Artificial Loneliness

I had played 80 hours of Red Dead Redemption too when I discovered the second half of the world for weeks I had lived Arthur Morgan's tale of growth and tragedy I slept in camp with my friends hunted game through lush forests attract for a mountain to swamp I spared and took pictures at the overlooks that highlighted just how small I was in relation to the world around me and in this world I robbed trains and I helped strangers i paged through gun catalogues I bought new hats Arthur Morgan's world is dense and his work has never done any direction I picked I would find opportunities to occupy myself bandits have taken over this homestead this fella needs a ride into town that iguana would make some sweet gloves there is a laundry list of valid issues people have with this game but vanishingly few of those complaints are with the landscape itself every inch is lavished in detail every individual aspect feels cohesive with the larger whole the world feels okay I'm about the 10,000th writer to describe Red Dead two's world as alive that's one of those videogame criticism words that's worth inspecting though what do we mean when we say a world is alive we mean stuff is happening The Witcher 3 is alive because all the trees are swaying at the same time and animals jump through the underbrush and glean salving breath of the wild is alive because it'll start raining and thundering and lightning and there are surprises around every corner and you can set everything on fire every game where you can just be minding your business and suddenly get attacked by a bear that game is alive I get it of course games are simulated environments governed by programmed laws eminently predictable for decades we've run and jumped through basically static worlds when something spontaneous happens it kind of feels like a crack in the simulation like the games a world has a mind of its own you know alive and so for good or ill open-world games are now packed with this stuff you can't shake a stick without hitting something that shows you how alive the world is it's great for dozens of hours I lived the life of the world's busiest cowpoke when I fell into bed at camp I had likely spent the last few sleepless days shooting skinning eating helping hurting hair cutting frequently I'd have long rides between true objectives but even on those I'd find new things to chase new checkboxes to mark off but I never went to the southwest of the map I was a wanted man there and I didn't want to spend the whole game fighting off bounty hunters 80 hours in though my wanted level was cleared away and for the first time I made my way through the town of Blackwater and into the land beyond like all good twenty-something gamer boys I spent a lot of my high school years playing call of duty modern warfare 2 I still have info from the game burned into my brain I could tell you the advantages of the Tarr versus the scar versus the a.k I can hear all the little clicks the menus made in my head I can't learn another language but I can tell you how many shots the mp5 takes to kill him damn it and I don't know how many other people had this experience but in addition to regular online matches I spent a lot of time playing split-screen multiplayer it was a great time to mess around it might take 15 minutes but I would land that cross map throwing knife shot what always struck me about these maps in split screen when it was just me and one or two other friends were these parts of the map I'd never really seen before I spent countless hours and online matches but those matches all had extremely well-defined heat maps of player activity when you played demolition on Terminal you knew that this hallway would be a 24/7 non-stop rave do you want it to plunge headfirst into bunker on wasteland god help you but in local multiplayer when neither I nor my friend felt the pressure to get into the fray we ended up finding a completely new side of these maps I had spent so much time in there were houses on the periphery I had no memory of back lots that I never ventured into and DeRay all the games largest map there were entire towns that I only ever sprinted through on my way to the enemy spawn point I was stunned at my own blindness how had these spots only a couple yards from high-traffic areas stayed so invisible as I touched on in a previous video we often see spaces especially in games utility first the point of modern warfare multiplayer was to kill the enemy team or client the bomb first or capture the flag since alternate routes through the map or a second faster it left these spaces quote-unquote useless but when those objectives were made unimportant in the context of couch split-screen those back alleys and shops and other weird little corners became incredibly interesting yeah I knew all the stats for every assault rifle but this was something new an oddly those weird course the ones least useful to gameplay they felt the most legitimate the main highways of the map of course those were artificial they existed only to shuttle me from point A to point B but a discarded magazine in the corner of an abandoned building is it weird to call that alive it was fun to revisit Blackwater oh I had spent all my time in Red Dead - avoiding it I remembered it from the first game seeing it in an earlier state with a vastly improved graphics was a cool novelty if not much more but my map still looked weird because there was a huge amount of blank space below Blackwater I had for all intents and purposes beat the game what was this landmass soive road I rode south from Blackwater following the train tracks I rode and no one jumped out to ask a favor and I wasn't accosted by any wild animals instead I emerged from the dark tense ride through a training tunnel and it was quite literally dumbstruck by what was on the other side desert yes beautiful yes even more shocking though it was familiar this was Red Dead Redemption ones desert I knew those cliffs and the curves of the land though the memory was almost dreamlike faded by years of distance and hundreds of other games I mind reeled what was the purpose of hiding this continent when dozens of new quests awaited me was this just the beginning of a grand new campaign as it turns out no instead this half of the map turned out to be something much weirder as I wrote down the path I remembered - armadillo bandits tackled me off my horse the world was no less gorgeous if anything it was more so but if we were to quantify the aliveness of the world as we defined earlier it would be way down armadillo as if to prove my point was quite literally dying in the past seven years and had reportedly been hit by scarlet fever followed by typhus followed by cholera in the first game I spent probably half my time running quest around armadillo now it's nothing a collection of empty buildings one saloon that I could get a drink at and even I'm not that desperate [Music] as I explored further and further out into the wilderness of the second map I realized that I hadn't somehow missed every quest giver didn't walk past the populated areas I had just stumbled into a lonely second world of the game one without all the spontaneity all the so-called aliveness of the main one here's the thing though and get ready for a big gallery poetic leap I felt more alive I felt more in touch with the character more like I was living in this world Red Dead Redemption to has all these weird systems ones that initially seem needlessly convoluted pointlessly drawn-out one example is split point in bullets out in the wild of Red Dead's world you can set up camp and do this whole big list of things you can roast animals on a stick you can make yourself medicine one option that took me a while to wrap my brain around was making split points they do more damage and take West dead eye energy to shoot there are complete improvement over your regular ammo and they're free so why wouldn't you always use them well to make a split point you've got to sit at your campfire and carve an X into the top of a bullet one at a time in the main game it's not uncommon to shoot fifty times or more in a confrontation with a rival gang seconds of violence prepared for by what feels like hours of sitting carving repeating in the course of the story you empty the cylinder of your revolver probably thousands of times no plan goes off without a hitch the vanderlin gang has almost infinite loose ends that need to be snipped the idea of carving each one of those bullets individually is mind-numbing but that's in the crowded main world in the barren Southwest dangers seldom appears and when it does it's a slow creeping threat a coyote stalking you at a distance a house you thought was abandoned that's actually angrily occupied by a squatter in these situations those six patiently carved a bullets actually feel like they're meaningful like your extra minutes of preparation actually affected your life in a tangible way and I felt this way about everything camping under the stars eating games key word on a stake pouring my own meds all this felt so much more important and more personal when there wasn't a town with an inn and a chemist five minutes away there was a sense of the actual loneliness that I imagined folks felt when they were out under that massive sky separated from everyone they knew and loved [Music] this is a photo by Aristotle goofiness take a second really look at it and galleries his photos are displayed on a massive scale more than ten feet across sometimes even that's modest one compared to the ultimate resolution of each of them though which could be shown at a hundred feet wide without losing much quality there cityscapes designed to be drowned in they're so big that individual pinpricks of light can be enlarged explored lived inside each slit window is a person they have lives possessions individuality but never are two lights on next to each other never and you get the sense of an actual connection just the strange solidarity of being two specks each alone in a void well look at this picture again you might have noticed it immediately it took me a while they're impossible Paris hasn't been this dark ever I think none of these places have not even blackouts are this kind of quiet roof anissa's compositions are actually thousands of photographs taken over months painstakingly stitched together and digitally edited to create an immense seamless collage of emptiness real says look like this at night blindingly bright they couldn't be more opposite so why did I immediately feel such a connection with these faux photographs I mean you who I need to say it Rufina s-- is communicating a feeling gear one that I'm intimately familiar with one that I think I hope other people are too that sense of being lost in something far far bigger than yourself doesn't only happen when all the other lights are off but we know it so well that it's immediately recognizable in this form in a photograph that has in reality never existed [Music] do roof anissa's pictures feel alive I'm not sure but they do feel intimate in a way that this doesn't even though this has a way more indications of humanity than this there's a sense of solidarity in roof anissa's work that imparts empathy with the subjects of the photo and with the others living in these giant lonely cities I think there's altom utley a pretty obvious answer to why all these things create this feeling at least for me I'm the alive one and of course I am I never really had any pretense that these virtual worlds were real but there are usually surface-level engaging to an extent that I don't really have to stop and think about how I feel every light in the city is on every I got on the map as a mission I make the joke pretty frequently that I listen to podcasts all day because what am I gonna be a load of my own thoughts a lot of games work basically the same way infinite checklists lightning fast gameplay anything to keep you from a moment or you think what should I be doing now and also what am i doing in a more general sense that's why these experiences stand out so much to me but they've given me is space without objectives time without a timer it's startling to not be told what to do in a medium that we've basically created to give us things to do what's left is and how I relate to the world and not as a tool to accomplish missions but just as a thing living on this planet it's as simple as being given time to reflect what's bizarre though is that I seemingly had to be tricked into doing them none of these happen naturally roofin is's photographs as I said each took countless hours to shoot and stitch together and buddy I don't even want to think about how many developers didn't get to see their kids in the process of making this vast empty area to give me an epiphany I am so averse to spending time reflecting seeking out that quiet that it literally had to be snuck into a 300 million dollar blockbuster game but actually it's well it's made me seek this out more in real life go hiking without a partner go to a concert by myself give tinder a little time to get to know itself this video is called artificial loneliness which I know sounds like seven different times of negative but I couldn't be more grateful for this kind of space and this lack of structure a reminder that you don't always need people to give direction don't always need to calculate which of the two roads will get you through the wood a minute faster things don't have to be constantly happening to remind you of being alive these worlds may be artificial the isolation coded the darkness and illusion but the feeling is real and the feeling is one I'm learning to welcome [Music]

Channel: Jacob Geller

Views: 2,870,248

Rating: 4.9476757 out of 5

Keywords: Red Dead Redemption, Analysis, Review, Lonely, Jacob Geller, Empty, Aristotle Roufanis, Alone Together, Landscapes, Scenery, Explore, Modern Warfare 2, Photography

Id: hUwTh4uSILg

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Qusid]

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[u/benjising]

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[u/codywalton]

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[u/Picklepanther7]

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