Red Dead Redemption 2, Realism, and the Lost Art of Immersion
As a teen obsessed with open-world video games like Grand Theft Auto and Elder Scrolls, games where you explore sprawling maps rather than navigate linear level design, I always schemed in my mind the blueprints for the perfect game. It was a game that contained a mile-by-mile representation of the entire planet. In this game, you were free to travel wherever you could go or do anything you wanted to do in real life: get in a car and drive cross-country for days, break into the Louvre and steal all the precious jewels, buy a mansion in any country in the world. I even went so far as to imagine a space shuttle as a usable craft, meaning, yes, you could go into space.
There was no quick-travel, no vehicle you couldn’t drive, and no place you couldn’t go - assuming you could get there. Entering the White House might be possible, but you’d need to be suicidal to try it. There would be some kind of narrative ȧ la Grand Theft Auto where you had an inordinate number of missions to play, plus a whole mess of disparate characters you could select with an accompanying story line. The game would have stats for your skills and physiognomy: muscle mass, diet, driving, gardening, cooking, persuasion, flying, all bolstered by mini-game activities that increased your skill the more you practiced it. You could purchase stocks, sail the Atlantic, or open a business. Death would be permanent, meaning you would have to start the entire game over every time you died. As I became more and more immersed in devising such an impossible game, I tried to make its mechanics as similar to real-life as possible. An initial groggy-state every time you start the game, occasional bathroom breaks, diseases and viruses that could impede your performance. The main draw to this video game was just how realistic I could make it.
Considering that vision circa the early aughts, I now see I was constructing a Google Maps meets Vice City kind of video game - a game where you could pretty much do anything you wanted on an inexhaustible map, with the most photorealistic visuals and uncanny physics you could imagine. That same idée fixe with hyper-realistic games extended into my young adulthood. I recall trying to beat entire video games without dying, fully immersing myself in the character so that every fight felt like I was really dying, at one point getting thirty deathless hours into Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the hardest difficulty until, in a humiliating error, I was avoidably electrocuted by a fence. I would play GTA IV without speeding or running red lights so that when the LCPD actually pursued me, it was that much more out of the ordinary. Before going to bed, I thought about what my own character would be thinking between game saves, making their fears in the game’s narrative my own anxieties. Looking back, I wonder how much of my mania for immersion and believability reflects my adult passion for how literature does the same thing, albeit with far more intimacy and depth and far less violence and terrible dialogue.
When games acknowledged the subtleties that arise with exploring, driving, fighting, etc. rather than ignore them, it made sense that it would naturally make the game more innovative, more immersive, and ultimately better. RPGs relied on recycling the turn-based combat of table-top games for an audio-visual medium and shooter games treated your avatar like some indomitable juggernaut absorbing truckloads of bullets, racking up a kill count in the thousands. I even thought it was unrealistic and unengaging that your avatar could die and endlessly try over again and again. I even began to feel bad for in-game bosses who had to best my avatar ad infinitum, while if I beat them only once, I could continue on my merry way, dancing on some would-be demon-lord’s grave. Unlike these games stuck on repeat with cartoonish gameplay, my make-believe game forced the player to put everything on the line with the rewards equal to the risks.
Nowadays, a game comes out every few years that reignites this childish memory, releases that compete with my fading dream-game. I was dead set on privileging a game’s fealty to reality as superior to gaudy racing games or roided out shoot-em-ups that felt hopelessly stuck repeating (or worse) doubling-down on outmoded game designs and genres. The games that made these leaps were, and still are, some of my favorites - games like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, where every time you were injured you had to heal the wound be it a snake bite, a bullet in the shoulder, or a third-degree burn. Or games like GTA: San Andreas where your character could eat enough fast food to become obese or bench press themself into Randy Savage sized-proportions. And games like the Hitman series, where you weren’t actually trying to annihilate an entire army of enemies every level but just one or two targets in a clandestine and believable manner. These games attempted to emulate the AI environments, combat, health, and mobility that accurately reflected reality. Be it Halo or Gran Turismo, such realism was everything to me.
Enter Red Dead Redemption 2, a game heralded by many as one of the greatest of all time - and - one of the most realistic. This isn’t the hyperrealism of Flight Simulator or ARMA, games so focused on the minutiae of their source material that its realism becomes dull and thus realistic to a fault for casual gamers. RDR2’s realism doesn’t deviate from the fast-paced shootouts most action titles define themselves with, but supplements the combat with a grab bag of careful nuances between (and during) firefights. This is a game where your character needs to eat to stay fit, wear the proper attire for different climates, and where (no joke) the scrotum of your trusty steed will shrivel-up in frigid weather and swing low in desert temps. Horses need to be fed, coffee needs to be boiled, and punches will leave bruises. If you treat people poorly, you will be ill-received but if you act honorably you will be treated in kind. Depending on your weapon you’ll need to cock back the hammer every time you fire off a round and if it gets too dirty you’ll need to eventually polish it off with a rag. If you fall or take a blow to the head your hat will fall off until you pick it back up, and refusing to shave will leave you with a beard that’ll make Grizzly Adams’ facial hair look like a five o’clock shadow.
As I became more and more submerged into the western zeitgeist through the protagonist, Arthur Morgan, a dilemma began to emerge. The more I clung to my faith in the verisimilitude of the game, the more fleeting it became. RDR2’s attempt at realism was beginning to backfire and actually diminished what once felt realistic. Let me explain. After being pulled into a visceral world like I had never experienced in a video game before, I went on a hunt at the foot of the Grizzly Mountains. I placed a trophy elk carcass on the back of my horse to sell later and rode to meet an in-game character to start a mission. Once I began the mission and watched the accompanying cut scene, I returned back to my horse - one I had realistically hitched to its post, had realistically fed earlier that morning, and realistically outfitted with a half-dozen items I had bought myself - and noticed that the elk was no longer there. This animal that I had spent hunting, skinning, and conveying disappeared inexplicably, as if it was carried up to heaven along with the devotees of Christ during the rapture. In these types of gaming situations, I would come up with some explanation beyond what I was presented with - Arthur must have taken the decomposing creature off his horse while off camera. But that was the problem! Because the game was so very realistic - the camera segueing seamlessly between gameplay to cut scene and back to gameplay again - I had no way to justify the game’s total believability because such glaring inconsistencies were outrageously apparent and tore the canvas where I had projected the illusion of a second reality.
Another example is how Arthur can only carry two pistols and two large weapons at a time, a detail I actually appreciated for its emphasis on strategizing before a fight rather than having a readymade arsenal in a bottomless satchel. Operating under this assumption though made me realize it didn’t make sense that I could carry a thousand bullets at a time, along with dozens of health items, tons of food, and a prodigious assortment of accouterments ranging from tomahawks to Molotov cocktails. If I can only carry one rifle and one shotgun for realism’s sake, then why the hell do I have five bottles of gin on my person? RDR2’s attachment to realism demonstrated how unrealistic it really was, trapped in an uncanny valley of sorts. The harder it tried to convince me that this was really the Wild West, and the more I tried to identify with the game’s protagonist Arthur Morgan, the more frustrated I became with failing at total immersion.
The problem with ostensible realism magnified with someone watching. I would hear comments like, “How did your horse find you?” or “ How did you skin an entire buffalo in under ten seconds?” and “Why do you keep meeting the same character in random encounters like you’re Larry David in an episode of Curb?” Sure your character can take a bath or read the newspaper, but they can also fall forty feet and sprint away with nary a contusion. I had to stop and greatly reconsider my emphasis on realism in order to really enjoy the game, exorcising this finicky devil in the details. Realism does not always qualify as necessary for any immersive piece of art or game.
The reconciliation I arrived at meant depreciating the very notion of realism, or at least tweaking my understanding of the intentions behind realism. I say this not only for RDR2 or video games in general, but rather all art that espouses aesthetic realism. Whether it be Noah Baumbach’s mumblecore films, Émile Zola’s literary naturalism, or Robert Frank’s street photography, all use realist techniques intended to more accurately depict lived experiences for a specific aesthetic effect. Realism, as initially deployed in its mid-nineteenth-century guise, was not about making art more real for reality’s sake, but a response to a half-century of Romanticism and idealism that no longer reflected Western societies engrained in industrialization and democracy. Stories of Ancient Mariners and Byronic heroes complemented the beginnings of new nations born out of monarchy. Now that the commoner had a voice, they wanted to see themselves represented instead of aristocrats and fanciful knights. From an ideological perspective, advocating for realism isn’t about accurately representing reality but reifying some thing for some purpose. Orientalism could be seen as a failed realism of the East, a replacement of “terra incognita” with the painted harems and exotic wildlife that solidified, rather than challenged, European preconceptions. Orientalism was a very biased and select kind of realism, a kind of subsuming of other cultures for the sake of a dominant right to truth. Just look at Jean-Léon Gérȏme’s painting “The Snake Charmer.” The painting limns in incredibly realistic detail the naked buttocks of a boy holding a mesmerized snake alongside a wizened snake charmer, but it is also composed in such a way to fetishize stereotypes about Eastern exoticism and mysticism. It would be realistic if scenes like this were representative of Eastern reality - which - they are not. One critic called the painting “a sleazy imperialistic vision of ‘the East.’”
The problems with realism are quite evident: it elicits a supposedly objective knowledge considered more “real” than other works because it acknowledges glossed over details. But who decides what those details might be? In the visual arts, wouldn’t the school of photorealism be the omega point for the painter? Maybe painters are irrelevant beings along with the poet and novelist and that instead of telling stories with the pen, shouldn’t they opt for the camera, the movie lens? Isn’t this the most real?
When we say something is realistic, we mean it bears similarities to another’s experience of reality. When literary naturalism came onto the late nineteenth-century scene, it emphasized humans as Darwinian byproducts rather than divine children of God. This is only realistic in so far that it levels all humans as biologically fated, but whether or not it maintains realism with its dismissal of spiritual experiences is a legitimate question. Later “non-realist” movements like the surrealists or the postmodernists were themselves a kind of realism, as all art is some type of realism. When cubism represented the multiplicity of temporal and spatial perspectives that occur with a phenomenological subject(s), wasn’t that more realistic than a precise depiction of two peasants working in a field? Postmodernism represented reality in terms of it having no stability to it, that reality isn’t actually real at all - instead it is powerfully random, chaotic, and impossible to depict objectively. A painting of pure black might just be a nihilist’s realism, or the numerical data that represents a waveform might be a mathematician’s reality. The realism question comes down to our understanding of realism’s intentions, namely, as it is opposed to other aesthetic intentions. Realism, as it turns out, isn’t entirely meaningless.
The function of the word “realism” signifies a category of works that attempt to embrace rather than abandon a scientific or social representation of things, events, and effects. The genre of realism implies a real vs. fictional aestheticism - a facile trap I’m sure some readers have been tricked into dichotomizing as well. Realism as it differs from other works of art (video games included), is a stressing of intimacy and detail instead of the unknown, the fantastic, or the impossible. A realistic work hones in on what is often sidelined - financial woes of a character, bodily functions, and banal trivialities. RDR2 is a game that takes certain imaginative liberties and it is clearly a game intended to be immersive because of how realistic it is, but even after the hundred-hour work weeks its developers put into it, it wasn’t its realism that immersed me but something else. In fact, I would say our obsession with realism is really an attachment to some nonexistent objectivity persistently beyond our reach. If games (and art) want to hone in on detailed nuances, they should only do it if it contributes to the unifying effect a game tries to achieve, a game’s specific internal logic. As I found out, realism in games is just not that important.
Like the logic that governs any piece of art, video games approach comprehensive unity when every factor contributes to the logic of its individual system. In RDR2, the fact that you can only use two rifles when away from your horse makes the game feel more real while simultaneously contributing to the forward-thinking necessary to navigate a shootout. The emphasis on details in the game shouldn’t make the game more real if it isn’t also making it immersive. Which is the key point I want to make - immersion (rather than realism) doesn’t rely on detail alone, but an interacting network of elements the player has to realize in order to become competent at the game. Realism can actually do a really bad job at being realistic if the interface, characters, and controls are awkward or confusing. A very unrealistic game can be far more immersive than a game that is a replication of real life processes. We tend to think of games with realistic physic engines and visuals that mimic human optics as more immersive than Super Mario, but realism doesn’t hold much water if the gameplay and environments don’t flow as intended.
Video game writer and developer Ian Bogost references this interplay between challenge and ability as “flow” and the definition he uses bears a similar resemblance to immersion. Bogost refers to the original definition of flow from the theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as, “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." What is so interesting about regarding video games as immersive when they emphasize flow and not realism is that a game like Tetris could easily be more immersive than a game like RDR2. If anything, all games now have a seat at the table if what we’re really trying to use as a benchmark for quality is their ability to immerse via flow rather than their ability to reproduce reality. If a mini-game for picking a lock has an element of flow to it then it’s not superfluous - but if it feels like a clunky addition, then it isn’t immersive, it’s tedious filler.
If we really wanted games to be more realistic, shouldn’t all avatars take shits, visit the doctor if they get injured, or walk far slower than they really do? Maybe. When James Joyce put scenes of his narrators shitting or masturbating in the novel Ulysses, it wasn’t just to depict realities ignored by a puritanical public. They tie together how the quotidian activities of humans are all connected by a network of language, be it mental or literal. In this case, the realism of Ulysses doesn’t stray from the indecent solely to make this point, not strictly to be “realistic.” The immersion of art takes us out of selves, bonding us to some external and infinite thing.
Video games, while not technically art, do something similar when we operate them. They force our brains to inhabit some foreign logic where the rules of reality are usurped and undone. In its simplest form, it means we can drive our cars on sidewalks in Grand Theft Auto, and in its most theoretical form, players realize a network of relationships, inhabiting an entirely unique system of operations that challenge our expectations of what real even means. I would go so far as to say that video games are like people; they are familiar to us no matter what, but require our silence and consideration if we mean to come to understand them, to comprehend their terms. Only then do we have the capacity to enjoy them, not through force, but by being lost in their being to varying degrees.
Realism as a foundation for immersive video games is a naive and overrated conceit, just as my global video game idea assumed that realism and quality went hand in hand. We seem to use objectivity’s nonexistence as the cornerstone for building better games. It can’t help but feel like Jorge Luis Borges criticisms of precise representations in his short story “On Exactitude in Science,” reminding me of the farcical video game idea I considered perfect because it was oh so very real. Borges writes,
...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with It. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that the vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.
The harder fiction tries to replicate reality, the more pointless it becomes. When artists and developers try to become scientists they do themselves and their consumers a disservice. Fiction is supposed to get us closer to reality by challenging the belief that it is rigid - not drill its fixity in our heads. Instead of art and games implementing realism to submerge us in make-believe universes, we should immerse ourselves in the flow and individual logic of those machines, be they novels, movies, or a video game that just happens to feature dynamic horse testicles.
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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.