Note: this text incorporates spoilers for one stranger mission in Red Dead Redemption 2. If you’ve been thorough and also you’re as much as Chapter four or so, you’ve in all probability executed this one. If not, it’s a minor second of the game to have spoiled however use your discretion as you see match.
If you’ve completed a minimum of the primary half of Red Dead Redemption 2 and talked to different individuals who have performed it as properly, Jeremiah Compson is more likely to have come up. You may not keep in mind his title – there’s an opportunity you by no means encountered him, or have let his stranger mission move – however the query is at all times the identical: did you kill the previous slave dealer?
Compson’s mission, The Iniquities of History, is triggered when Arthur finds the previous man on a bench outdoors Rhodes Station. Compson tells Arthur that his life has collapsed; the financial institution has repossessed his dwelling, he has nowhere to go, he feels disrespected. He longs for his three most treasured gadgets, which had been all left behind in his previous home – a ledger, a revolver, and a pocket watch. Naturally, boy scout Arthur takes pity and gives to go and get them for him.
The mission goes easily by Red Dead requirements, which is to say that you just solely find yourself needing to kill two folks (bandits seeking to loot the home). You discover the previous pocket watch, which has in all probability held a whole lot of its worth; you discover the revolver, which is clearly not in working situation. And then, after you kill the bandits, you discover a entice door main into Compson’s basement.
There are chains on the wall down there that seem like they’re designed to carry human beings. When you discover the ledger, it incorporates an inventory: ‘negroes recovered in 1856’. Names. Dates. Prices. Slavery wasn’t formally declared unlawful till 1865 – till then, Compson was a proud slaver. Now, over thirty years later, he’s homeless, offended, believing that his legacy has been “pissed on”. When you come with these things, he’s drunk and belligerent. “I want my job, my pride, the respect afforded to a gentleman,” he tells Arthur. Arthur throws his ledger within the fireplace and voices his disgust: “old man, some jobs ain’t worth savin’”. A livid Compson turns his revolver on Arthur, but it surely not works. “I still exist,” he moans, and begins weeping over his camp fireplace.
What follows is without doubt one of the game’s extra curious, restrained moments. The mission ends. Compson remains to be sat by his fireplace, bawling. The game doesn’t immediate you to kill or spare this man, however the implication is clear – do you place down this terrible man, or let him reside along with his distress?
I’ve talked to lots of people about how they performed this out, and none of them simply walked away with out fascinated by it. Just a few mentioned that having to maintain dwelling was a punishment worse than loss of life for this man. Others shot him instantly and watched as his physique collapsed into the campfire, setting alight. And then fairly a number of folks did what I did – began to stroll away, content material to let him endure, earlier than deciding that no, screw that, there may be at all times room for really horrible folks like Compson to stage a comeback, to connect themselves to no matter terrible rhetoric finds its means into the discourse and to dedicate themselves to a brand new horrible trigger. I shot an arrow into his head in order to not waste the bullet.
Curiously, killing Compson awards the participant with further ‘honour’, tipping the morality scale to the best. Killing this man, the game asserts, was the best factor to do. If there’s one other instance of this within the game, I’m but to seek out it. If you discover a Ku Klux Klan gathering within the game and homicide all of them – I haven’t had the pleasure, sadly – your honor score received’t drop, but it surely additionally doesn’t rise.
There are different cases the place the game can improve your honor for homicide, however provided that it’s in service of serving to somebody out within the wild. This is, so far as I can inform, the one occasion within the game the place you’re given honour for taking pictures an unarmed man. There’s a level of want achievement right here, after all – having the ability to erase somebody terrible straight away, to place an finish to an evil thoughts, is satisfying. Is it honourable, although?
“There is always room for truly terrible people like Compson to stage a comeback, to attach themselves to whatever awful rhetoric finds its way into the discourse and to dedicate themselves to a new horrible cause”
Compson is much from the one individual I killed who couldn’t defend themselves in Red Dead. I discovered myself veering far more in the direction of advantage in the direction of the tip of the game. Early on, once I wanted cash, I watched a gold prospector panning for gold nuggets and promptly beat him to loss of life after he lastly discovered one in order that I may take it myself. This was, on one degree, a transactional determination – I wished that gold – however I additionally made positive to justify it within the context of my character at that time. Early on, it appeared becoming to me that Arthur would do something to outlive and earn cash for his gang. It was a blatantly unhonourable factor to do, and that appeared like one thing Arthur would have made peace with. Not lengthy after, I shot a person as a result of the closest city was distant, and I wanted his horse. This one, admittedly, is a tougher to justify as being in-character.
There are downsides to the game’s – and by extension, the style’s – insistence that you need to be allowed to kill anybody not important to the plot. The disgusting trend of YouTube videos of players beating and killing the game’s suffragettes is especially distressing. These are characters who’re depicted properly within the game, and who Arthur more-or-less sides with (if you happen to speak to the girl asking for the best to vote in St Denis she accuses Arthur of being a ‘cynic’ for his ‘women should be allowed to vote, even if voting is for chumps’ perspective – it’s a fantastic alternate). None of that is actual, after all, however dwelling out a foul impulse in a game world – after which broadcasting it out into the world on this means – can typically be an announcement on somebody’s actual views and beliefs.
With this in thoughts, I’ve puzzled what my willingness to kill Compson means about me as an individual, if something. In my thoughts, firing that arrow was much less about killing him than stopping him – games can solely provide so some ways of working via a state of affairs, and by that time Red Dead has established a world the place homicide is the efficient resolution to a whole lot of issues. And after all, there’s the unreality of games, the truth that Compson isn’t actual. That issues a fantastic deal, but it surely additionally doesn’t imply that killing him is a meaningless act for the gamers who do it.
I’ll admit – with out saying something too particular, due to how badly this sentiment might be misconstrued or taken out of context if I’m too particular – that I considered a really particular Australian determine as I walked again to take out Compson. Not as a result of I imagine that individual needs to be put to loss of life, after all, however as a result of they’re an emblem of how outdated concepts and insurance policies can come roaring again at any second, and the way a nationwide joke can as soon as once more rise to a place of significant energy and affect if left unchecked. It’s their views, their beliefs, and the platform they’ve been provided that I wish to see shrivel and die, not them personally.
There was in all probability no want for this tbh. pic.twitter.com/0lFa5xqHGx
— VG247 (@VG247) October 25, 2018
Killing Compson is, I’d argue, a symbolic gesture, and the game treats it as honourable as a result of it’s the participant’s means of making an attempt to kill the attitudes he represents. The man crying over the tip of American slavery right this moment is simply as more likely to discover one thing new and terrible to connect himself to tomorrow. It’s the one significant means of claiming that you just don’t imagine that Compson is owed the respect afforded to a gentleman.
Games are nonetheless struggling to seek out methods to speak lofty concepts of ethics and morality in ways in which don’t contain killing or destroying folks (or, for that matter, saving their lives fully). One of my favorite mechanics in Red Dead is the way in which you’ll be able to construct up your honour just by strolling via city greeting everybody, and I’d like to see future games with morality methods take inspiration from it. But the tip of Compson’s mission stands out as an fascinating second, and a fantastic piece of storytelling via mission design, even when it comes down as to if you kill somebody. For my half, I advocate for killing Compson – you’ll be able to’t save the world that means, however within the context of the game, it’ll make you’re feeling a bit higher.
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