This is the tenth article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide our understanding of the environment.
In Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), players step into a fictionalized American West in 1899, a world framed by the fading power of outlaw bands and the tightening grip of industrial modernity. The game’s story follows Arthur Morgan, a member of the Van der Linde gang, as he moves across mountains, plains, wetlands, and the increasingly electrified streets of Saint Denis–a city modeled closely on turn-of-the-century New Orleans. The game constructs an environmental past that is both richly textured and carefully controlled–a digital frontier designed to feel immersive. But, as with all games, the designers limit the immersion through game mechanics, shaping the boundaries and meanings of history and ecosystems.
This tension echoes what historian Andrew Denning describes as “deep play,” a concept he adapts from Clifford Geertz to explore how video games function as historical simulators.[1] Deep play emerges when players do not simply watch history happen, but perform it, navigating stories and systems that cultivate an illusion of agency within predetermined limits. Through deep play, RDR2 functions as an environmental text that teaches players specific historical lessons even while obscuring others. What, after all, does it mean to play inside a disappearing world? And how does the game’s vision of that world shape our sense of the American environmental past?
For those who have not played the game, Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) is a sprawling open-world Western set on the cusp of the twentieth century. Players control Arthur Morgan, navigating story missions while also exploring independently–hunting, riding, fishing, crafting, and encountering wildlife. The game encourages players to linger: fog settles on swamps at dawn, thunder rolls across the plains, and animal behaviors respond to time of day and weather cycles. These features produce an environmental world that feels alive.
But that world is also tightly scripted. Early in my playthrough, I tracked a wounded deer across a snowy ridge north of the town of Valentine. The animal’s trail glowed faintly using the game’s “Eagle Eye” function, a mechanic that renders footprints and scent trails for the player. Kneeling in the snow, I expected the uncertainty that accompanies real tracking: the doubt, the possibility of losing the trail. Instead, the game gently corrected my path whenever I strayed too far. The wilderness became a kind of guided tutorial, a landscape that behaved naturally while ensuring progress.
This moment clarified something essential about the game’s environmental imagination: while RDR2 appears to model ecological complexity, it ultimately constructs a stable, predictable world in which natural systems serve narrative purposes. Weather heightens mood, wildlife repopulates after harvest, and landscapes oscillate between beauty and danger at carefully calibrated intervals. The game trains its players into a particular understanding of how both history and environment work. It privileges surface immersion over structural change, sensation over ecological instability.
The emotional force of RDR2 rests in its persistent sense of loss. The game tells players repeatedly that the frontier is ending, through dialogue, scenery, and the slow tightening of state authority across the map. The story emphasizes that Arthur and his companions belong to a world that can no longer sustain them.
Yet, the game’s mechanics often undercut that message. While the narrative insists on environmental and social transformation, the playable world remains remarkably consistent. Forests do not shrink from logging. Game animals do not decline. Mines do not expand or scar the land. The landscape is a curated nostalgia, a West in which players can mourn disappearance without actually experiencing it.
One evening, while riding through Lemoyne at dusk, I stopped near a broken fence line where fireflies flickered above tall grass. A train whistle echoed across the field. The scene suggested transition–the advance of industry into rural spaces–but the world around me remained static. No new tracks appeared the next day. No labor crews, no transformed land. The frontier closed in narrative terms, but not in ecological ones.
This is where nostalgia does its heaviest work. RDR2 offers an environmental past stripped of the very forces that reshaped the historical West: overgrazing, railroad expansion, mining waste, market hunting, Indigenous displacement. The world appears on the brink of change. But it never changes. That stability preserves the pleasure of exploration while muting the historical violence that made the real frontier “vanish” in the first place.
RDR2 includes the Wapiti people, whose forced relocation and diminished sovereignty are woven into the main narrative. Their story recalls the broad arc of U.S. expansion: treaties broken, lands seized, autonomy constrained. Yet outside scripted moments, Indigenous presence in the game world is minimal. Their lands do not repopulate with Native families. Their ecological relationships–fire management, hunting practices, land stewardship–are absent from gameplay.
This absence is not a moral failing of individual developers so much as a function of the broader design logics. Video games emphasize agency, action, and mobility. They reward the player’s ability to shape outcomes. Indigenous histories, by contrast, often demand attention to structure, constraint, and the limits of agency under settler colonialism. Those perspectives are difficult to translate into mechanics centered on player freedom.
RDR2 is not entirely unique in this. Denning observes that historical games “develop certain historical faculties quite well, while ignoring others entirely,” especially those involving social structures or collective experience.[2] But there is something uniquely environmental about RDR2, a game that has so powerfully impacted a generation of gamers’ understanding of the West. The game teaches players how to feel connected to nature–how to read weather, how to track animals, how to move across terrain–but it teaches little about the structural systems that shaped those environments: federal land policy, railroad subsidies, Indigenous dispossession, cattle syndicates, or the corporate West of the late nineteenth century. In other words, the game offers environmental intimacy without environmental history.
This notion of offering intimacy without history is precisely why RDR2 is valuable for historians. The game’s world reveals the gap between ecological memory and ecological fact–between the West players desire and the West that existed. Through deep play, players encounter a historical imaginary shaped by affect, nostalgia, and curated intimacy with land. In the process, RDR2, as much as any game, functions as “digital history and public history,” shaping historical understanding before academic work enters the conversation.[3]
By allowing players to inhabit a stylized frontier, it powerfully influences how contemporary audiences imagine environmental change. The question, then, is not whether the game accurately represents the frontier. Few popular media do. The more significant question is what the game teaches players about environmental transformation, and what it leaves out.
By allowing players to inhabit a stylized frontier, it powerfully influences how contemporary audiences imagine environmental change. The question, then, is not whether the game accurately represents the frontier. Few popular media do. The more significant question is what the game teaches players about environmental transformation, and what it leaves out.
To play Red Dead Redemption 2, thus, is to inhabit a paradox. The game invites players into a world on the brink of disappearance, yet one that never truly changes. It offers environmental sensation–storms, sunsets, animal encounters–while smoothing the structural realities that shaped the historical West. In doing so, it reveals the powerful allure of ecological nostalgia, and the difficulty of narrating environmental change within a medium built on player control.
But this is also the opportunity the game affords. As historians, we can read RDR2 not as a flawed simulation of 1899, but as a window into the environmental imagination of the present: a curated landscape that reflects contemporary desires for intimacy with nature, even as real-world ecosystems transform with unsettling speed.
If the game teaches us anything, it is that deep play is never neutral. The worlds we explore shape the histories we remember. And the frontier we ride across on-screen tells us as much about the twenty-first century as it does about the nineteenth.
[1] Andrew Denning, “Deep Play? Video Games and the Historical Imaginary,” American Historical Review 126, no. 1 (March 2021): 180-198.
[2] Denning, 190.
[3] Denning, 196.
Nolan Reynolds