ClockworkWorlds

Every person is a self-in-formation, living in the space between what it has been able to become and what it or others think it might be. Although history is strewn with attempts to define the “True” or “deep” self in a particular way, so as to give jurisdiction over it to some authority—parents, priests, peers, philosophers, shamans, therapists, ideologists—all of them are rhetorical and in some degree self-interested attempts to give solid form to a highly fluid reality, namely the always-revisable compound formed by interaction between reflectivity and the self’s other’s dimensions.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a fairly obvious key source work for Red Dead Redemption, is often cited as an apocalyptic novel; Red Dead Redemption is an apocalyptic game. The destruction of everything is at the center of the game: the wild horses are reigned, the indigenous people are murdered, the buffalo are overhunted, the wildlife and killed for sport, the people are brought under the caul of violent governments. The precise balance of violence is cut down with the destabilizing precision of machine guns and automobiles and the ever-running train.