'Red Dead Online': The Sound of Saddling
I played an immersive cowboy simulator for a whole month and all I got was this lousy newsletter
Sun is high as Diplomat’s Son and I mosey our way through Tumbleweed, a forgotten town on the western reaches of New Austin. Years ago now, who can say how many exactly, Tumbleweed hummed with gunslingers, prostitutes, and prospectors. Then the railroad bypassed the town, the *future* bypassed the town, and all those gunslingers, prostitutes, and prospectors decamped for shinier places like Armadillo, or even Nuevo Paraiso south of the border. “Summer soldiers,” Thomas Paine would’ve called them, and I call them that, too. A town is as much just collective belief as anything, sustained by the people who call it their home. My home? I ain’t got no home, pardner. But you might say I feel a certain kinship with a place what time went and forgot about.
A gunshot rings out, spooking Diplomat’s Son. “Shh, you’re alright, boy,” I reassure him, even as I worry we’re both anything but. The sound of metal gets replaced by the sound of men, angry men, getting louder. My hand’s already wrapped around a Schofield revolver with six shots, ready for whatever’s roaring out of the west. And roar it does: first as a cloud of smoke, then silhouettes, then a flesh-and-blood cadre of banditos. I should pepper them with split-point rounds. Instead I attempt to parley. “Hey guys,” I say, “Playing in defensive mode here, honestly just trying to raise my Collector rank.” Silence. “I guess what I mean is, like, don’t kill me. That would be super-lame.” More silence. One of the banditos raises a sawed-off shotgun at me. Diplomat’s Son whinnies. “Oh, give me a fucking bre—.” BLAM. With all the grace of a pronghorn fart, I slump to the ground. Finito. Dead. Another lazy afternoon turned completely sideways by the — *this is the name you went with, guys, really?* — DeezNutzBoiz.
When I was in 2nd grade, my friends Jean Bentley and Amy Bigelow and I spent a whole month pretending to be aliens named Thora, Thora, and Robin (in honor of Thora Birch, kid-star of ‘Hocus Pocus’, and the incomparable Robin Williams). This was not rigorous cosplay — we dressed like we usually did (Tommy Hilfiger), conversed using human English, and acted out little to no backstory — but to this day I remember feeling different when I assumed the identity of “Robin.” For a month, Henning stayed home while Robin did math problems and read ‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe’ and ate peanut butter pinwheels that his adopted human mother, Leslie, found the recipe for in Family Fun Magazine. We were still students in Mrs. Pascal’s class, sure, but we were also aliens, and that made all the otherwise normal stuff of elementary school seem new and exciting.
Fast forward twenty-ish years and every night I’ve been firing up ‘Red Dead Online’ (RDO)1, a digital recreation of the American West (with astonishingly accurate horse poop animation!) where I doff my Adidas for spurs and assume the role of a hard-edged outlaw just trying to survive in a world that seems hell-bent on my destruction. Henning Fog? That’s the guy who picks up the controller, and pays for PlayStation Plus. But riding high in Diplomat’s Son’s saddle, picking off road agents with pinpoint accuracy, that’s someone else entirely. Pardner, that’s Bethany LaCroix.
WWBLCD
What I’ve described so far is all, of course, ROLE-PLAYING, a pastime that encompasses everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Kylo Ren cosplay to “pretend you’re my gym teacher, Coach Schneebly” bedroom fun. With varying degrees of fealty, you assume the identity of someone (or something) else, make decisions for them, and live out the consequences. Then, because it’s pretend, you go back to being the person you started as! It’s cheaper than acting school OR plastic surgery, and more reversible.
Bethany LaCroix, as I’ve come to understand her entirely in my head, is a firecracker and shit-stirrer who spent the bulk of her young life riding with various gangs — the O’Driscolls, the Lemoyne Raiders, hell, maybe even DeezNutzBoiz — before stealing one too many horses and landing herself in Sisika Penitentiary. She got out, of course — LOL like four walls could hold the hurricane that is Bethany LaCroix — and then found someone she could actually trust: Diplomat’s Son, named for the Vampire Weekend song of the same name that would come out 110 years in the future.
(Is he the fastest steed in New Austin? Not by a mile. Hell, I could easily pay for a new one — exorbitant Rockstar prices be damned — and have a much faster go of in-game travel. But where would the loyalty be in that? Maybe that’s what Henning would do. But it’s not what Bethany LaCroix would do, goddammit.)
A few high-profile wagon robberies got her on the radar of a society lady with a bone to pick, which is to say enemies to dispatch. So she did some dispatching (old habits and such), but somewhere in her post-prison wanderings, also discovered two unexpected passions: treasure hunting and moonshine. Suddenly cheatin’, stealin’, and murderin’ didn’t hold the same appeal they once did. Could she start a new life that was just cheatin’ and stealin’, minus the murderin’?
…Maybe 10% of that is present in the actual “story” of RDO, which at best just projects a framework onto which you can build your own. Other players gamble, or race horses, or study animal species. Hell, RDO is so all-encompassing you could plausibly build a whole frontier life around cataloguing 65 different herbs and flowers. It would be boring AF, but you could do it! Henning stuff gets left at the door (read: PS5 home screen) when I don that ostentatious pink hat of Bethany’s — for the next few hours my exclusive concerns are dynamiting roadblocks full of lawmen and sabotaging rival moonshiners’ operations, and maybe a fishing challenge if I need some “me” time. Life is good.
Weren’t No COVID in The Wild West2
(I promise I won’t relate absolutely everything back to COVID in future Lifting Fog installments, but the fact is…well, it’s here, and colors our lives every day even when we’re not actively thinking about it. COVID! It’s what’s for dinner.)
It’s been a year! Literally (it’s almost exactly one year to the day of LA’s first lockdown order) and figuratively, where even now as we sense some hope on the horizon, finally, it’s not without the awareness of what this awful trip around the sun has done to us.
Consciously or not, we’ve all developed coping strategies to get by. Sourdough bread-making. Afternoon walks. Zoom cocktail hours. More Zoom cocktail hours. (Some “coping strategies” are, in actuality, just the beginnings of alcoholism.)
…Maybe Bethany LaCroix is mine3?
This was hardly a conscious effort! I didn’t boot up RDO thinking, like, “I really need to find a healthy outlet for these feelings of stagnancy and isolation.” But in the absence of real travel or community or freedom as we understood it before March 2020, riding Diplomat’s Son across a beautiful, Hudson River School-inspired landscape has provided some essential form of escape.
I live alone (this sounds so SAD but is merely a statement of fact) in a studio apartment, something I relished pre-pandemic, but which somewhere around lockdown #2 began to feel like a bummer spin on ‘This is Water’: inescapable in its ubiquity. Your bedroom is your living room is your office is your… well, not kitchen, thankfully, that’s separate. But most days are constrained to this confined space, every corner of your life folded into itself, your home now some sort of time-prison you’ve been forced into for indeterminate crimes4.
Bethany, man — she already busted outta prison! And she’s out there just livin’, like some bongo-playing Matthew McConaughey, unbound by pandemic life or the law or any semblance of conservative fashion sense. I envy her… and I AM her. Whoa.
One person’s ‘Friends’ rewatch is another person’s tie-dye Etsy shop is another person’s vape pen is another person’s 8000-piece LEGO set: a way to provide some semblance of comfort and structure in what has been, let’s call it what it is, an absolute dog-shit year. Life is hard right now! We’re all identifying more with this woman than we could have ever expected:
Even if all I’m doing as Bethany is buying canned peaches from the general store or literally waving at another player (using L2 then R1 then holding down circle, obviously), she’s offered an escape that, when we ARE finally out of this mess, I’ll look back on with fondness. Bethany, you can imagine, is nowhere near as sentimental as me — she’d scoff at the very idea of a Substack, while skinning a full-grown bison — but she needs that hard exterior to survive on the plains of New Austin. You never know when DeezNutzBoiz will show their faces again.
Thanks for joining me on this long-winded defense of my gaming habit! If for some reason you’d like to read MORE cowboy fan-fiction, I’d be thrilled to send you “A Grisly Encounter” or “Clippin’ Bluebirds in Saint Denis,” two lost entries from the journal of ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ protagonist, Arthur Morgan:
**It’s only weird if you won’t admit you’re doing it!**
You already know this, but RDO is the online multiplayer companion to ‘Red Dead Redemption II’, one of the best games of all time and itself a sequel to another contender for Greatest Game of All Time
There was smallpox, of course. Dysentery. A litany of other diseases scientists had no cure for, because science didn’t exist in any kind of industrial capacity. A toothache could kill you
Don’t get me wrong, I’m also drinking more than I used to
This newsletter??