That’s The Way It Is
What’s the meaning of the scar if we don’t learn how to heal?
I’ve written a bunch of articles lately. More than I have in the last four years or so, I believe. I used to write a lot, but I kinda lost the desire to do so over time, like most of my more active passions. Depression’s a bitch and it will take away what drives you piece by piece. And yet here I am, writing again. Not without reason, mind you; all of the pieces I’ve written lately were a way to channel my feelings through something I used to love doing — talking about my greatest passion, videogames, and the multiple ways it intertwined with my life.
The first article, Wild Hearts Sometimes Die, is the long and short of it. The events of my life that led me to see the world without my depression-tinted goggles for the first time in over a decade and how everything went to shit, leading to my current mental state (which is pretty poor, if it wasn’t clear). The Ghost Of My Name was a long overdue piece on how fighting games shaped my life in the last few years, how only in hindsight I can see what they brought to my life and how I foolishly threw it all away. At The End Of The Road is an article I wrote at my lowest — a cry for help about the regrets that I can’t shake off and the ever-so-growing desire to just end it all. Lastly, Opening The Cage is where I am right now: broken, tired and disillusioned. Little more than a zombie, waking up every day to live a life that doesn’t feel real.
That’s the word I’ve been using more and more lately: real. Nothing of what I do feels “real”. I get up to work a job I don’t really care about for money I have no use for (yes, they pay the bills, but what’s the point of paying for electricity when you’re just waiting for the lights to go out for good anyway?), to help a family I feel I have no real connection to and support a hobby that I love but I’ve also been thoroughly exploring for almost 30 years. There are many, many points during my week where I just stare up at the ceiling and wonder “Is this actually all there is to it?”. Because if the answer is yes then I’m ready to call it quits. Triple jump off the balcony and call it a day. I do not want to live another god-knows-how-many years of this. That much I know for sure.
But I haven’t jumped off the balcony, and that’s not because I can’t triple jump (all italians can do that). The whole reason I started writing again was because, for the first time in over ten years, I felt a change. A change for the better. I was no longer a zombie waking up to a life of events that didn’t matter — every morning I’d immediately grab my phone to chat with my friends, these people that were changing my life by letting me in. And I mean truly letting me in, not just being friendly acquaintances with a common hobby. And I was happy. Genuinely happy.
Change.
That didn’t work out, as I explained multiple times across the previous articles. But the craving for change remains. The one thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to continue living like this. Whether that means ending it or not remains to be seen, but one thing’s clear: I want change. I need change. All the previous articles point to this conclusion. I need to move forward, but I don’t know where to find the strength and where to go. So let’s formalize the question for emphasis: what does it take to change?
Like all the other articles, I’d like to express these feelings by talking about a videogame. And when it comes to change, there’s a character that fits the bill perfectly in more ways than one. As obviously hinted by the opening cover I’m talking about Arthur Morgan, the main character of Red Dead Redemption 2 — a game I have very strong feelings for, and one I think is pretty interesting in more ways than one. Let’s talk about it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a pretty fascinating case.
When it comes to AAA games, there’s a tendency for playing it safe nowadays. If you look at, say, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 by Insomniac you’ll see a game that has been called “more of the same” a lot. I haven’t played Spider-Man 2, but I did play the prequel and its expansion and when it comes to “playing it safe” they’re as safe as you can possibly get. Huge open world with tons of activities to do, most of which are the same minigame but in a slightly different location. Cool animations and focus on setpieces overshadow everything else, which is not necessarily a bad thing by itself. With Spider-Man, though, it’s hard not to feel like this is not really that different from the Batman Arkham games, or any similar open world games I’ve played before. When you look at the numbers the reason is kinda obvious: according to the Insomniac leak, Spider-Man 2 costed a whopping 315 million dollars to make. Sony needed to sell around 7 million copies just to break even. From this perspective it’s kinda obvious why Spider-Man feels like something I’ve already played — it’s because people liked those games that Spider-Man is taking notes from. You can’t really afford to take risks with that kind of budget.
Rockstar Games is one of the exceptions to this rule. Like Valve and Nintendo they’re one of the lucky companies to have unlocked the infinite money cheat code (taking the form of GTA Online for R*). This allows them to spend a fortune and take risks where others can’t really afford to. Red Dead Redemption 2 dips a bit into this territory, and it does so without sacrificing budget — estimates from experts sit around the 500 million dollars mark, which is extremely high even for an AAA game. And yet, RDR2’s open world is nothing like Spider-Man. In fact, while it’s far from perfect, RDR2 has a lot to say. So much so that one could even describe it as “authorial”, in certain aspects. When I first played the game I gave it an 8.5 — a good score, but not the 9 I usually give to games I deem to be “masterpieces”. This is because when I played it I had quite a few issues with the game, and I still do. And yet here I am, writing about it six years later, after completing two playthroughs (both over 100 hours long). A game that can transcend its flaws like that is special, and that’s definitely a word that describes Arthur Morgan’s story well. But what’s so special about it?
Let’s start with the basics, just in case someone out there doesn’t know what RDR2 is. In Red Dead Redemption 2 we play as Arthur Morgan, one of the members of Dutch van der Linde’s gang in the old, wild west. The year is 1899, and the west as Arthur knows it is dying. Outlaws like Dutch’s gang are being actively hunted down by the law, and the game starts after a failed heist where many gang members have been killed by a private security force known as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Dutch and the remaining members of the gang go hiding up north, on the snowy mountains that will host the first hour or so of gameplay. “Gameplay” here is a word used very generously. If you’re familiar with Rockstar’s titles they usually start by getting right into it; GTAV, for example, starts with a big shootout, following by stealing a car and driving it across the city.
While RDR2 does start with a shootout, the stakes feel immediately different. Where in GTA you open up with what you’d expect from GTA — a big gunfight against a dozen of policemen — RDR starts with the slow realization that your gang is in trouble as your partner finds a poorly hidden body next to the house where Dutch is asking for help. As you draw your revolver and take the first shot at the man in front of Dutch, the music playing is far removed from the usual adrenaline-pumping beats we’re used to hear in games during gunfights, immediately giving us the feeling that this is not gonna be that kind of game. There’s gonna be violence, alright, but there’s not gonna be any glory to it.
This feeling is expanded upon during the first hour or so of gameplay, that most people would describe as “slow” at best and “a slog” at worst. You go hunting for food for the gang’s survivors, you rescue John Marston (the main character of the first game) from wolves and generally spend a lot of time travelling around, getting to know your companions and doing very little shooting. This is “dragged down” even further by how slow everything feels. Arthur feels heavy to move and every action has a deliberately long animation. There’s no skipping animations for opening drawers or closets, looting corpses has Arthur going through every pocket and skinning an animal has a fully detailed animation of the main character using a knife to carefully remove the skin. Arthur’s rifles are stored in the saddle of the horse and have to be retrieved manually. Even the revolver, our starting gun and a cowboy’s best friend, feels weird to use: starting with a single-action revolver we’ll have to press the fire button twice every time, once to cock the hammer and twice to pull the trigger. These actions have often been described as an attempt from the game at being realistic, but I always thought that was the wrong way to look at it. We’ll get back on that in a bit.
After the first hour or so, the gang starts moving east and we enter the open world. This is where the game completely detaches itself from other Rockstar titles. Instead of a bustling megacity, the world of RDR2 is made up by a few small cities in a vast country. Each of these cities has its own personality, starting with the small and modest Valentine and eventually reaching Saint Denis, a huge (well, comparatively) city filled with modern technologies. But unlike GTA, the open world of RDR2 is not just a bunch of activities to complete.
See, one of the “realistic” aspects of the game that people dislike is that RDR2 doesn’t have a proper fast travel. You can unlock a fast travel to one of the cities, but to get back to the gang’s camp you’ll always have to use your horse. This is obviously a very deliberate choice, and there’s a reason for it. Red Dead 2’s open world is probably the single most “alive” open world I’ve ever seen in a videogame. There’s an incredible amount of random events — so many that I only saw them start repeating around 70 hours into the game. Some of them are obviously rather simple, like someone trying to rob you, but there’s a lot of events where we meet minor characters asking for help with a story attached to them, along with other more particular events we can decide to intervene in. Whether it’s a lady whose horse died and needs a hand or a bunch of workers who need to move a tree, Arthur is gonna meet a lot of people on his travels, and they’re gonna make every trip unique.
Mind you, this is only a small part of RDR2’s open world; yes, we have a bunch of activities like poker and what you’d usually expect from an open world like this, but there’s also bounties (each one with an unique storyline — you won’t always go in guns blazing), subquests, seemingly irrelevant places that have surprises waiting inside. My favorite is the small cabin outside of Saint Denis, where you can find a bunch of people who killed each other after a game of poker. If you try to grab the money they’ll get back up, revealing they were only pretending to be dead after hearing you come in and forcing you to kill them. The last open world that had this much detail in it that I remember is The Witcher 3’s, but TW3’s open world is waiting for you to discover it. RDR2’s world won’t wait. Things will happen as you ride on your horse or make your way to the saloon, and that’s what makes it feel alive. People are living their lives around Arthur, and it’s up to him to decide how to interact with them.
Right, interacting. While we can’t exactly decide what Arthur will say, we do have the option to “greet” or “antagonize” every single NPC we meet. While this doesn’t usually do much aside from waving a friendly hello or getting into a fistfight, Arthur’s dialogues will change dynamically based on the context. And this is where we circle back to what we were talking about earlier: I think “realistic” is the wrong word for RDR2. Yeah, there’s a bunch of realistic things in the game: Arthur’s beard and hair grows over time, you need to polish your guns, you can set up camp to cook meat and so on. In the end, though, this isn’t a game about realism. It’s still a third person shooter with regenerating health where your main character can reload a revolver faster than a trained soldier can swap an AR15 magazine.
The word we’re looking for, in my opinion, is “immersive”. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a very, very immersive game. There’s no proper fast travel, we can take a bath for no reason other than being able to, we can spare a dollar for a poor homeless veteran on the side of the road, we can sit at the camp and listen to people talk (or talk to said people, in some occasions) for hours. RDR2 is deliberately slow because it wants you to fully experience it. For the 100something hours the game takes, you become Arthur Morgan and fully embrace his life. And this is handled masterfully across the whole story. The camp is possibly the most beautiful home I’ve ever seen in a videogame; every time you come back to it you can see the members of the gang talking to each other, arguing, playing games, drinking, singing. There’s more details in the gang’s camp than in an entire Ubisoft open world. Which isn’t saying much, but you know.
This deliberate immersion that slows down the pace hasn’t been received super well by anyone. A lot of people don’t like, for example, that you can’t run around while you’re in the camp. While I understand that for game-y purposes that can be annoying, I feel like that’s missing the point of what Rockstar is trying to do with RDR2. Arthur’s story is not one you rush through, but one you savor bit by bit, understanding more and more about him as you travel across the country with Dutch’s gang. It’s a bold choice for a product of this caliber, but the way it paid off is incredible.
Unfortunately, though, Rockstar ultimately chickened out when it comes to the campaign itself, which is the reason I didn’t give the game the highest score at first. All the details about immersing yourself in a fully alive world kinda hit a wall when you face repetitive missions where you follow someone and engage in very limiting firefights where if you stray too far from the path the game will instantly hit you with a game over. My biggest pet peeve is how Arthur’s rifles magically appear on his back if you’re about to get ambushed, both ruining the surprise of the cutscene and taking away what could be an interesting gameplay element — one that you do have to face when in the open world and get ambushed by outlaws, for example.
What ultimately saves the campaign is three things. First there’s the fantastic gunplay, which we’re used to get by Rockstar titles thanks to their Rage engine. Aside from that the game has some amazing setpieces, that set up an incredible atmosphere thanks to good writing choices, fantastic music and great visuals. There’s a lot of scenes that will vividly remain in the player’s brain long after they’re done, even though gameplay-wise they really were no different from any of the other missions played so far.
What really sets it apart, though, is its story. When it comes to Rockstar stories, if we exclude maybe GTAIV, they always tend to be a bit on the weaker side. Generally excuses to set up setpieces like fighting on the chopper or doing the gatling heist in GTAV. These are very fun to play, but aside from that I can’t say I really cared for any of the GTA stories much. Even the first Red Dead Redemption is a game where nothing happens for roughly 85% of the story. That 15% is kinda significant, but boy does it take a while to arrive.
RDR2 is the exception, and the reason I wanted to write this article. The story here is not perfect, but it’s the kind of story that could only be told through a videogame: a 100 hours journey through the life of a man we come to know through his actions and, ultimately, comes to an end that wouldn’t have the same impact in any other medium. Every subquest, every random event, every mission is necessary to define the answer to the question that brought up this article in the first place:
Who the hell is Arthur Morgan?
The following part of the article contains spoilers about Red Dead Redemption 2. It also discusses topics related to depression.
Arthur met Dutch (and his older friend Hosea Matthews) when he was around 14, a few years after losing his father. Dutch is often described as a charismatic man, with a vision for a community free from the limits of the law. While they lived as outlaws, Dutch preferred to see his group as modern Robin Hoods, donating the money they stole to orphanages and other people in need. As one of the main members of the gang, Arthur is no stranger to doing bad things in order to provide for others. He doesn’t take joy in killing but he also won’t hesitate a second to pull the trigger. Some of the jobs we deal with early on in the game definitely feel less “noble” than others, like collecting debts from poor people that decided to take a loan from Strauss, the loanshark of the group. Despite Arthur visibly not approving of Strauss’ methods he still has no problem putting on a scary face for the debtors. Regardless of what he might personally think about it, Arthur always stays loyal to Dutch and has blind faith in his vision.
The first few chapters reflect this vision. Dutch is presented as a charismatic man that always seems to get what he wants, and while things don’t always go the gang’s way Dutch seems to have a plan ready for every occasion. The group travels further east as pressure from the Pinkerton increases, and as tensions grow Hosea seems less and less convinced of Dutch’s plans. As the story progresses Dutch seems to become more and more bloodthirsty, seeking revenge against everyone that wrongs him. While he initially masks this by trying to protect the gang (and rescuing John Marston’s son, who gets kidnapped), he soon starts killing anyone who is against him, despite Hosea protesting his decisions and arguing they should try to lay low and avoid drawing the Pinkertons’ attention.
During all this, Arthur is growing more and more disillusioned with his life. Constantly running from the Pinkertons made him realize that the world he grew up with along with Dutch and Hosea is slowly falling apart. They are Robin Hoods no longer — they’re just outlaws trying to survive. He’ll still do whatever it takes to provide for the gang, but something is starting to change in him, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.
Before we progress any further, I should specify the game has an honor system. Doing illegal actions outside of missions will lower the honor, and the game is divided in High Honor and Low Honor. While it is almost impossible to finish the game with Low Honor (the story makes more sense with High Honor) there are some significant changes to the plot that I think are important and I’ll discuss later on.
The plot reaches the boiling point in Saint Denis. Dutch proposes “one more score” to solve the gang’s issues: rob Saint Denis’ bank and board a ship to Tahiti. One last robbery to get enough money to sail away from the pressure of the law and live happily ever after. Things, of course, don’t go as planned: Hosea (and Lenny, another good friend of Arthur) dies in the robbery and the gang is forced to flee on a boat, barely surviving and ending up in Guarma. This chapter is honestly weird and filler-y (and nobody really likes it), but it does set up a beautiful ride once Arthur manages to return home to the gang. The robbery failed, more people died and Dutch seems to have lost all of his charisma in favor of anger. Could things get any worse?
Yes, actually. Remember those debts Arthur collected in the first chapter? One of the debtors was sick and ended up spitting blood on him as Arthur was beating him up. When he gets back to Saint Denis, Arthur starts to feel sick and barely makes it to the doctor. Tuberculosis.
He’s dying.
With his death approaching very quickly, Arthur has to decide what he wants to do for the time he has left. This is where the Honor system comes into play, but not just that: subquests also play a big role into the story. Arthur often has to choose what he wants to do, and during the last chapter (excluding the epilogue) many quests appear that involve helping people. I can’t really do justice to a 100 hours journey in so little space, but there are a few quests that stand out. I want to start with my personal favorite: a mission that has very little to do with gameplay but somehow left a big impact on me.
As you travel up north during the last chapter, Arthur can find a woman called Charlotte crying over the grave of his husband. She lived in a shack with him and has no idea how to hunt and provide for herself. Arthur decides to help her, catching a rabbit and teaching her how to skin it and, later on in the second part of the quest, showing her how to handle a rifle. Arthur starts feeling sick and Charlotte takes care of him, giving him a kiss on the cheek before he departs.
After a full game of following Dutch’s plans, we finally start to see the real Arthur Morgan. He might be an outlaw and a killer, but his intentions were always to help the people he cared for. There’s no real reason to help Charlotte other than it being the good thing to do, and Arthur doesn’t hesitate to do so. It’s possible that the Arthur at the beginning of the game, still following Dutch as his ideal father figure, would have just ignored her riding on to wherever he had to go. But that’s not Arthur Morgan. There’s a good man within this dying cowboy, even if he doesn’t believe it himself.
This last part is obvious in the last part of Strauss’ debts questline. When he reaches the last city in the game he meets the widow of the man that gave him tuberculosis, and has to meet the other end of his actions: she’s now forced to prostitute herself, while her son is working in the mines and getting bullied by the other miners. Arthur intervenes for both of them and offers money back to the two. She’s not willing to forgive him, which Arthur understands perfectly fine and doesn’t care for: he’s a damned soul that cannot and will not forgive himself, but he still has enough time left to do the right thing and try to fix some of his mistakes.
This is further explored in the rest of the quest, where Arthur has the opportunity to refuse to claim the debts of all the remaining debtors. One of them thanks him, claiming that he’s a kind soul — something Arthur immediately dismisses by saying “I don’t know nothing about kindness”. The message here is clear: Arthur doesn’t believe in forgiveness. He doesn’t believe there’s a good man within him, despite all of the debtors claiming otherwise. When he comes back to the camp he kicks Strauss out, claiming he’s the worst out of all of them. He’d rather be a killer than someone that takes from the poor. All the actions he justified by “helping the camp” now weight him down, and he only has one desire left: to make things right. Whatever it takes, and whatever it means.
And of course, we have to wrap it up with the one cutscene everyone talks about when referring to this game. During an earlier chapter Arthur can help Sister Calderón, nun of the church of Saint Denis, recover a crucifix stolen from a young boy, and later on donate money to the food bank she’s making. If the player does this the woman will appear in a cutscene after a story mission, about to leave for Mexico. This is where Arthur exposes himself the most, talking about his disease with Calderón.
He explains that he’s a bad person that has done horrible things, but the nun isn’t convinced. The Arthur Morgan she knows is not a monster. He smiles when helping people in need and donates money to the less fortunate. “That’s the problem”, she says, “You don’t know you”. Arthur opens up more and more, admitting to not knowing what to do, to which she replies to be grateful that he sees his life clearly for the first time. “Sometimes [I also don’t believe in anything], but then I meet someone like you and everything makes sense”.
And, finally, that one scene. Arthur manages to find the words he needed to express how he feels. “I’m afraid”, he says staring at the nun, his expression no longer hardened by the last god-knows-how-many years of violence. Two simple words that finally put together everything that’s happened so far. He’s dying and the world he believed in fell apart. What is he supposed to do now?
He has to change.
When we arrive at the end of the game, the situation for the gang is out of control. Most of the gang fled, and whoever’s left is uncertain of who to trust. Dutch is only interested on who is on his side and who is against him, and Arthur only has a few people left on his side. When talking to John Marston (the main character of RDR1 for whoever doesn’t know) he doesn’t mince words: when the time comes, he has to go and not look back.
In the last mission, Abigail (John’s wife) has been taken hostage by the Pinkertons. Dutch decides to leave her — a decision Arthur ignores. He leaves with another gang member to rescue Abigail (there’s also a mole in the gang but that’s not really what this article is about), and after doing this he sets off for his final confrontation with Dutch. This last ride, likely coming after many, many hours of gameplay, has Arthur looking back to the people he met. The quotes he’ll remember will be based on the playthrough and his honor level. Assuming high honor for now, most of them will remind him that there is a good man within him — the determination he needs to do the right thing. As he rides, That’s The Way It Is plays in the background; a beautiful song that elevates what’d otherwise be a somewhat cliché cutscene.
The many miles we walked
The many things we learned
The building of a shrine
Only just to burn…
When he arrives, Arthur has one last choice: help John get to his family or try to go for the money the gang has left. Assuming the former, John tries to convince him to try and leave with him, but Arthur knows this is the end for him. “You’re my brother” is the last thing John tells him before Arthur is left alone. After one last gunfight with the Pinkertons and a fistfight with the mole, Arthur has a few last words to say. He reminded Dutch, who showed up at the last second, that he gave him all he had, but he also knows he won, in his own way. John and Abigail made it out alive — his last act, against every order Dutch gave him. He dies staring at the sun rising, knowing that he managed to change. He probably still doesn’t think of himself as a good man, even on his last breath, but the people around him will remember him as one.
There’s a lot more to unpack about RDR2’s story (and it’s really hard to do it justice without a 3 hours essay), but for the sake of this article I just want to talk a bit about the low honor ending. For a long time I just thought it didn’t really make sense, but after thinking about it I think it’s fair for it to exist. This is the version of Arthur that doesn’t manage to change.
Instead of Sister Calderón, Arthur meets Reverend Swanson at the train station, member of his camp. A drunkard in the first few chapters, the Reverend manages to change himself and decides to escape the camp before things go out of control. He also appears in the high honor route if the church subquest isn’t completed. In the low honor ending, Arthur tells him he hasn’t changed. “I’m still a bad man”, he complains. Swanson puts a hand on his shoulder and tells him he might not change, but he knows his path. He lived his life like a warrior and he will die as one. All of the ending variations in this one end a lot worse for Arthur — even if he decides to help John his death hits a lot worse, cursing himself and the mole before being shot in the head.
Most people think this ending is less fitting, and while I do agree it’s also important that it exists. Change is hard. Extremely hard. Especially so for Arthur Morgan, who has to face the fact the last 20something years of his life were for nothing. It takes a lot of strength to look at that in your last days of life and decide to row against it. The developers clearly intended the high honor ending to be canonical, especially since it’s really hard to get to low honor, but I do think the simple existence of the low honor variations gives it more gravity. There’s a version of Arthur Morgan that just didn’t make it. That makes the one that made it that much more special.
So, back to the original question. What does it take to change?
Arthur Morgan had to face death to finally see his life with clarity. He had to challenge more than twenty years of his past life and figure out who he really was. Who he really wanted to be. A man with no beliefs left, without the person that led him most of his life, left to figure out for himself what he really wanted to do. In the end, assuming the high honor ending as canonical, he chose to take the gamble. He stuck with the people he loved (and the people he wronged) and tried to make their life better. He died giving what little he had left to the right people. This is who he chose to be in his last moments — a good man. Whether he believed in it or not.
Safe to say, I’m no Arthur Morgan. I haven’t shot anyone in my life (yet (this is a joke, don’t send the cops to my house)). But I have hurt people. I tried to make up for it, but I ended up making things worse. The people I have offered my love to refused it, and that has left me stuck for the last year and a few months now (how time flies). I do believe, as cheesy as it sounds, that Sister Calderón was right — love is the answer. But what do you do when people refuse it?
That’s the part I’m stuck at. I’ve been chasing the same fragments of a life that no longer exists for so long now that I forgot what else there is to find. And I don’t want to do that anymore, because all it’s done for me is cause me pain. I’m tired of wallowing in pain. I want to move forward. But where “forward” is, I don’t know. Every step I take seems to be the wrong one, and it just makes me fall back in the box. So how am I supposed to change?
I don’t know. The simple answer is that I don’t know. Days pass by staring at the ceiling waiting for something to click. Something to finally make sense. Instead I get burned out by more and more disappointments, leaving me in this room where nothing feels real anymore.
So maybe I have to look at it the other way. I can’t change. How can I change when I don’t know what I’m supposed to change? I did something wrong at some point and now I’m stuck waiting for the clock to tick down to the final second. I’d want nothing more than to say this isn’t the case and that I still have hope, but so far everything points in that direction. I guess this is the giant I’m wrestling with. I can only hope that, at some point, in some way, I’ll actually win this fight.
But maybe that’s someone else’s story.
