Let me paint you a portrait. Behold:
On the one hand, Red Dead Redemption 2 is critically acclaimed bestseller that’s received the ravest of rave reviews across the gaming press and mainstream outlets alike. The game is one of the best-reviewed titles of all time, receiving a Metacritic score of 97/100 on both PS4 and Xbox One. (Read our review here.)
Only a handful of games have scored higher, and not by much.
On the other hand, the game lets you kill whoever you please (with consequences, of course, such as bounties on your head.) This means that players are able to kill innocent townsfolk or ruthless thugs at their discretion. One of those innocent townsfolk happens to be a suffragette—i.e. a woman fighting for women’s right to vote. And this has sparked some predictable—and predictably silly—online feuds.
Let Me Welcome Everybody To The Wild, Wild West
To make a long story short, a YouTuber (many YouTubers, ultimately) called Shirrako made a video of him punching the suffragette in the game and titled it, rather childishly, ‘Red Dead Redemption 2 — Beating Up Annoying Feminist’.
Apparently, this digital homicide, which involves Shirrako punching the suffragette in the face in the game, and then feeding her to an alligator in a separate clip, was “horrific” according to some in the press. When Shirrako was banned temporarily from YouTube, one writer gleefully wrote an article titled ‘YouTuber Banned For Hateful, Feminist Murder In Red Dead Redemption 2′ almost as if Shirrako had actually murdered a feminist in real life, maybe using a copy of the game as his murder weapon. Others framed the entire “controversy” as if there were some conspiracy of anti-feminists, all working together to hurt suffragettes in the game.
Vice’s Emanuel Maiberg started the outrage train with an article on the Motherboard blog titled ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ Players Are Excited to Attack and Kill Feminists in the Game‘ that mostly criticizes the YouTube comments section of Shirrako’s channel which, as you might suspect, is filled with misogyny and stupidity in equal measure. Because it’s a YouTube comment section, the Wild West of horrible comments.
Since when is writing about hateful YouTube comments worth anyone’s while? I can’t even.
When asked by Vice about why the video blew up, Shirrako responded:
I know you’re probably expecting some political answer but the truth is it was simply a funny moment from one of my streams which I’ve decided to upload as a separate video. Not sure if it was intentional by Rockstar Games but the NPC is made to be rather annoying, when you try to shop for clothing in the game, your dialogue with the shop keeper keeps being interrupted by her shouting, so I simply wanted to shop in peace, I’m sure that as a gamer you’re familiar with these annoying NPC situations.
Shirrako also added:
I mean obviously I don’t agree with the sexist comments, but there is not much I can do about them, I don’t like censoring people’s opinions, regardless if I like them or not.
Meanwhile, Maiberg’s concluding paragraph fails to say virtually anything at all:
I don’t think video games alone can be blamed for real-world violence, but they are a part of our cultural infrastructure that allows someone to roleplay as an anti-feminist murderer (a very real, ongoing problem in the real world), upload a video of it to YouTube for profit, and allow others to use that video as a jumping off point to discuss how much they hate women in the real world.
Forgive me if I’m having a hard time gathering the actual point from this conclusion. Yes, it’s true, games like this can be used by hateful people to help spread their hate. And also as a “jumping off point” for articles discussing the historical relevance and struggles of the suffragette movement.
And yet this article later spawned dozens of others like it and likely helped spark the temporary shutdown of Shirrako’s YouTube channel.
“While RDR2 doesn’t actively advocate misogyny, developers consciously chose to let players afflict [sic] violence on feminists,” reads one article. Indeed it does, but then again you can also inflict (not afflict) violence on other innocents in the game as well, and will no doubt spend most of your time shooting at other men with guns. You can shoot animals, too.
So what’s to be done? Make it possible to punch anyone else in the face, but have some magical barrier where the suffragette is standing? Or, alternatively, not include feminists in the game at all?
Wouldn’t that be leaving out a character that might actually make some players curious about the suffragette cause and history, about the struggle women faced to be able to vote in the first place? I’m not saying that’s the point of this game, either, but it seems a shame to leave out these characters because—gasp!—some players might punch them or feed them to alligators or leave them on the train tracks like some mustache-twirling villain.
I suppose we could ban YouTubers who post tasteless videos (quickly leading to the downfall of YouTube in the process.)
Alternatively, this mountain we keep talking about is just a molehill, after all.
Outrage(ous) Wars
In a revealing passage, Maiberg writes of another encounter with suffragettes he had in the game, when asked by one’s lover to accompany her to a protest in order to protect her from potential violent backlash:
I thought it was an interesting backdrop for a mission, and that it was smart for Rockstar Games to highlight some of the horrifying inequalities that defined the American frontier just as much as cowboy hats and six shooters, but I also felt that it was mostly included for flavor. It didn’t say that the suffragettes were good or bad, just that they existed.
How are players supposed to feel about this? Do players think that the suffragette in Saint Denis is annoying because that’s the baggage they bring to the game, or is she portrayed unsympathetically?
I’ve noticed this tendency from some corners of the internet. These people who want games to tell us what to think and how to feel. Apparently Rockstar should hold our hand, helping us know exactly what to think and feel at every juncture (as if the game doesn’t already hold our hands enough.) We should know precisely what the game is saying about any given issue. Heaven forbid we read between the lines or come to our own conclusions. There should be some line of dialog where a character tells us, explicitly, that suffragettes are good and that women should be allowed to vote. If it isn’t included, we helpless, mindless gamers will not have a clue what to think and might be left to our own devices and potential wrongthink.
But that isn’t how art is supposed to work. We aren’t always supposed to know how to feel after we finish watching a film or reading a book. Good art leaves us with questions. I remember finishing The Last Of Us for the first time, and that game’s ending unsettled me. I wasn’t sure how to feel. I was deeply conflicted. It was one of the first times in my gaming experience that I felt really at odds about the way the story turned out—not because it was flimsy (as so many game stories are) but because it was a powerful story that didn’t leave us with easy, obvious answers.
Side-note Tomb Raider Dragon’s Lair.
The art of a good open-world game is partly achieved by letting players do what they want. In many ways, this is an area where RDR2 comes up short, oddly enough. Too often the game feels more on-rails than it should, and certainly more scripted than other Rockstar titles. The genius of a game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is in the way its systems all work together, allowing players to do whatever they want with results that make sense based on the systems at play. RDR2 falls short when it comes to being an open-world sandbox game in some ways, but it still gives players a great deal of freedom.
Those players then have freedom to do silly, stupid things. I’ve certainly done plenty of ridiculous, murderous things in past Rockstar games. I’m not sure that running down a crowd of civilians, or sniping people from the roof of a building, is any better than killing a prostitute or punching a suffragette. They’re all violent. They’re all also just pixels. If you can’t properly explain why you draw the line where you draw it, perhaps set down your pen.
Digital Crimes Against Digital Humanity
Don’t get me wrong, I find the videos about this incredibly immature, and the whole “beat up annoying feminist” is just pure trash clickbait, much like all the outrage clickbait the video spawned in response. And, of course, it’s never pleasant to see how hateful people can be online which is one reason you should probably just not read YouTube comments unless you absolutely must. (My apologies to all the decent and thoughtful YouTube commenters out there. This is not directed at you, but at the bottom-feeders who, alas, so often populate threads.)
But this is a Rockstar game. Who among us hasn’t killed innocent civilians in a Rockstar game before? Or had a little fun with them? I distinctly remember lassoing a woman in the first Red Dead Redemption, which I think was part of a quest. It was also, quite frankly, hilarious. Not because she was a woman or had any political views to speak of, mind you, it was just a humorous thing to do. Don’t worry, no real people were harmed in the process. I’ve had lots of hilarious interactions in Rockstar games, with both men and women. It’s part of the fun. Yes, roleplaying as a bad person can, at times, be cathartic. It doesn’t make us bad people to pretend to be bad people for a little while. It might even be good for you.
(P.S. There is a much better argument to be made that Rockstar has not written very interesting female characters overall across its catalog, and I would still very much like to see a Bonnie & Clyde style GTA game where you finally get to play as a female character, but that’s another story for another time.)
The reaction to these videos in online rags is just as predictable as the ugly YouTube comments. Nobody writing these articles is really that shocked or aghast that this can happen in the game; those who truly are appear to have a poor understanding of how video games actually work and an even more tenuous grasp on meaningful social criticism. Meanwhile, many of these websites have published near-perfect reviews of the game already. Nobody docked points for the ability to punch a suffragette. Nor should they. Tis the sound and the fury, dear readers.
This post-review outrage is just clickbait dressed up as Very Serious Condemnation of…what? A YouTuber making a stupid video? Nobody is actually surprised that you can do this in a Rockstar game or that someone on YouTube made a video about it or that YouTube comments are garbage. It’s just a golden opportunity to write about evil gamers and stir up more outrage. Keep the flame wars going. Feed the beast.
Quite frankly, it’s far more surprising that you can’t actually hire a prostitute in Red Dead Redemption 2.out this
I mean, come on Rockstar, how are these girls supposed to make a living? I am shocked. Shocked and outraged! I need to write an article condemning the game and the studio for this gross oversight.
How about this for a headline: ‘Red Dead Redemption 2 Wants You To Starve Prostitutes To Death’. That’s messed up, Rockstar. Just…wow.
