12.620 Like there's, there's so much about it that I think is, is kind of unique, but you know,

00:50:16.620 it's, it's really interesting that we spend so much of, of our lives on screens and so

00:50:22.200 much of our lives mediated through screens and they become transparent to us.

00:50:26.420 And that's not necessarily a bad thing, right?

00:50:28.500 I mean, we, as I say, getting through the pandemic, we had to become more transparent to

00:50:34.040 each other through screens because it was the only way you could have contact with people.

00:50:37.520 So we got used to video calling.

00:50:40.180 We got used to mediated ways of communication, which were already there, but suddenly they

00:50:44.200 were much more kind of present in our lives because a lot of the time it was the only way

00:50:48.120 you could communicate with people.

00:50:50.240 With games, it's really kind of fascinating because you get this breakdown between passively

00:50:56.440 watching fiction, like say watching a movie or whatever, and actively engaging with people

00:51:03.120 online the way that, well, the way you and I are right now.

00:51:06.020 And there's something, it creates this interesting kind of in-between world.

00:51:10.460 Kendall Walton actually talks about this as, he says, you know, that playing is basically

00:51:15.160 as if, right?

00:51:16.680 It's, it's basically saying, well, we're going to do these things as if we're really doing

00:51:20.020 this.

00:51:20.820 And that's a, it's, it's make-believe, right?

00:51:23.520 And make-believe is actually a really powerful kind of way of engaging things because it's you,

00:51:29.020 but it's also you doing things that you somehow never did.

00:51:31.920 And that's kind of, philosophically, I find that really kind of intriguing, the sort of

00:51:36.380 fact that it's, it's you, but not you, that you are doing these things and yet you're not

00:51:40.620 doing these things.

00:51:41.880 So yeah, you mentioned like Grand Theft Auto, right?

00:51:44.300 You're doing things you would never do.

00:51:46.040 And yet, in a sense, you're kind of doing them.

00:51:47.980 So I find the ontology of that just really, you know, tantalizingly ambiguous.

00:51:54.200 It is weird.

00:51:54.900 You know, Plato talked a lot about, he was really concerned about art and how you got to be careful

00:52:00.260 with art because we are mimetic animals, right?

00:52:03.800 We like to mimic things.

00:52:05.880 And he said, well, if you know, if your art you're doing is really crappy, it's going to 0.98

00:52:08.900 turn you to a crappy person.

00:52:10.760 And video games, I feel like it just takes to the next level because like you're, you're 0.96

00:52:13.680 doing it, but not doing it.

00:52:15.260 And so I'm always, when I'm playing, I'm like, what is this doing in my soul?

00:52:17.860 Like, what would Plato say about this?

00:52:19.900 Red Dead Redemption?

00:52:20.720 Like, I felt like there's parts I'm like, ah, that didn't feel good.

00:52:23.640 But there's most of it.

00:52:24.360 I just felt good.

00:52:25.160 Grand Theft Auto, I felt awful.

00:52:26.740 So I had to stop playing.

00:52:27.960 Yeah.

00:52:28.300 Yeah.

00:52:28.920 And I mean, that's the interesting thing though.

00:52:31.580 You're still doing pretty awful things sometimes in Red Dead Redemption, but it creates that

00:52:35.760 distance, right?

00:52:37.020 And I mean, something like Grand Theft Auto maybe doesn't create that distance in the

00:52:39.780 same sort of way.

00:52:40.480 So yeah, you torture somebody, but then you walk away and do a big soliloquy about, oh,

00:52:43.980 torture's bad and it never works.

00:52:45.840 That doesn't get you out of the fact that you just did this thing for however long.

00:52:48.740 You know, it's, whereas with something like Red Dead Redemption, you are, I think, and this

00:52:52.700 is again a Kerk Guardian thought, I guess, but you're thrown back upon yourself

00:52:55.700 as the agent, as the person doing this stuff.

00:52:59.420 You're forced to sort of think, where do I stand in relation to this?

00:53:03.400 What would I do?

00:53:04.300 How would I live?

00:53:05.440 And what kind of choices would I make?

00:53:07.820 And that kind of reflective dimension, I think, is really powerful and can be, at its

00:53:15.780 best, really transformative.

00:53:17.700 Well, Patrick, this has been a great conversation.

00:53:19.040 Where can people go to learn more about your work?

00:53:20.620 I spend way too much time on Twitter.

00:53:23.980 You can also find me at patrickstokes.com.

00:53:26.340 And if you want to read any of my stuff, it often turns up in New Philosopher or sometimes

00:53:30.960 produce radio documentaries for ABC Radio National here in Australia, which you can listen to

00:53:35.960 as podcasts.

00:53:37.440 Fantastic.

00:53:37.820 Well, Patrick Stokes, thanks for your time.

00:53:38.880 It's been a pleasure.

00:53:40.120 Thanks very much, Brad.

00:53:41.440 My guest today is Patrick Stokes.

00:53:42.840 He's a professor of philosophy and the author of his recent book, Digital Souls, A Philosophy

00:53:46.620 of Online Death.

00:53:47.740 It's available on Amazon.com.

00:53:49.480 You can find more information about Patrick's work at his website, patrickstokes.com.

00:53:53.300 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash rdr2, where you can find links to resources,

00:53:57.840 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:54:06.380 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:54:09.160 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well

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The Art of Manliness - December 05, 2022

The Existential in Red Dead Redemption 2

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