Book chapter 705 views
No freedom, no honour: Red Dead Redemption 2 and heritage as procedural rhetoric
Leighton Evans 
Mobile Heritage: Practices, Interventions, Politics, Pages: 25 - 37
Swansea University Author:
Leighton Evans
Abstract
This chapter explores how heritage experiences in games are shaped by the procedural rhetoric embedded in games as an expression of the intentions, biases, and visions of developers. Video games are an example of the mobility of ideas and concepts, enabling virtual as well as physical mobility. Thro...
| Published in: | Mobile Heritage: Practices, Interventions, Politics |
|---|---|
| ISBN: | 9781003400288 |
| Published: |
London
Taylor and Francis
2025
|
| Online Access: |
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003400288-2/freedom-honour-leighton-evans |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa69372 |
| Abstract: |
This chapter explores how heritage experiences in games are shaped by the procedural rhetoric embedded in games as an expression of the intentions, biases, and visions of developers. Video games are an example of the mobility of ideas and concepts, enabling virtual as well as physical mobility. Through a case study of the popular game Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), the chapter examines how the experience of playing the game, and engaging with its underlying encoded ideologies, can shape understandings of a particular historical time and space as well as societal relations (in this case those of the ‘wild west’). By decoding the ideologies produced in playing RDR2, the chapter critically considers how ideological shaping in digital games affects players understanding of heritage, history, as well as our historical (and present) roles through, for example, particular characterisations of women and non-white figures. While the historical experience of Red Dead Redemption 2 is not the history of the West, it has become one understood by millions of gamers thanks to the virtual and physical mobility of digital games. The virtual mobilisation of a unique, partial, and culturally defined historical interpretation is, in this and many other instances, the mobilisation of a set of concepts, ideologies, and understandings that demand critical appraisal. |
|---|---|
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
25 |
| End Page: |
37 |