A prestigious collection of short stories by an award-winning Irish author isn’t the first place you’d expect to find an intelligent critique of a popular video game and the double-edged sword of escapism. In the second story Colin Barrett Nostalgiathe brilliantly revised collection of eight connected stories set mostly in the west of Ireland, the plot takes a breather to weigh the good and bad of Blood Dusk 2a not-so-subtle nod to Rockstar’s hit open-world western.
Gerry, a boy raised by his brothers after the death of his parents, refuses to leave his room. When he’s not spying on his family, he finds a mixture of comfort and frustration in the predictability of his current game of choice.
Here is the excerpt:
Gerry, the flesh-and-blood boy, was huddled on his bean bag, the only light in his room the glow of the television above the dresser. His PlayStation wheezed on the floor at his slippered feet. The game was Blood Dusk 2. You played as Cole Skuse, a former Yankee soldier and mercenary. At this time, Gerry was about to try to rescue Skuse’s love interest, a beautiful blonde prostitute named Dora Levigne. The Cullen gang was holding her hostage inside the hall. The goal of the mission was to get in there, vent as many Cullen boys as possible, and get her out of it. The Cullen faction was part of a larger horde of wandering rapists, murderers, thieves, and scalpel hunters led by a scarred brute known only as the Father. The Father was your true and last adversary, the man who, in the game’s prologue, had ordered the murder of your family.
Gerry liked Blood Dusk 2, but was less and less enamored with the repetitive missions and intense firefights that you were forced to complete to advance the plot. The match weighed things too much in your favor. You had unlimited lives, too many auto-save points, too nuanced and forgiving targeting system to pick off your opponents. What was worth it, what kept Gerry coming back, was the game’s map. The map was splendid, two hundred square miles of simulated and completely intractable nineteenth-century American frontier. While the missions tended to be clustered into towns and settlements that took up only a small percentage of the game’s physical environment, Gerry had spent countless hours scouring the vast rest of the map. He had discovered the remains of Indian graves, hunted buffalo on an open plain, drunk moonshine with a benignly deranged prospector on the bank of a moonlit creek. The landscape was teeming with wildlife and, to a lesser extent, other people, and of course you could shoot every living thing in the game, although Gerry refrained whenever possible. At dusk he would spur his horse up a hill trail to watch lightning plunge through the cliff walls of a distant canyon, the heavy spots of vultures straggling in thermal currents…
It’s a beautiful piece of prose, managing Gerry’s feelings about the game to open the door to Gerry’s psychology. The story of a man who has lost his family resonates, but the boy cares less about the violent confrontations that drag the story into the swampy, repetitive violence of shooters. And the hero’s struggle with pain and revenge is too easy, too pain-free. Yet Gerry can’t stop playing, because this vast facsimile of the world is a respite from his own, so totally disconnected in time and space.
Is Barrett literally talking about red dead redemption 2? Does not use the official title. Whether that decision relates to legal limits or personal choice, Barrett is clear on the simulacrum and its function. Criticizing one of the most popular games of all time, Barrett invites readers to see themselves in this troubled child. With a couple of paragraphs describing a video game within the context of its player’s life, Barrett mirrors our own relationship with Red Dead, along with all the other games we play to relieve ourselves of reality.
Video game fans of a particular era have spent most of their lives seeking validation for their hobby. For decades, we’ve had to listen to parents, pundits, and politicians dismiss games as violent, childish, and artless. Games were secondary to serious hobbies like literature, movies, music, and sports. But that has changed over time, as people raised on games become great artists, weaving the medium into the larger tapestry of art.
We see games in literature. We see literature in games. And ideally, we see more of ourselves in the stories we love.
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Prices taken at the time of publication.
From the synopsis: “Barrett assembles eight character-driven stories, each showcasing his inimitable observant eye and darkly funny style.”