Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?



Time Out for Tumbleweed

What can I write in this column about Red Dead Redemption that hasn't already been said? Very little. Check any forum thread dedicated to the game, and you'll inevitably find a couple first-person narratives about John Marston's activities and adventures. Some players talk about all the sadistic ways they have him shoot, stab, set afire, or hogtie and drag his enemies through the desert underbrush. Others describe John's exploits in the wilderness, hunting rare beasts or buried treasure. Still others speak of how he joined some fellows at a campfire and heard their story.

Red Dead Redemption is a meaning factory. I walk a few yards outside the scrappy town of Armadillo, and a man comes running up to me, yelling that his wife has been kidnapped. I can follow him to the scene of the crime, turn my back, perhaps draw my revolver and rob him. I toss these randomized nuggets of drama back and forth with the game like we're playing catch in the backyard, and laughing at our mistakes and triumphs.

I walk my horse through said scrappy town, and a noise in the kitchen causes me to turn my head away from the television. When I come back to the game, I nudge forward on the analog stick a little too hard, and my horse lurches forward, knocking a man to the dusty street and sending his package flying. As easily as a paper cut, I've started a minor but authentic ruckus as Armadillo bystanders turn their own heads and the man yells insults.


I stand in the middle of Mexico, doing nothing. The sunlight on the cliffside is blinding. John suddenly slaps his neck, missing the invisible mosquito that had just been there. This too is meaning. It's packed tightly into the game and always on the verge of bursting.

I say "I," but this really isn't my story. My every decision is made with respect to John Marston. For one, I respect John as a person, and I don't want to see him get hurt. For another, I can't separate my personal decisions from my awareness of John. I can see him standing right there, forever in front of my camera. Moreover, I am unmistaken about his personality. John has a bad past, but is essentially a nice man and a romantic. One of the strongest statements in Red Dead Redemption is that -- in contrast to every recent Grand Theft Auto game -- John can't and won't pay a prostitute. He always refuses, on the basis that he's married. I don't have any say in this, so I learn something about John. Even when he does something untoward, like throwing a driver to the ground to steal his carriage, I am ready to forgive him and explain his act away. John has had a bad past and he won't be perfect, but he is always trying -- if not to save his family, then just to get to the next town. This heart of the game is expressed whenever a player catches a story from the game and wants to share. The more we learn about John as an individual, the more we treat him as a separate person. We direct our play toward him, what he might want, what he needs.

And yet we are always there, deciding how best to spend our own time. Sometimes, this conflict is stretched to a limit. For this column, I went for 20G: Frontiersman, the achievement for obtaining Legendary rank in an ambient challenge. I went for Survivalist; I wanted to have John travel the frontier picking flowers.

As diversions in Red Dead Redemption go, flower-picking is one of the least exciting. As you ride around, you might spot a wild clump. Or it appears as an unambiguous flower icon on your radar. You dismount your horse, walk over the flower, and press a button to pick the flower. The flower appears in your inventory. That's it.


Well, not entirely. When you pick the flower, the camera moves from just beyond John's shoulders (I call this the "Angel vs. Devil" view) and fixes itself in the dirt. You get an ant's-eye view of John picking the flowers, so close that you can almost smell his breath. The change in your perspective, from detached to intimate observer, suggests a moment of poignancy. Even the amoral West has moments of beauty. Like this flower. That's what this means.

What I really like about picking flowers is John's commentary. "Ahh. Here we are," he says, while rummaging through a batch of Wild Feverfew. "You little beauty!" he tells a Prickly Pear. I catch a glimpse of John's other side: not the former-bandit-turned-family-man who seeks revenge and redemption, but the man who takes notice of his surroundings, who can simply enjoy a moment. The past and future aren't as important as the present.

In that sense, the Survivalist challenge should be an ideal achievement. I'm playing a metagame in which I put the overarching narrative behind me. John puts his worldly concerns on hold. In reality, the achievement-hunting is a mixed bag. It exposes the fundamental paradox of the game, that the West is an absorbing and naturalistic world -- with lifelike human beings and animals and sunlight so fresh you could be looking out your window -- which you interact with by literally connecting the dots on your radar and your map. This world is presented as both a seamless slice of life and a collection of discrete data points.


Normally, these two aspects aren't in conflict. Anyone who plays games understands how to explore a world between mandatory tasks. But in trying to become a level 10 Survivalist, which involves picking increasing numbers of increasingly hard-to-find flowers, I felt that I broke the illusion, if not the game. John bought a Survivalist map, which temporarily uncovered all the flowers in his vicinity. He scurried from bush to bush, hoarding flowers by crushing them together in his front pocket. "That's the one," he said to a Violet Snowdrop in Tall Trees. "That's the one," he said to a Butterfly Weed in Diez Coronas. "That's the one," he said to a Golden Currant in the Great Plains. John began to annoy my housemate. This became a story of a man on a machine, scanning a map to reach his quota for the article he meant to write.

In games like Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, and even Table Tennis, Rockstar's art depends on keeping the player at bay. We watch from a comfortable distance, privileged yet protected from the drama. But the point is that we are always watching our characters, even while we play with them. When John Marston repeats himself three times in less than five minutes, I realize the game's writing and world-building ultimately can't stand up to my agency as a player. This feels like a glitch in reality, like Neo's experience of deja vu in The Matrix. John is compelling, but he can be broken.

You might call this a good thing. But my feeling about Red Dead Redemption is that I don't want to play the game. I want to stay with John. And that is the game's brilliant tragedy.

Achievements earned: 1
Points gained: 20



Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.