Don Wildman

One of the most successful games ever made has sold an ungodly number of copies, like 82 million or something.

So as a professor of history, how useful do you find video games as a means of teaching modern college students?

Yeah, it's a very engaging medium.

I mean, as a person of my generation who didn't grow up with them, pinballs was about as complicated as my gaming was.

I look at these modern games and go, oh, my God.

It's an amazing world into itself.

But how accurate in Red Dead is the picture of the American West?

I mean, is it as comic book or, you know, like the movies?

It's a mashup in many ways.

But what I find interesting is by choosing 1899, they're really talking about the transition moment or transitional era of when the West really becomes part of, you know, linked with the railroad and so forth and industry is moving out there.

And it's really the...

That same Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid kind of theme of, you know, the melancholy, we've lost this Garden of Eden kind of feeling.

Yeah, exactly.

Only my favorite movie of all time.

So I want to talk, though, about Americans' idea of this era.

It takes about two centuries of American West immigrant settlement for this sort of romanticized and glamorized, stylized idea of the West through all these dime store novels and widescreen movies.

It's always been a story of good versus evil played out on the plains.

So let's reassess this history with this conversation.

If I was a non-hero, average Joe, you know, not a character in a video game or a movie, post-Civil War, and I decided to go West, what would I have experienced out there?

Is there a kind of typical baseline there?