Tore Olson

Yeah, well, surprisingly useful in part because the general public and students as well.

they very often encounter history through pop culture.

And I think throughout much of the 20th century, this was through the lens of television, of film, of literature, and so forth.

But in the last 20 years, more and more students and just general people are encountering history on this digital, playable, interactive screen.

And that really matters because I don't think that video games necessarily teach all that much history, but they do plant seeds of curiosity and of interest, which are then very ripe for someone like myself to harvest.

To nurture and to use the sort of pre-existing passion and curiosity that students have that they've learned through games as a way of actually getting them to grapple with the usually much more complicated and nuanced history of what actually happened.

Right.

Well, it's a little bit of both.

So there's really two core Red Dead Redemption games.

Yeah.

My book fundamentally looks at the second one, Red Dead Redemption 2, which came out in 2018, as you mentioned.

It's set in 1899 in both the West and in the South and in Appalachia.

I find that it's a lot more smarter and rich of a game than the first one.

The first one has some strengths, but I really emphasize the second one in part because it's much more popular and it's much more recent.

And I think in many ways, the question to ask is not, is it historically accurate?

Because the game is fictionalized, right?

The names of people and places are all made up.

It's very hard to compare it kind of a one-to-one comparison to, you know, Wyoming or Louisiana in that same time period because, you know, stuff is made up.

I think the question we need to ask, is it historically thoughtful?

And to me, historically thoughtful means something a little differently.