The Frontier as American National Identity Narrative in the <i>Red Dead Redemption</i> Games

Abstract In his work on national identity, Homi K. Bhabha claims that national identity is a narrative resulting from the negotiation between its pedagogical and its performative dimension. The former consists in the stable notion of national identity authorised through discursive practices, while the latter refers to the unstable performance of national identity whose constant slippage undermines its attempt to match the prescription of the pedagogical dimension. The instability of performing national identity leads to a compulsive repetition in hope that slippage might be regulated. Bhabha’s postcolonial approach to national identity as narrative can provide us with fresh insight into the cultural working of video games as a form of cultural expression. In this article, I employ Bhabha’s method to analyse American national identity in the Red Dead Redemption games. Seeing how gameplay is an experience based on repetition, I argue that the Red Dead Redemption games function as technologies of American national identity which, in keeping with Manifest Destiny and other late 19th-century and early 20th-century American ideologies, hinges on the successful suppression of racial otherness. The stable identity of the white cis straight abled male playable characters, John Marston and Arthur Morgan, constructed through linear representation functions in a manner similar to Bhabha’s pedagogical side of national identity that, in our case, calls for a ludic performance of the said identity. Yet this performance is inherently unstable as the player has to compulsively make use of the complex third-person shooter/role-playing core game mechanics in order to constantly (re)perform the cultural identity of the frontiersman of the protagonists. At the same time, if the performance of frontiersman identity does not meet the conditions of success imposed by the game engine, then the player faces a game over screen and goes back to the most recent checkpoint to repeat the mission or mission section in order to perform a gameplay that is consonant with the ideological norms of cultural identity of the playable characters.