cowboys and mortality: how "Red Dead Redemption 2" deals with choice and being a good person

Spoiler alert for the events of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Read Dead Redemption 2 is your classic wild west story--gangs, heists, stand-offs. From the outline you might expect a run-of-the-mill run and gun story. I mean it's cowboys! And for a while, it is. That is until Arthur Morgan comes face to face with death. On this occasion, it's imminent, and there isn't any escaping it. Arthur Morgan is going to die.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/pahoug/is_there_an_in_game_explanation_arthur_sees_a/, Arthur hallucinating a deer on the streets of Saint Denis.

Within Red Dead Redemption 2, there is an "honor" system. At its core, it tracks the player's activity and decisions they made throughout the game and categorizes them between good and bad--honorable or dishonorable. These can have some effect on the gameplay, as a lower honor level means the player is more often wanted by authorities, and generally is greeted with more hostility wherever they go. High honor, on the other hand, renders the player (and Arthur Morgan, the character you play as) basically just a normal dude. Until about the halfway point of the game, this system is not super important.

At that halfway point however, Arthur gets diagnosed with tuberculosis--ironically, he contracts it after he beats a man to death that had it himself. There were warning signs leading up to this--bouts of coughing, spitting up blood. At the time of this game (late 1800's, around the end of the American Wild West), there is no cure to tuberculosis--it's a death sentence. No matter what level honor the player has, the reaction is the same for Arthur. His whole world comes crashing down, he knew he would probably die early, but not by the hands of some disease. So now, confronted with the limited time he has left, he is left with a choice: make amends for the mistakes he made, or die an outlaw with the rest of the wild west.

This decision, of course, is left to the player. You could hypothetically stay "bad," continue looting and shooting as if nothing were wrong. As a result, Arthur will continuously see visions of a coyote that lurks in the back of his mind. In the end, if Arthur never changes, his actions catch up to him. Arthur dies, left behind and betrayed by those who used to run in his gang. A former gang member shoots him before the disease takes him. The player sees the coyote one last time, before the game closes.

What is widely regarded as the "true" ending, however, is when Arthur has high honor. What's funny though, is that there isn't a ton of differences between these endings. One key difference though, is the presence of a deer instead of a coyote. Instead of a dreary, gray scene, its golden and proud. There is also how Arthur dies here. Instead of being shot, the other gang members simply leave him. So, Arthur is left alone, wheezing out his final breaths as he watches the sunset. The player sees the deer one last time, and he dies.

For all intents and purposes, the ending doesn't change. Arthur is destined to die no matter what, but the ending does change Arthur himself. The events of the story shapes Arthur's character, and the player has a pivotal role in his transformation. But, even if there are miniscule changes, is there ultimately any reason for the player to be good? To be bad? There isn't any incentive to do either, besides the reactions of the people around you in the game. Even the coyote/deer is more of a signifier to the player if they've made mostly good or bad choices--I don't think its meant to make the player feel a certain way, rather it merely serves as a warning for what's coming.

But I think most people are compelled to be good in a situation like Arthur's. Arthur is by no means a good person--he has lived his whole life on the run, committed numerous crimes. But there's something about the presence of death that causes one to question the events of one's life. To set things right. And although the player isn't the one that has lived Arthur's life (he is a fictional character after all), they are compelled to want him to be a better person. The game does an excellent job of facilitating this through small, human moments. One conversation that always stood out in my memory is a conversation that Arthur has with a Sister at a train station. This conversation can be different, again depending on honor, but if Arthur has high honor at this point, the Sister will mention how Arthur is always helping people and making them smile. She says that life is full of pain, but also full of love and beauty.

Then the Sister says this: "Be grateful that, for the first time, you see your life clearly."

Death has a funny way of doing that--making you reflect on your own life, and force you to reconcile with what you've done and what you still want to do. Then, Arthur says probably what we're all thinking. He says, "I guess... I'm afraid."

I think the Sister's response here perfectly reflects what I'm trying to say: "Take a gamble that love exists, and do a loving act." Time is finite, life is finite, so it's better to live honorably while you can; it is better to assume that people are good, and that they will choose to be good. I think that is the message that Red Dead Redemption 2 is trying to hammer home here--it is a story of redemption, after all. People will choose to see the deer, not the coyote.