![]() Like the classic westerns and gangster stories it draws from, it can be crude and violent. With an enormous production budget, seven years of development and a script running about 2,000 pages just for the main story, it might well be the most ambitious game ever made. If ever a video game has risen to the level of those classics, it’s Red Dead Redemption 2. ![]() From “The Searchers” to “The Godfather,” from “The Sopranos” to “The Americans,” what connects these eras, and their most outstanding works, is a shared ambition, a desire to be both grand and granular, telling individual stories against the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form. But the best games reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years. Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male. So the perception is that video games don’t really matter, because they have nothing - or at least nothing important - to say. ![]() Today’s elite tastemakers might be perfectly comfortable discussing the inner workings of the banking system in Westeros, but gaming is still stigmatized, at best as a guilty pleasure, and at worst as a psychologically destructive hobby for socially stunted young men. Yet video games remain something of a second-class cultural medium, even as geek culture has otherwise ascended into the mainstream. In popular entertainment, nothing is bigger than video games, and the holiday shopping season is when many of the year’s most anticipated releases hit stores. ![]() To put those numbers in context, this year’s biggest Marvel film, “Avengers: Infinity War,” grossed about $640 million worldwide in its opening weekend. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen this at this box office, it’s because it’s not a movie. After its October release, Red Dead Redemption 2 earned $725 million in just three days, giving it the highest-grossing opening weekend of any entertainment product - ever. ![]()
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