The present essay wishes to explore the link between video games and literary discourse by considering the case of Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the worldwide blockbuster game regarded as a milestone in the Western genre, as well as a contemporary reframing of the nineteenth-century mythology of the American frontier. However, as a theoretical focus on narrativity and storytelling may suggest, Red Dead Redemption 2 also represents a specimen of narrative work in its own right. In fact, Red Dead Redemption 2 indirectly adapts literary techniques and tropes typical of realist fiction, in its complex and subtle portrayal of late-nineteenth-century American society. By means of a close reading of key video game missions set in what can be defined as a typical Gilded Age metropolis, Saint Denis, this essay proposes to reinterpret Red Dead Redemption 2 in light of the structural connections it shares with classic American realist works – whose authors range from Mark Twain to Henry James, from Stephen Crane to Theodore Dreiser. Indeed, Red Dead Redemption 2 mirrors three pivotal stages in the development of the literary discourse underlying realist fiction, namely: (a) the examination of an urban environment within the game setting; (b) the representation of stereotypes through non-player characters; and (c) the construction of a socio-cultural individuality through player actions. While representing a case-study of transmedia storytelling – or, more precisely, of storyplaying of the American lifestyle characterizing the Gilded Age, Red Dead Redemption 2 also employs a number of significant strategies comparable to the creation of literary fiction.
This article examines how the Call of Duty videogames, specifically Ghosts (2013) and Modern Warfare II (2022), reproduce and aestheticize US state violence at the US–Mexico border. Through an analysis of gameplay mechanics, mission structure, and audiovisual design, the article argues that these videogames proceduralize US exceptionalism. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics and Ian Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric, the article introduces procedural necrorhetorics to describe how games embed racialized death into their rule systems and rhythms of play. These mechanics make players intuitively identify and eliminate racialized enemies, rendering border violence both thinkable and pleasurable. In this context, whiteness functions as a kinesthetic and affective structure of dominance, guiding players to perceive threats and exercise force. By embedding necropolitical logics into the body’s sensorimotor responses, Call of Duty rehearses a digital fantasy of American sovereignty under siege – one that must be restored through preemptive, racialized violence.
This article explores video game adaptations of American popular history and culture by looking at the 1990 arcade title Mad Dog McCree produced by American Laser Games. Heavily inspired by the Hollywood Western (along with the broader mythology of the nineteenth-century American West) and using light guns and Full-Motion-Video (FMV) technology, the live action title offered players the chance to play an active role in a celluloid-based frontier story. Handling replica pistols, players watched a series of cinematic vignettes, before assuming their own role in the action, shooting their light guns at all manner of renegade gunslingers. Thanks to the FMV, the title recreated in tone and substance a traditional Hollywood Western, placing the player in the role of lead character and hero, and offering a unique ‘film-game’ experience and cinematic realism explored in this article. As well as functioning as a nostalgia piece for traditional cowboy movies, Mad Dog McCree also took the Western in new directions, emphasizing the frontier as, in essence, a landscape of play and play-acting, marked by simple pleasures and constant repetition.
