Jul 24, 2026
The Dastardly Achievement
A fascinating account of attempting to get the “dastardly” achievement in the popular video game, Red Dead Redemption:
A few hours in and I found my gal. A woman cried plaintively near a stagecoach for help, a woman serving voluntarily as bait for what were essentially a turn of the century version of carjackers. She was attempting to lure my unsuspecting gunslinger into the crosshairs of a group of bandits hiding behind the coach. After dispatching them, I swooped in, hogtied the woman, and deposited her on the back of my horse, and I was off to find a convenient set of tracks.
Having set her down, I waited for my achievement to unlock, which, of course, it didn’t.
Then it dawned on me. I was going to need to wait for a train.
I cut her loose. It wasn’t funny anymore.
Editor Picks
Recent Columns
Recent Podcasts
Jan 31, 2024
The Scandal of Reading 37 | Tiffany Kriner on Louise Erdrich’s LaRose
Jan 24, 2024
The Scandal of Reading 36 | Winn Collier on Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow
Jan 10, 2024
The Scandal of Reading 35 | Lit Pulpit – The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Dec 13, 2023
The Scandal of Reading 34 | Daniel Nayeri on Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Dec 6, 2023
10 Comments
To each his own, I watched a video of a guy hogtie thirty or so people onto the tracks while waiting for the train. It was funny in a video-game mechanic sort of way. Just like Oblivion Bear Rolling.
I can’t do stuff like that either. Bear rolling is way different to me than tying a woman to the railroad tracks and watching her get run over. I can’t play the bad guy in video games; it makes me very uncomfortable. There is nothing funny to me about wickedness, even if it is only “pretend.”
But is it really wickedness if it’s pretend?
That’s a good question, The Dane. We know that imaginary sex is sin. We know that imagining murderous revenge on someone is sin. I would posit that anything not done to the glory of God is sin, and I’m not really sure how pretending to tie women to a railroad track in order to see them squished is a noble thing. But then, bear rolling isn’t very noble, except that getting rid of predators is seen as a positive thing in the Scriptures.
Always play the hero, bro. Always. ;)
This is an issue we’ve discussed here since our very first video game articles, so I’m not going to jump into this fully, but I do want to point out that God seemed to think that the wickedness of idolmakers was pretty funny when He describes how funny it is that they use some wood to make a fire and the rest to make a “god.”
Obviously the contexts are quite different, but I would say that wickedness can be funny in a redemptive way.
I am actually writing an article about this very thing so I will save you the details, but in short I think their is a big difference between mocking false religion/idols and making light of sin.
Well, I mean we are talking about NON-reality here. These are ideas that we are basically experimenting with here. I don’t have a huge problem with the idea of being able to do something like this.
My problem in this case is that, in classic RockStar fashion, issues of life, death, sexuality, etc. are treated as some kind of hilarious joke, something to take lightly. If they want to pull off satire, as many claim, it needs to take us somewhere concrete, and to have some kind of gravity.
I like the idea of using achievements to lead us to do something we (virtually) “regret” doing in the game world. It teaches us something about real life. But I’m not crazy about the light and fluffy way that Rockstar treats these instances in its’ games. It just lessons the experience and makes it less affecting.
Do we know that imaginary sex is wrong? I think it probably depends things like: a) the context, b) what we mean by imaginary, and c) what is the moral content of what we’re pretending. The same would hold true to violence.
Let’s look at en example. I’m at work and I think about how I just might have sex with my wife when I get home. If I’ve thought in any detail about what that means, I’ve imagined sex. Nothing wrong with that so far as I can see. Now what if I read or write a book in which sex occurs between a couple of college students. It’s pretend and it’s sex. Wrong? Not in itself.
Really, these imaginary instances of sexuality only become a problem in the moment that they cause someone to harbour adulterous thoughts in their mind. And that is something that is a) hardly necessary to the pretend depiction and b) more about the individual and their digestion of the pretend act of sexual intimacy.
Now applying this concept to game violence, for many of us, there is a strong disconnect between real violence and videogame violence. I’m pretty much a pacifist. Yet I have absolutely no problem using an insta-gib on someone in a capture the flag match. That’s murdering someone in order to win a sport, essentially. You know why? Because I’m not actually murdering anyone. What I’m doing is not even analogous to murder. I’m using game-conditions to secure a victory. It’s so entirely mechanical that there’s not any intrinsic ethical content to the action.
Rich complains that Red Dead Redemption follows RockStar’s theme of satirizing society’s moral failures. If there is satire here, I’m not sure that he’s got the right target pinned. I haven’t played RDR myself so I can’t speak to it’s content so well (though from what I understand, its content is less satire and more just homage to the Western genre—in which case, Dastardly fits nicely with the theme). In RockStar’s most popular catalogue item, GTA, they are certainly satirizing society to some extent (but societal satire is almost entirely exclusive to GTA’s radio programming and advertising). As far as its violence goes, I think a much more suitable argument would be made that GTA is satirizing videogame worlds.
By reveling in game mechanic mayhem, their skewering the entire pop medium. And doing so by embracing the medium for all its excesses and logical, reasonable end. Super Mario Bros is, essentially, about murder on the way to sex. That’s not even an obscure reading. But SMB pretties it up in cartoon fetish so it’s not so recognizable for what it is—disguising it to the extent that mothers who wouldn’t even have the context to understand game worlds wouldn’t think their children were engaged in a game that’s about murder (Koopahs, Goombahs, Lakidu, Hammer Bros, etc.), greed (coins for life), and sex (Peach). GTA takes the same mechanic and recontextualizes it, allowing us to see these things for what they are inside the context of the game world—and thereby showing that it doesn’t matter.
There is no intrinsic difference between Tetris and Mario Bros and Team Fortres 2 and GTA. Any difference noted is fabricated in the player or observer. This doesn’t mean the differences are not important, only that they are different on an individual basis.
Much like pretend sex.
The Dane,
I think your answer is more fantasy than any of the games you are writing about.
First, I would like to say that you can imagine sex with your spouse and that be within the parameters of goodness. However, that is about where the agreement ends. I cannot imagine a scenario where you could imagine sex between college students and think that’s fine with the Holy Spirit and glorifying to God.
As for Super Mario Brothers being about sex and murder on par with this new cowboy game, all I have to say is that you cannot possibly mean that. The Princess was kidnapped. Bowser and his minions are holding her against her will. There is redemptive value in that. Plus, Mario and the Princess have never once been seen in a sexually compromising situation, have they? What in the world are you talking about? Are you seriously contending that saving the Princess from kidnappers and thugs is morally equivalent to strapping people to train tracks to see them squished for giggles? What an imagination you have!
As for you being able to bust a cap into an imaginery fellow in capture the flag and coming away unblemished and unfazed, well, that’s precisely what we are talking about, isn’t it? As one who has enjoyed mayhem and murder in the virtual world quite often, I cannot say with 100% certainty that this has been altogether good for me spiritually. At the very least, I don’t think it was very wise use of my time. At worst, I fear it does indeed make light of the seriousness of death.
@Brad –
I actually find it pretty easy to imagine such a thing. I just read a great book in which a character had been promiscuous and a bit of a cad before he met his wife. We know this because the book tells us so, essentially saying, “And then: they had sex.” It was fictional. Not real. It didn’t cause me to sin, despite depicting an instance of sin. Scripture does this too, positing an imaginary circumstance in which a man engages sexual infidelity in his head, leading us to contemplate such a situation ourselves. Both of my examples glorified God, the first in that my reading of the book honoured God for what I do with the text, the latter for a host of reasons but primarily because it is God’s own word.
Therefore, if such fictional representations of sin can still be an honour to God’s name, the problem may not necessarily rest in fictional representations of sin. More likely, I think (and I think Scripture bears me out on this) the crux of the matter lays in the response of the individual. And I’m not just talking about flight here.
Fleeing a circumstance that will drive you to sin is a good and wise thing. It is also good to not find in every instance of sin (real or fictional) an opportunity to sin—and therefore to flee. As we grow in God’s strength, we should come to find ourselves more and more resilient to the call of sin. Further, not every believer struggles with the same difficulties. Some of us struggle with sex and with drugs and with rock and roll. Others of us don’t, but instead suffer under the temptation of arrogance, vanity, gluttony, laziness, greed, anger, et cetera.
I don’t find myself in any realistic danger of turning to violence. Because of this, there is little for me to worry about when I do the 8-bit equivalent of curb-stomping my enemies in Super Mario Bros. (in real life, I am supposed to love my enemies, but in the Mario gameworld that mechanic is not existent). While playing a driving game, I can crash my car into anything without concern for the realworld ethic of good stewardship and if I happen to misjudge a corner and barrel over a gameworld pedestrian, I don’t need to start therapy to help me deal with the death my negligence brought about.
Because it’s not real. And because things that would be sins in the realworld often aren’t any such thing in the gameworld. Of course, to participate ethically in gameworld requires one to be well-aware of the difference between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, and the realworld vs. the gameworld. If one cannot distinguish between the two, then achieving Dastardly would indeed be an ill omen.
Comments are now closed for this article.