Sites of Play: Locating Gameplace in Red Dead Redemption 2

The paper examines how Red Dead Redemption 2 builds a sense of place, drawing on placeness theory and site-specific performance to argue that places in games emerge from the interplay of space, human connection, and player activity. Based on more than thirty hours of close gameplay analysis, the authors identify four modes of environmental storytelling through which the game constructs its world: evocative spaces, enacting stories, embedded narratives, and emergent narratives. The work situates RDR2 against its predecessor, Red Dead Redemption, which has been critiqued for reinforcing neoliberal and white-supremacist narratives despite its strong critical reception, and it treats the sequel as a case study in how a game's environments can carry cultural and political meaning.

Central to the analysis is the argument that place functions as both storyteller and structural device. Arthur Morgan's journey from snowy mountains to the rural town of Valentine and then to the industrial city of Saint Denis dramatizes a movement from frontier myth toward modernity. The authors describe the game's compressed, cinematically referenced landscapes as producing "topopoesis," a poetic rather than topographical representation of place, which they present as an unusually explicit example in videogames. The concept of home emerges as portable and political, while the free-roaming mode and populated environments generate a tension between player agency and the fixed identity of the protagonist.

The paper ultimately distinguishes a "gameworld," a space designed for traversal, from a "gameplace," which is inhabited through long-term personal goals such as achievements and collecting. Mechanisms like the honor system, which ties player conduct to local non-player character behavior, and references to real regional cultural tropes such as Louisiana swamplands and New Orleans, reinforce the view that environments are culturally mediated places rather than neutral spaces. The authors conclude that place serves as the compositional fulcrum of emotional response, and they propose comparative studies of other titles to refine the concept of gameplace further.