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Hello Rockstar, please make an open world based on my unplayable Xbox edition of Red Dead RedemptionHow the West was Weird
How the West was Weird
Image credit:NaughtyMonk33 / Fandom
Image credit:NaughtyMonk33 / Fandom
I looked around and saw another rider proceeding along the canyon edge, his demeanour calm and his appearance normal save for his hat, which teleported along behind him. I drew in my breath to scream for help but there was no air, for air requires a three-dimensional volume, and I had left such petty Euclidean considerations behind. My horsebillowed. I died.
OK, I’m exaggerating slightly. This anecdote is over a decade old, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the detail – I’ve pieced things together in hindsight with the help of theRed Dead wiki. But I will always remember the fear, and the fascination. I must have tried to leave Bonnie MacFarlane’s farm about 30 times, each attempt a gradual cascade of bugs and glitches that ended in cosmic paralysis. While I wasn’t thinking as analytically back then as I now (sort of) am, I developed a muscle memory for the kinds of technical problem I could expect at different ranges. If I’d run into such a phenomenon today, I’d have drawn a map equivalent to the maps of quarantine zones you find in games likeS.T.A.L.K.E.R.orPacific Drive. Except that nothing I’ve ever encountered in games like those has struck me as nearly as bizarre.
Red Dead Redemption - Bird People GlitchWatch on YouTube
Red Dead Redemption - Bird People Glitch
They call certain variations of this phenomenon the Far Lands. I adore the Far Lands, and now that I compare those dysfunctional cliffs with my scanty but vivid memories of Red Dead Redemption, I wonder if there’s any mileage in doing this kind of thing deliberately.
Imagine an open world that got steadily, purposefully glitchier, the further you travel from its centre, an open world constructed according to the logic of thelegendary self-sabotaging Minecraft server 2b2t. Technical problems spotted during early prototyping would not be erased, but delicately organised and cultivated, formed into concentric rings of increasing unplayability. Testers and designers wouldn’t squash bugs but scout them, competing to isolate the most interesting physics hiccups, dodgy renders and nightmare chimera.
Such a game would avoid the open world’s usual problem of scale breeding tedium, because every region would require you to creatively relitigate the fundamentals of traversal and interaction. Master the unseen waywardness of the code and you, too, could be a cowboy with a teleporting hat, beating a trail through nested event horizons. Representations of people and places would crumple and mutate, acquiring symbolic and political resonance at random: theWeird Westindeed.
There are actually a few precedents for this armchair developer’s daydream. In Yedoma Globula – or at least, the version of it I played in 2021 – the terrain generator’s obsession with fractalstakes you to some terrifying places. There’s also Relative Hell fromZeno Rogue, an indie who specialises in subjecting innocent genres like the roguelite to the horrors of hyperbolic geometry.
