This was written by Gabe from St. Olaf. To submit your own work to the student blog, please email [email protected].
The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.
“May I stand unshaken / Amid, amidst a crashing world”
-D’Angelo, from “Unshaken”
(Major spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2 ahead. The game has been out for a year and a half, but still.)
I wasn’t quite sure things were getting bad until it was obvious.
My older brother and I decided to get Red Dead Redemption 2 while the two of us were stuck home due to our colleges going online. It took seven days for the game to arrive, and then it took me seven days to complete the story. It was by far the most time I’d dedicated to a single game over the course of one week in a while, and well, it was surreal.
I learned a few things in the process of leading Arthur Morgan (the player character) through the fictional states of New Hanover, Ambarino, Lemoyne, and West Elizabeth. Most distinctly, I wasn’t in control.
Now, obviously I was controlling the character. If I moved, Arthur moved; if I shot, Arthur shot; but Rockstar spent almost a decade developing this game, it wouldn’t be that easy.
I’m not the first, and I certainly won’t be the last, person to describe Red Dead’s world as “alive.” It’s a word that game reviewers use often nowadays, especially with the prevalence of open world games. Yet, no matter how many games I play, there’s always something deeply intriguing about a world that seems to act independent of me. Basically, I’ll never forget the time I was riding to a town when a cougar spooked my horse, I got bucked to the ground, and then immediately had my throat ripped out by the cat.
All this to say, Arthur Morgan felt more like a character in a movie than a character in a video game. Maybe it was the journal he kept as the game progressed, maybe it was the voice work of Roger Clark that humanized him, maybe it was the longing for safety and security to those who mattered to him. Regardless, I found myself caring about Arthur in a way I don’t for most video game characters.
Which made it so much worse when I couldn’t save everyone. Arthur is very distinctly a criminal. I killed a lot of people, robbed a lot of stores, and even a few trains while I was at it. In the back of my head I knew this was an unsustainable path, and Arthur did too, commenting several times that his goal was just to make sure everyone stayed safe, that no one else died.
And for the briefest of moments, in Chapter 3, that seemed feasible. Things had settled, we’d just moved camp after a successful bank robbery, and the gang was working to find some hidden Confederate gold that an old family was allegedly hiding. The task was to pit the two major families of Rhodes, the local town, against each other. They’d been in a blood feud since the Civil War, and if we could keep them at each other, by God, we’d come out on top. And it was working? I burnt tobacco fields, I stole crates of illegal moonshine, the rest of the gang did the same. One big score, that’s what Dutch, our leader, said, one big score and we’re gone.
And then Sean got shot in the face, and we got into a shootout with one of the families in town. And then we get back to camp and find that the other family kidnapped Jack, only a boy. Everything we had done was for nothing. There was no gold, there was no successful pitting of the blood feud. We tried to use both families and got used instead.
That was the first moment I realized I wasn’t in control. I was too late to do anything about it. Sean was dead, we were fleeing, and we didn’t make enough money.
That cycle would continue to the end of the game. I felt progressively more passive in my ability to influence the world. Arthur could move Heaven and Earth and might delay the inevitable, but there was only so much he could do.
My college did a fine job of keeping us updated on the growing Coronavirus pandemic. Our president promised in email after email that by all account St. Olaf College was going to stay open so long as we were able to do so. This was in February. Things were…fine, I suppose. The Coronavirus sat idly in the back of our heads. It would be pulled as a joke whenever someone got sick, but that was all.
I wasn’t quite sure things were getting bad until it was obvious.
St. Olaf had a late spring break this year anyway, which was suddenly extended by an extra week. Okay, simple enough. Two weeks of online learning were scheduled for the end of spring break. Not optimal, but fine, two full cycles of infection, that was the reasoning. They would update us on the situation regarding the end of the year but maintained that the goal was to get back on campus. “That’s what you paid for; that’s what we’re here for” was essentially what they were saying.
Okay, things are planned for, as much as they can be. Every email did end with “We’ll keep you updated as the situation evolves” of course.
Things went from bad to worse in the span of three days.
What was initially “see you all after the long break” became “if you don’t have a compelling reason to stay grab all of your things and leave with post-haste” in an afternoon. I left on a Thursday; campus felt dead. There was a weird air to the world, it sat with an uneasy weight.
I wasn’t in control. There was no control.
Arthur Morgan is diagnosed with tuberculosis at the beginning of Chapter Six. It’s a death sentence. Antibiotics wouldn’t be invented for another 30 years, and Arthur can’t go anywhere to potentially lessen the progress of the disease.
I couldn’t shoot my way out of this.
I don’t think I speak for just myself when I say that people like security. People like knowing what’s going to happen next, people like knowing what the results are, people like being in control. The problem is, no matter how “in control” we might be, we aren’t.
Bad things happen to good people. That’s a fault of the bad, not the good.
Arthur Morgan, plagued by tuberculosis, with full knowledge of the things he did wrong, succumbed to his illness and injuries watching the sunrise at the end of the game. He was never in control, despite how much it felt like it sometimes.
And despite that, he won. His goal was always to protect the people he loved, and he did that. He got John Marston (the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption) to safety. John’s wife and kid got out too, thanks to Arthur. He saved the Marstons; he protected the people he loved, and at the end, the Marstons were the only ones left.
I can’t stop the Coronavirus by myself. I don’t have the skills to do that, and that’s not how diseases work. What I can do, however, is protect the people I care about, the people I love.
I wish I could snap my fingers and get rid of the Coronavirus.
I wish things were back to normal.
I wish I was in control.
But I’m not, and battles are not won with what you don’t have. They are won with what you do.
