Course title:
The Story of Red Dead: Exploring America's Violent Past Through the Hit Video Game
How did the thought for the course come about?
This course was created through the COVID-19 pandemic. Faced with 2020 lockdowns and unsure months at home, I rediscovered a highschool hobby that I had neglected for 20 years – video games.
One of the primary games I got was “Red Dead Redemption 2”, is about in a fictional America of 1899. The game follows the Van der Linde gang, a ragtag group of idealistic outlaws fleeing authority in an increasingly orderly and hierarchical world. Since its release in 2018, the sport has greater than 64 million copiesI do that seventh on the list of best-selling video games of all time – and the just one with a historical theme on the list.
While video games were a mindless pastime in highschool, this time I played a professor specializing in US history for the reason that Civil War. And while that made me a far more critical gamer, I used to be also genuinely surprised by how often RDRII – because it's often called – alluded to vital issues that historians have debated for generations.
These issues include corporate capitalism, settler colonialism, women's suffrage, and racial inequality in an era that Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age” – a time when the dazzling wealth of a small handful stood in sharp contrast to the misery of abnormal people. These weighty issues were often peripheral moderately than central – but they were present nonetheless.
It wasn't long before I had an epiphany. Given the sport's enormous popularity amongst college-age Americans, why not try teaching a serious history course that uses the games' fictional content as a springboard to delve into a few of the thorniest dilemmas of America's past?
The experiment was a hit. The course was extremely popular with students and in addition received wide media coverage for his unusual approach to conveying popular culture.
Encouraged by this response, I actually have now turned the course right into a book for gamers and history buffs all over the world, entitled “The Story of Red Dead: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past”, which is scheduled to be released in August 2024. An added bonus is that the audiobook version is narrated by Roger Clark, who played the protagonist of RDRII.
What does the course examine?
Given the central role of violence in video games, the course seeks to know what actually led to bloodshed within the United States between 1865 and 1920.
In RDRII, shootings are often sparked by personal grudges, robberies, or excessive drinking. But in Gilded Age America, it wasn't that straightforward. Instead, broader social issues were the essential catalyst for violence. First, Americans were fighting against the emerging regime of corporate capitalism. Should recent corporations like US Steel and the Union Pacific Railroad, which wielded unprecedented power and influence, dominate employees and consumers alike? Many resisted such an idea through protests, strikes and sometimes bloodshed.
Second, there have been disputes amongst Americans over the unfulfilled guarantees of racial equality that had been written into the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. Especially within the South, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived, former slaves and their descendants demanded political participation and a likelihood at economic advancement. But many white Southerners resisted such efforts and infrequently used terror to drive their black neighbors into subservient positions.
Why is that this course relevant now?
American society within the late nineteenth century was shaped by inequalities attributable to capitalism and race—and that continues to be the case today. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests, it is smart to look back on the long road that has led America to its current dilemmas of racial violence and the gap between wealthy and poor. approach to start this conversation with young Americans is thru video games—an industry whose value has now risen to surpass music and flicksand that may very well be the important thing to reaching the scholars of this generation, because studies show.
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What is a very important lesson from the course?
One of a very powerful lessons concerns the town of New Orleans, which is fictionalized in RDRII as “Saint Denis.” In the sport, the outlaw protagonists engage in a gunfight with the town's blue-clad police after a botched bank robbery that leaves corpses on the streets. Few players would have guessed that in the true city in 1900, only one 12 months after the sport's motion, a similarly bloody gunfight with the police took place, during which seven law enforcement officials were killed. But here the outlaw was black, Robert Charleswho vehemently opposed police violence and the emerging racial segregation under Jim Crow laws.
In response to his attacks on the police, white mobs marched through the town and Black civilians killed indiscriminatelyThe outbreak of violence in New Orleans was due to this fact not the result of straightforward banditry, but of one of the vital powerful social dilemmas in America.
What materials does the course contain?
I often start classes with a brief video sequence or gameplay recording of RDRII before we get into the actual story that the games depict—or sometimes misrepresent. For reading, students delve into scholarly monographs reminiscent of that of historian K. Stephen Prince “The Ballad of Robert Charles”, about the violent racial dilemmas in New Orleans. You will also read a number of original sources, such as Cowboy Memoirs, Train timetables and a Texas newspaper from 1899.
What does the course prepare students for?
Anyone who has taken my course or read my recent book knows that the foremost social issues we wrestle with today have deep roots and took their modern form in the identical period between 1865 and 1920 that’s memorably captured in RDRII. They will even turn out to be far more sophisticated consumers of digital media, and games specifically; they can be higher in a position to judge and critique representations of history on the digital screen.
image credit : theconversation.com