the console allows that connection.”ĭavis cataloged her journey through RDR2 in a story that concluded yesterday, with her son publishing her 2,800-word essay (“Unsung heroes: Reconceptualizing a video game as a work of art”) to the Red Dead Redemption subreddit. Consider the intimacy of the relationship when you and he are the lead character in the game. “We decide where he will move, what he will wear, if he will shave his beard, give money to the collection pot for Dutch’s gang, go into a saloon and play poker, or check into a station and pay the bounty on our head for some or another murderous mistake. “Arthur and I are connected by that controller,” she writes. She got the hang of it, by her account, in two weeks. She faced down a twin-analog controller that millions nimbly command by second nature, but which is intimidatingly complex to a complete newcomer. So Davis bought the game and a PlayStation 4. “The only way I would get to experience my son’s celebrated performance was to learn to play Red Dead Redemption 2,” she writes. She was there to see her son, Benjamin Byron Davis, on a panel to talk about portraying Dutch, the lead non-player character in charge of the gang for which the player’s character, Arthur Morgan, rides.īefore that visit, Davis really had no idea of the depth of video games culture or why fans are so intensely devoted to them.
Jessica Hoffmann Davis, an educator, playwright and author of four books about the role of arts in education, picked up a DualShock 4 controller after visiting FanExpo Boston in August 2019. And the essay she wrote about her experience is a wonderfully affirming, outsider’s commentary on fan culture, particularly in video gaming. The 75-year-old mother of the actor who played Dutch van der Linde in Red Dead Redemption 2 played through the entire open-world game so she could understand what it was her son had done, and why millions hailed the work.