By Bella Potter | Senior | East Lansing High School
[This work comes from the Art of Storytelling class, taught by Julia Satterthwaite.]
Baity Wagner doesn’t relax on weekends.
She saddles horses to gallop across towns, hunts for hours on end, hijacks trains, robs banks and duels her foes.
You could say she gets pretty worked up.
For just a few hours, she’s not Baity Wagner. She’s outlaw Arthur Morgan. Red Dead Redemption II’s main character. A self-proclaimed “bad person.”
But the video game isn’t just gun-slinging cowboys and tumbleweeds — it’s philosophical, she says. It all begins in the title with a single word: redemption, defining “how your actions eventually affect the universe.”
As her finger hovers over the rounded buttons, each decision she makes will be deemed one of two things: “bad” or “good?”
She could sink herself further into criminal behaviors, furthering the notion of being a “bad” person. Or, she could redeem herself and finally be perceived as “good.”
But rather, she sees herself — and her character — as neither.
“You can’t classify someone as a good or a bad person,” Wagner said. “All we are is the actions that we [take] and how they affect other people.”
Under the fluorescent mood lighting of her room, she chooses every path her character takes in 1899 Wild West America, reflecting on how she would do so in her own life.
As the sun sets outside her window, and on her TV screen, she places her controller down for the day.
Yet she knows she’ll return to contemplate her fate once again on a random Saturday.
But after all, it is just a game.