Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry

I was at a college house party once, more than a decade ago. I had just gotten an insignificant job writing about video games for an online publication. It didn't pay much, but I was a broke college student who enjoyed writing and I had been playing video games since before I could read, so it was a good match. I had been discussing this with one of my good friends when an acquaintance butted in. 

He was a friend-of-a-friend type; the kind of person who sits on the periphery of these conversations and, rather than seeming awkward, radiates a haughty, above-it-all air with a shit-eating grin that makes you want to toss a blunt object into their teeth like they're bowling pins.

Let's call him Jake.

Jake was not a tall fellow, but what he lacked in length he made up for in thickness. He had bleached blond spiky hair, embarrassingly poor tattoos, and the kind of beach muscles that would make a Jersey Shore cast member blush. I didn't know him well, but he seemed an affable enough sort when we did make small talk. I don't even remember how we came to know him—probably a friend of one of my girlfriend's friend's boyfriend's.

Jake made his entrance into my periphery and loomed under me. "You're still playing video games!? You gotta stop playing video games, man." He chuckled, subtly imparting to me how ridiculous my hobby was, and how silly it made me look. His comment was timed to perfectly coincide with the end of the conversation that was happening just prior—my friend to whom I was just speaking had already ambled on and was now out of earshot of Jake's comments.

This was nearly 15 years ago, but I can still remember Jake's sneering face in my mind's eye.

I was completely taken aback. Video games and those who play them have never enjoyed a sterling reputation, of course—and that reputation has decreased exponentially during the years since this conversation happened. But Jake's words were an openly made, mocking criticism the likes of which I hadn't heard since I'd been called a nerd in grade school.

At first I didn't respond, just gaped at him like an idiot, which likely confirmed his judgment of me.

"Well, they are paying me," I eventually managed, and left Jake to wallow in his smugness.

I assume that justification meant little to him—someone who wouldn't be caught dead doing such a detestable thing as playing a video game, paid or not—and, to be honest, the justification itself meant almost nothing to me. I'd have gone on playing video games whether I was being paid to or not, simply because I loved them. A few days later, after the embarrassment passed, I thought again about the incident, recoiled, and became internally angry about it. Who is he to judge my hobbies!? That anger eventually dampened, too, and gave way to introspection. Jake's statement left a lingering question in my mind: Why do I play video games? What is it that I enjoy so much about them? Why can I sit down at my computer desk and be so wholly locked into this experience that it would take a monumental sense of responsibility and discipline to move myself away from it? Why, when I think back on certain periods of my life, do I immediately think about which video games I was playing around that time?

And, further: Is this all of this adoration artificial? Maybe they are just a complete waste of time, and I've been tricked into thinking otherwise. Perhaps video games satiate my mind the way cotton candy might fill your stomach when you're hungry—completely lacking in any actual substance, and better replaced by something more substantial. Maybe everyone sees this except me, and I'm being a fool about it.

I am nothing if not a hobbyist, and over the past 15 years I've asked myself these kinds of questions about my hobbies many times:

"Is this worthwhile?" 

"What value does this offer me?"

"Is this enriching my life?"

The process has become what I consider to be a healthy habit with regards to how I spend my free time. In recent years I've begun to develop an answer to that question when I've asked it of my lifelong infatuation with video games.

Video games can be deceptive to those who play them, and even moreso to those who don't. On the surface, it's easy to see why they're so attractive: They look beautiful (especially nowadays), they provide a steady dopamine drip by feeding the player bite-sized rewards for accomplishing menial tasks, and they immerse their players with heaping doses of escapism, allowing them to forget their troubles—sometimes to great fault, as gaming addiction is a very real thing which destroys lives by allowing the player to so effectively ignore their problems while their entire life crumbles around them.

But for me, games go beyond those minor benefits, and their value easily eclipses their pitfalls. My favorite moments in games often come when I feel a completely foreign sense of place; when I'm existing, as another person, in a place so foreign to me that I'd never have thought it up on my own. My senses are assaulted by this notion of otherworldliness and my brain regularly struggles to accept such a novel experience.

I'm on a planet far out into the depths of the Milky Way, staring at twin suns as the wind howls around me.

I'm on horseback in a quiet orchard in a fantasy world, trotting slowly along past a giant windmill.

It's 2029 in Prague, and I'm taking a moment of respite in my apartment as an unsettled city howls curses around me.

So when I think of what actual value it is that video games impart on my life, I'm left ignoring the moment-to-moment satisfaction of leveling up or getting a new piece of gear, and instead focusing on this intense feeling of having been at such a unique place at a certain point in my life. The experience of existing in this reality alone, of adapting to its rules and thinking critically about its events, is a worthwhile endeavor even in a vacuum, but it's profoundly affecting within the context of the current challenges one is faced with in their life; playing a game about human social relationships after a difficult break-up, or a game which examines a struggle you know about personally such as substance abuse. Even something as simple as an open world game which takes place in a city to which you've been.

These places may not exist in reality, and few of them are experiences which you could have in the real world. But these fantastical experiences have bled into my psyche and the challenges they've proposed to my thought processes exist now not only as a memory, but as a part of who I am; a part of the way I think about and affect the real world around me. I've lived other lives, I've spoken with people who do not actually exist. I've considered their problems and how I might impact them. I've enriched my own life experience and thought processes with each new "place" I visit, and I truly believe I've become a more empathetic, considerate person because I have played so many video games.

Once, a few years back, I had a similar experience to The Jake Question™. I was reading some piece of literary fiction while taking a break at work and having a great experience with it. I enthusiastically mentioned my experience with the book to my boss, who was also in the room. He replied that he didn't read fiction, as he never saw the point. 

"Why read about something make-believe when you could read history, or philosophy, or science, and learn something real and practical?"

Though a much friendlier occurrence than being confronted by Jake many years past, it sparked a similar round of introspection in me: Why do I read fiction? What possible answer could I offer to my boss's question, when I had never seriously considered it before? Am I just reading these stories because they pass the time in an enjoyable way? In what manner are they actually enriching my life? Do we all just tell ourselves that reading fiction is worthwhile merely because we enjoy the act of doing it, and need to rationalize a justification for all of the time fiction saps away from our lives?

The answer was, surprisingly, almost identical to the question of why I play video games. Amusingly, reading literary fiction is a far more socially acceptable pastime for adults than playing literary video games is—perhaps due to the mature age of literature as a medium and the fact that it requires years of rigorous study to partake in, whereas video games can be picked up and played by almost anybody and are often marketed towards children as a result. But the more I consider it, the more I group the two media into the same category, because the only other medium I've experienced which comes close to the kind of full cognitive transference of video games is literature. And the more I have considered this over the years, the more surprised I am that readers and gamers alike generally always balk at the statement when I make it. It seems so obvious to me.

I'm sure the non-gamers reading this were somewhat lost when I was discussing this wholly immersed, empathetic transference I often experience with video games. But they're probably unconsciously nodding their heads now when I describe the same experience as applied to reading a good novel. Think about it: How many times have you been riveted while reading, so fully immersed in what's happening on the page, that someone next to you said something and you not only failed to hear what they said, but did not even realize they just spoke to you? How many times have you read well into the night, unable to put your book down, even though you knew you had to wake early for work in the morning? How many times have you thought back about a book and instantly and effortlessly, in your mind's eye, re-created a setting or event from it? I can perfectly recall scenes from certain books I read decades ago, but I can't recall what meat I took out of the freezer to let thaw for dinner just two hours ago.

It's the same with video games. The ignoring others around you, the playing well into the night, the sense of which game you were playing at certain moments of your life, the photographic re-creation of affecting scenes in games you've played in the past. And once I made this connection, I began to connect the two forms of media more frequently.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games

This year I played the critically acclaimed video game Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time. Though I had my complaints, the experience was a wonderfully immersive treat. So much of what Red Dead Redemption 2 does relies on transporting your entire consciousness, unceasingly, to the American wild west. The experience stands out as one of the most memorable and striking experiences I've ever had with the medium of video games. The vast size, legitimacy, and reality of its world is matched only by the depth and humanity of its characters. The game took me 114 hours to complete, and each step of the way I suffered and persevered with these characters. I shared their triumphs, endured their struggles, and took agency on their behalves.

One of my good friends is fond of telling me "It's not real, Jon" whenever I rant and rave so passionately about video games. The events the game depicts may not exist in reality, but the experience I am having is real. The characters with terminal illnesses, struggling to make amends for their violent and malicious past; the characters who have watched their entire family be slaughtered and attempt to pick up the pieces; the characters who are spurned by their lovers and driven to desperate action; the characters who lose their children and would give anything to find them. These events affect me in a very real way. I get to know these characters, and so I empathize with them. I learn from them, perhaps not practically, but emotionally. I place myself in their shoes and I find out how I'd react to such events, because I am reacting to such events. Yes, it's all on the screen; but it's so affecting and feels so real that I have a taste of what I'd do in such a situation. It's not actually life experience, sure; but it's the closest you can get to it without inventing your own time machine. And if we take it seriously and think critically about the positions such media puts us in, we can learn and grow from it, as human beings, in very real ways. Such experience is invaluable.

Red Dead Redemption 2 affected me so deeply that I yearned for more after it was done. Where else was I to turn but literature? Multiple searches turned me towards two great works of contemporary American literature set in the old west: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy—which I've already read—and Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove. I picked up the latter after some stellar reviews, hoping it would impart on me a similar experience that Red Dead Redemption 2 had.

Lonesome Dove both did, and did not.

My most notable criticism of the novel is that it is one of the slowest starting books I've ever read. It begins on a sleepy ranch in south Texas, with not much going on. It's hot and dusty. The Indians are all but gone, the Mexicans rarely raiding into Texan territory. Augustus McCrae drinks, jokes, and messes about with his pigs. Newt gets nervous. Pea Eye follows orders. Bolivar cooks. The other hands drink, gamble, and whore. Woodrow Call mostly just broods. Each day is relatively the same.

And this goes on for hundreds of pages. No exaggeration.

There were many times through the first half of this novel when I considered setting it down entirely and moving on. How much time does a novel deserve before you give up on it? It certainly fed into my strong desire to be immersed in another wild west setting, but, early on, the story just did not provide anything for my mind to chew on. While I liked the characters—they felt like real people, with real philosophies and intriguing quirks—there just wasn't enough happening to sustain the kind of page count Lonesome Dove features.

But there's a momentous occurrence a bit past the halfway point of the novel, something which glued me to the rest of it. It's an event that's not possible to describe without spoiling it, but suffice it to say that McMurtry shows he's playing for keeps. Such an event created a real fear within me that the characters of the story were in legitimate danger, and that McMurtry might kill any of them with a single swipe of his pen.

Although the story threatened to get too dark for my enjoyment after this event, it never actually took that plunge. From this point onward the interplay between the characters became the focal point of the story for me, partly due to the great danger it was proved that they were all facing. The disparate character threads which had been building for nearly 600 pages began to intersect with one another in interesting ways, and the story's wide cast of characters began to profoundly affect one another. The story peaked for me when an old love of one of the main characters is introduced. She quickly became my favorite character in the entire book, and my eyes were glued to the page whenever she showed up.

The characters were challenged more and more, and the sense of place provided by the novel was watered by these challenges and grew due to them. I was more able to enjoy McMurtry's scene setting and the slower parts of the novel. I was once again there in the wild west; I was crossing the rivers on a swimming horse; I was dying of thirst in the bone-dry plains of Wyoming; I was stuck in a blizzard in Montana and bowled over by the gargantuan, infinite blue of its sky; I struggled to calm my horse with the rest of the cowboys, stunned and awed by the nearby confrontation between a hulking Texas bull and a Wyoming grizzly bear. The characters' struggles became my struggles; I starved with July, broke mustangs with Newt, tracked Indians with Gus, cared for my husband with Clara. There's a corner of my mind carved out in which the experience of reading this book will live until I am no more—it's in the stall adjacent to where the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 lives.

The two are of equal value to me.

In the end, I was able to battle the top-heavy nature of Lonesome Dove's pacing and, eventually, I got the immersive, affecting experience I wanted.

Whether or not one will enjoy this book probably depends on what they're hoping to experience from it. It's overly long in my estimation, but this helps to set up the depth of these characters and leads to a more thrilling and cathartic—though perhaps too abrupt—conclusion. While I'm not sure I agree with the near-flawless adoration this novel receives, it is certainly an experience to behold, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's a fan of westerns or good character writing.

As far as the value of fiction in general, though, the jury's still out. Maybe I am wasting my life with video games and books. Maybe I'll look back on a life spent growing soft and fat while lounging lazily in an enormous reading chair and at a computer desk and feel like I've accomplished nothing of value; seen and felt too little for it all to be worth the trouble.

Or maybe I'll look back on a fantastical life spent only partially in reality, accompanying elderly cowboys on a three-thousand mile cattle drive; battling gargantuan, sentient robots alongside hulking space marines I'd give my life for; managing English households with bold Victorian governesses; tilting at windmills with Spanish knights errant; and tearing through time with a handful of friends to change the fate of civilization. And maybe when I reach my end I'll smile wryly and feel nothing but a deep gratitude to humanity for crafting such wonderful and fulfilling fiction, and I'll think to myself that it was all undeniably worthwhile... And that all the Jakes out there can go fuck themselves.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Further reading on Red Dead Redemption 2 and the unrecognized artistic quality of modern video games, via the New York Times.