the best games reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years. From “The Searchers” to “The Godfather,” from “The Sopranos” to “The Americans,” what connects these eras, and their most outstanding works, is a shared ambition, a desire to be both grand and granular, telling individual stories against the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form.
If ever a video game has risen to the level of those classics, it’s Red Dead Redemption 2.
Like the classic westerns and gangster stories it draws from, it can be crude and violent. But it is also richly cinematic and even literary, serving up breathtaking digital vistas reminiscent of John Ford films along with a mix of deftly scripted stories about outlaws, immigrants, hustlers, con artists, lawmen and entrepreneurs, all trying to eke out an existence on the edges of civilization. It’s a game about power, violence, frontier justice and murky moral choices — a new American epic for the digital age.
It’s a game, in other words, that implicitly tells its players to grow up — and it’s as sure a sign as any that video games are starting to do just that.