Sometimes the price of a large, open world is less fidelity in each environment – not so in Red Dead Redemption 2, which manages to be both meticulously constructed and impossibly huge. What’s more, Red Dead is a period piece taking place from 1899 to 1907; But who’s keeping track of all those fussy details, right? Would anyone care if details were scattered here and there?
Yes, this is the internet we’re talking about, surely someone will. YouTuber Annie Austin decided to conduct an ad-hoc in-game census of Red Dead 2’s fictional town of Valentine, covering “employment status, employment industry, income level, age, and overall health”. He compared his findings to actual United States census data from 1907 and found that, at least by some metrics, the game’s batting average was “pretty surprising”.
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None of Austin’s videos explain the specifics of his methodology, but suffice it to say that he divided the city into a uniform grid and picked out random pools of NPCs at different times of the day and then entered a suite of details about them into a spreadsheet. Since he couldn’t explicitly interview NPCs, he used visual cues to identify their status in life: their clothing, their surroundings, the amount of teeth attached to their skull, and so on. Although not perfect, it works when Red Dead fills its cities with various grab bags of NPCs on a certain day; Since there is no real population in the game to assess, the best thing to do is to assess how accurate the illusion is on average.
And in that regard, Valentine did pretty well, as Anne Austin points out in her video. Some things were a little rough; The unemployment rate seemed slightly higher than reported in real life, the population of entertainment workers in the city was higher (and the population of construction workers was lower) than was likely, but nothing so extreme as to break the illusion even when examined at this level.
The only exception found by Austin is health; The Red Dead’s view of the Wild West apparently included much improved dentistry, and as a result a full set of teeth, that was within the reach of groups of cowboys and farmers a century earlier. Still, considering you have to clip your camera to someone’s face to actually pay attention, it hardly seems like a big deal.
There are many other grounds on which one could assess the historical accuracy of a game like Red Dead – the stories of gun-toting cowboys like Arthur Morgan are, themselves, a romanticized embellishment of American history. But given the use of actual historical data in Anne Austin’s experiment, it’s impressive to see how well Rockstar has a hold on the US border. And hey, if you think this is all a waste of time, you’re welcome to turn Arthur into Super Monkey Ball.
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