Tore Olson

Not does it recreate the sort of, you know, granular details of everyday life, but does it engage some of the big questions and dilemmas that Americans actually cared and thought about in the time period?

And I actually do find Red Dead Redemption 2 to be a historically thoughtful game in the sense that it engages a lot of the core elements

dilemmas that, you know, are really transforming American life.

I mean, the role of big corporations, the role of railroads, the cattle ranching industry as a transformer of space and of politics, the role of gunslingers.

But thinking of gunslingers is beyond just the mythology that Hollywood has given us.

So I actually think that, you know, on the whole, the accuracy is often suffering.

You know, there's the timing is way off.

I mean,

Red Dead 2 is set in 1899, but it really is a game about subjects that took place in the early 1870s.

So it's like, you know, 30 years off or so.

But I think there's a lot to work with in Red Dead 2, to be sure.

And indeed, if there's a single documented historical episode that inspired Red Dead 2, it probably is Butch Cassidy's hole in the wall gang.

There's so much diversity depending on where you go, right?

If you move to a farming community in South Dakota, let's say everyone around you are Norwegian immigrants.

You're going to see a very different place than if you move to a mining town in Colorado or California or to a ranching town in Kansas or Texas or a place like that.

So huge chunks of the West were quite sleepy and boring and very nonviolent, to be sure.

But, of course, there were sort of hot zones, pockets where there was a great deal of chaos and lots of strangers encountering each other in this high pressure scenarios.

And it's true that those pockets, places like Abilene, Kansas, Greeley, Colorado, are

That could be quite violent because there's a lot of sort of colliding forces coming together and a lot of alcohol and tension and, you know, potential profits to be made.

Yeah, that's a good question.