In a Q&A with Big Think about his novel Luka and the Fire of Life, author Salman Rushdie spent some time talking about Rockstar Games’ Read Dead Redemption. He seemed fascinated by the game’s mix of storytelling and open-world interactivity. Rushdie said:
The game that my 13 year-old boy Milan and his friends all seem to be playing right now is this wild west game called Red Dead Redemption and one of the things looking over… I mean I don’t even pretend to understand what is going on really, but one of the things that is interesting about it to me is the much looser structure of the game and the much greater agency that the player has to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for you. He doesn’t… in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long periods of time. There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I’ve always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end — to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.
I’m a big fan of Rushdie and was totally jazzed to hear his thoughts on videogames. (On a side note, I totally marked out when he asked J.K. Rowling about Severus Snapes’ motivations in a Deathly Hallows Q&A.) However, not everything he said was positive. Check out the video clip if you have a chance and let me know what you think (please)!
The character in that pic reminds me of Stranger from Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.