With a mix of pride and shame I confess to having clocked hundreds of hours playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Like my all-time favorite video game, Witcher 3, I most enjoy moving my character through open worlds, exploring vast territories unsure of who or what will come next.
Both games tap into my primal wish to have been an explorer in a past life. Think Champlain or John Colter. I’m obsessed with maps and above all with frontiers, the notion that something is untouched, that I’m the first non-native person there and that I must make choices that have never been made before—for which there are no maps.
One such choice befell me my first time through RD2.[1]Told from first- and third-person perspectives, RD2 is a western-themed action-adventure game set in a fictional U.S. West in 1899. You play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw and a member of the Van der … Continue reading It occurred rather early in the game, when my character Arthur Morgan rides his horse up a ridge and encounters an explorer, Máximo Cristóbal Valdespino. After boasting of his exploits Máximo states he’s leaving the country for his homeland and he offers to sell me a treasure map that he can no longer use.
I make the purchase and then, as if not in control of myself, I shoot and kill Máximo and his horse at point blank range. I then loot them.
When I—the real me—woke up in the morning I felt a kind of residue that one often feels from disturbing dreams. Yet this residue, containing immense guilt, stayed with me for a week.
It weighed on me as if I had actually killed someone.
A second take
I recently took up the game again, in part to see if I could play it differently. After all, embedded within the game is something called “honor.” This is a measure, which can be displayed at the bottom of the screen, of whether you have performed more good deeds (e.g., greeting strangers or helping those in need) or bad ones (robbing or killing innocents).
Honor in turn affects the fate of Arthur, with the game developers creating different endings for him based on the kind of life he’s lived over the course of the game. In my first play-through Arthur, low on honor, died of a prolonged and painful bout with tuberculosis.
The other day I came across this same scene. I again purchased the map from Máximo and then let him mount his horse to ride off. I then shot him in the back.
A reflection
Red Dead Redemption 2 is on one hand a video game, where one can become dissociated from the act of killing. On the other, it’s an at times deeply realistic game with a central character who, like me, struggles with conscience.
The week of guilt experienced after the first killing of Máximo reflects several things, notably my assertive superego and the game itself straddling the waking world and the dream world.
What the world of the game and the world of dreams have in common, however, is they are realms in which primal fantasies are allowed to play out.
A fear emerges when our fantasies reveal something disturbing about us, in this case a propensity to kill. This fear often disturbs us so much because we feel that it defines us, that these propensities are us. We then take steps to defend against this, keeping this part of ourselves hidden at all costs through acts of denial or repression.
This helps form the root of psychopathology.
Conclusion
My daughter once asked me whether there were people in the world who scared me. After thinking a moment I said, yes, the people who scare me are those who are detached from their own aggression, who carry a great deal of it but are in total denial of it.[2]If one pays attention these people can be spotted multiple times daily in our communities.
Over the years I’ve treated people like this and so I’m no longer afraid of them. But an essential part of the treatment involves helping them to identify the aggression within them—and at the same time to recognize they’re much more than simply that.
The question moves from whether we are aggressive to whether we can begin to have our own aggressive thoughts, fantasies and impulses—without acting on them.
Dreamworlds allow us a visceral way to let them play out, without harming ourselves or others. These dreamworlds become like maps of the frontier, with their own complex and ever shifting world of tributaries and offshoots that make up a whole rather than define it.
In my second time through this scene in RD2, a chance perhaps to get things right, I didn’t kill the horse. I stole him instead.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | Told from first- and third-person perspectives, RD2 is a western-themed action-adventure game set in a fictional U.S. West in 1899. You play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw and a member of the Van der Linde gang. After a botched robbery the gang flees and is forced to rob, steal and fight its way across the West in order to survive. Throughout the game Arthur must choose between loyalty to the gang that raised him and his own conscience. |
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| ↑2 | If one pays attention these people can be spotted multiple times daily in our communities. |