On March 4, 2024, Red Dead Redemption 2 became a history course at the University of Tennessee, opened by university history professor Tore Olsson. In addition, Olson plans to compile his eldest cousin's nineteenth-century American history into a history book about Red Dead Redemption!
Torre Olson is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, with a focus on post-Civil War American history, with a focus on the American South, popular culture, rural and agricultural history in the United States, and transnational history.
In 2021, Olsen decided to offer a history course about Red Dead Redemption at school, and Olsen said he wanted to be as close to the students as possible, so he took the plunge and started the course, which was closely related to the game.
For a long time, historians have mainly tried to combine pop culture, serious literature, film or TV drama culture to conduct historical research, IGN, Eurogamer, etc. have become interested in Olsen and conducted interviews with Olson.
In the last two decades, the gaming market has skyrocketed, but historians have been reluctant to get involved in video game research for a variety of reasons, and Olsen decided to become a crab-eating historian himself, spearheading a very serious approach to Red Dead Redemption to see why so many people love Big Cousin.
Judging from Olsen's personal experience, he also liked to play games very much when he was a child, after he opened "Red Dead Redemption 2" for the first time, he was amazed by Big Cousin 2 in the first 10 hours, Olsen said that it was difficult for him to look at the game as a player, but to play the game as an American historian, and the degree to which R Star restored history is simply shocking.
Many gamers may not care much about the historical details when playing the game, and of course, few historians have done in-depth research on the game, Olsen searched for the ** about RDR2 in many historical journals, and the answer was nothing, and the academic community was completely silent about such a best-selling game.
In real life, Olson, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, wondered if he could create a course about nineteenth-century American history based on his cousin's fictional storyline.
And this is not a joke, but really as a historian, to ** the macro and micro history that real academics will pay attention to, such as politics, race, gender, class and capital in the game, of course, these may not be the focus of the game, but if this course is to be offered, Olson still hopes to take students to understand the historical details of the game.
After the course was opened, Olson became the most sought-after professor at the University of Tennessee, and after a semester of classes, Olson said that the class was still open, and all the students invested time and their ability to understand historical materials significantly exceeded other history courses, and there was no need to sign in, and there were many students who were not from the history department, and the students from other departments were mainly from CS and business.
Overall, this course is able to attract students, mainly because of the love of the game, but this is precisely the charm of history in R-star games, games often do not provide a complete story on their own, but they at least provide players with an introduction to American history.
For example, like the real Pinkerton detectives in American history, the game restores them, although the names of people and places are fictional, but like St. Denis has very obvious New Orleans elements, R Star is very good at restoring the United States in the 19th century, and the architecture, pop culture, and aesthetics of the game are in line with the America of that era in Olson's mind.
As for whether there is anything wrong with R Star, this is also for sure, but this does not affect the game at all, because the purpose of the course is to take students to understand the United States of that era, and Olsen intends to bring the content of the course together into a book that I hope players will enjoy.
IGN asked the professor in an interview if the way the characters in Red Dead Redemption 2 spoke in line with that era. Olsen emphasized that the people in the game were very polite and talkative, and even in the Van der Linde gang, everyone referred to each other as Mr. and Mrs., which Olsen thought was very reasonable.
R Star has often used movies to examine 19th-century America, such as the southern elements in the Coen brothers' "Three Kings of Prison Escape", and Westerns such as ** Three Darts, which have had an important impact on the game. There was a lot of swear in the 19th century, and in general, workers were not very bound by the rules of politeness, unlike the Victorian era across the ocean, but the history of the United States is still very interesting.
There is a special topic in the course about Pinkerton, and Olson says that the real Pinkerton is indeed famous for catching gangsters, but this kind of thing is mainly in the 1870s, by the end of the 19th century of the Vanderlinde Gang, Pinkerton actually became a mercenary of big capital, went undercover in the union, infiltrated the working class, and specialized in acting as a thug for the boss.
Olson said that his research on the period of American history is a little later than the time in the game, and at present, the course of "Red Dead Redemption 2" at the University of Tennessee is indeed a very good start, and he looks forward to more scholars participating in the historical research of video games in the future, further exploring the restoration of historical events, characters and culture in video games, so that more students can also contact and learn historical knowledge through video games, and expand the influence of history education.