After nearly a month of sweat, dust and strong whiskey I can finally
hang my boots up and call it a day with Rock Star San Diego's epic Wild Western
Red Dead Redemption. It's been a long
emotional journey across a dynamic and utterly spell binding landscape. The
characters along the way have been just as memorable and the story has not only
been exciting and deep in its own right but has also been a tale shot through
with clever references and knowing nods to the dying West of Peckinpah and
Leone. A thoughtful and exemplary videogame, but one which is also incredibly 'cinematic'.
It's hard not to play this game without noticing the long shadow of cinema
creeping across nearly every facet of Red
Dead. This filmic quality is not a criticism and is partly the reason why
this game is so successful, but it also points out the problems which the game
faces.
It was interesting to listen to David Jaffe's speech at DICE 2012
whilst being in the midst of my romance with Red Dead. Jaffe's talk, whilst slightly meandering, seemed to come
upon something important. What I understood from Jaffe's argument was that game
developers - and publishers - were focusing too much upon telling stories
through the medium and not enough on the mechanics of actual gameplay. So,
while millions of dollars are being ploughed into developing the visual element
of videogames the actual gameplay hasn't actually developed much since the
nineties. While Jaffe's speech may have seemed (as it did to me at first) to
deride videogame story altogether (his off the cuff comments about videogames
being a rubbish story telling medium surely didn't help him), I don't think
this was in fact the purpose of the talk. Instead he seemed to be saying that
games need to focus on developing the gameplay rather than only focusing on the
often non-interactive narrative and visual appearance.