When Tore Olsson was a kid, he loved playing video games. In his words, they were an “obsession.” He played so much that he had to force himself to quit, for fear that it would derail his college career. And once he put the controller down, he didn’t pick it up again for 20 years.
After he went cold turkey, Olsson didn’t just make it through undergrad, he got a PhD in history. But just when he thought he was out, his old friends pulled him back in.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Olsson figured the world had already gone sideways, so what harm could his obsession really do? He fired up a game called "Red Dead Redemption 2," which tells the story of a 19th century outlaw named Arthur Morgan. Olsson wasn’t looking for much more than a distraction from the horrors of the pandemic.
But he got way more than he bargained for. As an expert in post-Civil War American history, Olsson was genuinely impressed by the game’s narrative, which forces players to confront issues like gilded age corporate capitalism, the clash between American settlers and Indigenous communities in the West, the messiness of Reconstruction, and a whole host of other issues. And what’s more, Olsson says, the game does all this with a level of sensitivity and nuance that’s hard to find almost anywhere in popular culture — let alone video games.
Olsson was so blown away by "Red Dead Redemption 2" that he wrote a whole book about it. It’s called “Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, An Obsession, and America’s Violent Past.” Olsson joined The Show to discuss, beginning with a key moment in the game, when the outlaw Arthur Morgan comes upon a Black merchant who’s just been robbed by a group of white men.
Full conversation
TORE OLSON: And you know, Arthur sympathizes and he's like, that sounds awful, and then the doctor says, well, you know, it's not as awful as the punishment that they offered me, the crucifixion, defenestration. This long list of, you know, really awful, shockingly violent, physical punishments, and he's like, well, you know, I got off easy, I didn't get that, right? And the game doesn't do any more than that.
It just hints at this threat that hung in the air, but for me as a historian of the American South, that veiled threat was really fascinating because it's an allusion to the institution of lynching. And in fact, the 1890s were the single bloodiest decade of lynching in the entirety of Southern history. So 1899, the moment when the game is set, is very much of a time and place when this threat of extreme physical violence was on the minds of pretty much every Black man and woman in the South.
SAM DINGMAN: Well, so this for me, gets at an element of your book that I found really compelling, which is the way that Red Dead Redemption is almost more of a leitmotif than kind of the central focus of the narrative, I would argue. It becomes this way of interrogating the oversimplified narratives that we often accept when it comes to American history.
And one of the biggest examples of this for me was the sequence where you talk about the Civil War monuments in Saint Denis, which is a fictional version of New Orleans in the game. Now, obviously, in our actual world, there is an ongoing conversation about whether or not those monuments should still stand in the places where they do. But you make the case that in Red Dead Redemption 2, there is an invitation to consider the truth of what those monuments actually represent. And that they might be more evidence of mythology than history.
OLSON: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's really fascinating that the developers of Red Dead Redemption 2 chose to include in every urban or small town space in the deep South, these large scale monuments to the Confederacy. These monuments were erected at a very significant rate across the South beginning really in the 1890s.
That's surprising to a lot of folks because you might imagine that oh, directly after the Civil War is when the South started, you know, commemorating the Confederacy, but that's actually not true. These large public monuments in the center of towns and cities only really begins like 25 years after the war is over, and those statues are of course closely affiliated with something we call the Lost Cause.
The Lost Cause is a sort of airbrushed, whitewashed mythology that claimed that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, that the Confederacy's cause was noble, that it was justified, really removing the realities of what the Civil War was actually all about. And as I lay out in the book, there is a reason why it happens in the 1890s. It's not a coincidence. It's not just happenstance that it took 25-30 years to begin that campaign.
It was very much a response to threats that many white Southerners perceived to the institution of white supremacy. They worry that poor Blacks and poor whites would come together in this third party political movement, and they worry that as more Black Southerners were making more money and buying land, that it was also chipping away at white power and control.
So it's really in an attempt to kind of shore up white supremacy and to, you know, deflect this threat that this construction of monuments and, you know, installation of Confederate flags all over the place takes place.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, it's just so interesting because, you know, the, the charge that gets leveled at people who want to take those monuments down in the present discourse about it is that it would be a kind of revisionist history to do so, and that we ought to leave them standing because they represent something that actually happened. But your book and the game by extension became this way for me of coming into an awareness that the monuments themselves are an act of revisionist history.
OLSON: Absolutely, they're an act of mythology, not of history.
DINGMAN: Lest we get too far down the road of, of making it sound like this is sort of a an unalloyed work of praise, I do think we should talk about how, in spite of all the unexpected sophistication in the game, it really, as you point out towards the end of the book, drops the ball when it comes to its portrayal of Appalachia.
OLSON: Yeah, absolutely. When they get to the southern mountains, they can't resist the urge to lampoon rural white working class Southerners. And I should say this is a long pattern within Rockstar's games going back to the earliest Grand Theft Auto games from the 1990s, which I of course played while I was in high school. There's just been this common assumption that Appalachian people, especially white mountain folks from the rural South, are the sort of last acceptable stereotype, the last acceptable prejudice. Like it's always OK to make fun out of this group, and I really disagree with that.
The makings of sort of poverty and inequality within the region is very much a the the byproduct of this sort of expansion of large external corporations into this region for very greedy self-serving motives, right of stripping timber and coal and other natural resources, for the sake of making people outside of Appalachia quite wealthy, and the scars that that leaves on Appalachia are pretty profound. We still live with them to the current day.
DINGMAN: And it's surprising given the level of thought that seems to have gone into these other sequences that when it comes to this particular region where there is an equally fascinating and thought provoking history to explore, it kind of resorts back to these Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel type portrayals.
OLSON: Toothless, shoeless, long bearded, archaic, preserved in amber hillbilly, right? I mean, that is, that is the myth, but I will say there is a saving grace in Red Dead Redemption 2's portrayal of Appalachia, which is that, yes, they recycle all those sort of cliches, but then they also show that in the 1890s, this region is being torn apart by external interests, particularly Leviticus Cornwall, the sort of robber baron of the game. His name is everywhere in Appalachia just like it was in the West. It's his company that's, you know, running the coal mine. It's his company, the, the, you know, the timber companies that are leaving these massive fields of stumps of these, you know, vanished forests as a result.
So the game does show, you know, it does sort of gesture toward, well, this region is not just isolated, it is being integrated very violently and rapidly into the American economy and you know, maybe that has something to do with the poverty that that people see, but of course it doesn't go all the way. But I do in my book.
DINGMAN: Well, speaking of the book,, in closing, I thought it might be nice to have you share a quote with us, that comes on Page 239, which, which felt to me, like kind of a thesis statement. And this is a section where you're talking about the dangers of being lazy about historical stereotypes, in the way that you're arguing Rockstar does when it comes to these Appalachian characters, and it begins when we retell familiar tales like this.
OLSON: “When we retell familiar tales like this, they might seem harmlessly innocent, but they flatten the nuance and drama of the past, and they whisk away the political and economic engines that drove violence in 19th century America. They make the past seem simpler than it actually was, and that's a danger if we wish to understand our present.”
