Red Dead Redemption 2's Minigames are the Point of its Story
Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming up on six years old, somehow, and I only recently started playing it. I tend to get to AAAs too late to have any meaningful thought on em. I'll skim Wikipedia and TVTropes pages and get some residual from memes escaping containment, so I tend to not be that invested in them by that point. Their money has been made and I can kinda look past the narrative's tropes, and sometimes the ludic interactions tell their own tragic tale.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is, in many ways, a tribute to the end of the Old West, as it existed in idealized films and stories of the postwar era, with its train robberies and horseback shootouts, but halfway into the game, the player is reminded of just how soon their stories are going to end.
Halfway into the game, the player learns of their protagonist's terminal illness, and it leaves them excluded from some of the camp activity minigames for fear of their health. While dominoes, five-finger filet, and poker are available out in the world to play, their options for the smaller parts of their life at camp like doing chores and listening to stories around the campfire dwindle, and as you are nearing the end of your adventure...
...you kinda don't want it to end.
You want to sit there and listen to every stupid little campfire story, you want to help cook and feed the horses and chop firewood. You want to play dominoes with Dutch all of a sudden. If you haven't done any of them and are now realizing how little there is to do, all of a sudden, you're gonna want to replay the game all over again. They get another 50 hours out of ya to see what you missed. If you know it's coming... if you know how Arthur Morgan's story ends, then you're going to want to take all the time you can to enjoy the stories and the chores, even if you hate 'em, therefore using the narrative to make you change the way you look at these ludic interactions. It's a crazy good way to interweave the story to the gameplay, and it's absolutely genius.
Those madmen, I'm going to spend so GODDAMN much time in cutscenes now
