Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke
Image via Wikipedia
In which Rockstar chooses to whistle Dixie.
I finished Red Dead Redemption and it was a fairly fun game. Despite excessive horse riding, I enjoyed myself. Then I got to the end and I never wanted anything to do with the game again. This is why.
Below are spoilers, so if you intend to play through Red Dead yourself do so and come back.
Rockstar has a tendency to write reluctant protagonists. Manhunt dealt with a main character forced into action by a threat to his family. San Andreas’s CJ Johnson falls into working with an antagonist to help his own family. Niko Bellic, from GTA4, wouldn’t stop whining about how he wanted to live the American dream in peace, even while he was shooting people. Red Dead is no exception. The main character, John Marston, is so eager to be done with his mission he practically gets killed in the first 30 minutes of the game.
Unlike previous Rockstar protagonists, Marston is justifiably reluctant to go on an armed rampage. Our player character is an ex-outlaw and the FBI is holding his family hostage to get him to kill off his old running buddies. He tried to get out and …
50 posts later: Looking back from my half-way point

About 2 days ago, I reached 50 blog posts over my two blogs. Here’s my most popular content from my march to 100 posts. What happens after I hit 100 posts? I guess I’ll just keep going. The most clicked through on Facebook and Twitter: Crowd-sourced television goes to the next level with Bar Karma […]
Story arcs beyond TV [Thinking]
Sometimes it is important to maintain a character or narrative over multiple stories. The tool for that is story arcs. Story arcs are most common in TV and graphic novels, however, with the easy linking of stories, there is an opportunity to expand the use of arcs. A quick review: A story arc allows you to move one narrative thread […]
Related posts:
Branching narrative schema and similar narrative structures
Many mediums have a standard narrative structure, for journalism that structure is the inverted pyramid. The three act structure could almost be considered a meta-structure, as it is used in concert with other formats. However, TV tends to use a certain flavor of the 3 act structure. What structures are common in branching and interactive narratives? The […]
Related posts: