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Human beings need frontiers. Be they physical, technological, intellectual, or ideological, frontiers help life retain its luster and spark, and inspire us to seek out the best in ourselves and in the world.  They enrich life with a sense of grandeur, adventure, and discovery. There is an element of the human psyche that needs this; we need to look out at a landscape, marvel at it, and see a bit of ourselves, or the person we wish to be, reflected in it. Frontiers are a pivotal cornerstone of life: they raise our spirits and our intellectuality, and provide a sense of adventure in today’s oft mundane first-world life cycle of work, eat, bills, sleep, repeat. Never are frontiers needed more than when our life is shaken to the core, and we feel our world shrink around us.

Several years ago, a relationship I was in for almost 5 years came to an unforseen end. Many people use the analogy of being punched in the gut to explain the feeling of such a suprise, but I find this allusion to be inaccurate. In my experience, it feels more like your world is blown apart but somehow leaves you intact in the middle of a vast, vacumous space.  It is both haunting and liberating, terrifying and silent as a cemetery. It was the beginning of Winter, and having felt like I just lost my best friend, the horizon looked bleak, dark, and cold. Thankfully, I have amazing family and friends in my life, and one of them gave me some particularly poignant advice. The Creative Director of the advertising agency I worked at and I had become close friends, and when I relayed what had happened to him, he told me “Now is the time to get addicted to something that you cannot sip, snort, or shoot. Find something positive to lose yourself in.”

Several days prior to my relationship ending, I had received Red Dead Redemption as a Christmas present from my family. Having heard great things about it, and knowing that it included a vast world to explore, I decided this would be my horizon for the time being while I regained my footing amidst a tumultuous emotional state. As I explored the bucolic fields around Hennigan’s Stead, the snow-covered forests of Tall Trees, and the vast deserts across the San Luis river, I began developing emotional reactions and associations with the environments I was discovering. The act of playing a video game was metamorphisizing into a journey through the psychology of how one deals with grief, loss, acceptance, and finally, begin to move forward.

A particularly poignant aspect of this was that the world of Red Dead Redemption is enriched with many wide-open, seemingly-undisturbed natural landscapes. My ex lived in the country, and that association hit me immediately upon traversing this digital world. I associated nature with her - hiking through the country side, staring up at the stars, and peaceful nights beside a fire. The haunting guitar strums and whistles while riding through Tall Trees felt like biting winter winds, forcing me to confront my own loneliness and feelings of emotional isolation and abandonment. Moving a videogame character from point A to point B became melancholic, introspective horseback rides, staring up at the night sky and trying to understand why bad things happen to good people in a seemingly unjust world. The importance of this game helping me to confront these emotions cannot be overstated, especially by allowing me to feel as though I was not facing them alone, because another conflicted soul named John Marston was along for the ride.

I immediately felt a sense of emotional kinship with Marston: a good man, struggling with maintaining an unwavering morality in an immoral world. Marston simply wanted to pick up the pieces of his life, and return home, and anyone who has ever dealt with the hardship can attest to how far from home it makes you feel.  Marston and I shared that sense of being haunted by your past, wondering how your own actions led to the state of your life, and occassionally, knowing exactly what you did to put yourself there. Red Dead Redemption, along with Silent Hill 2 in my opinion, is one of this medium’s finest examples of the realization of internal conflict within a complimentary physical space. As I rode from province to province, I related the amorality of the West to the amorality I felt confronted with in our world. While reflecting on my situation at the time, I learned two imporant lessons about the world and life while playing through RDR. The first of these being: having strength of character is maintaining dignity, steadfastness, and hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable hardship. The second, and possibly more important lesson, is that we can often decipher why our lives are suddenly changed by certain external factors, and sometimes we cannot. The natural world can be cruel, but sometimes that cruelty isn’t inherently malicious; sometimes, the bear just has to feed.

What I did not expect was how I, or John, would react when coming into contact with a soul in need, such as an NPC stranded in the desert, or running for their life while being chased by a mountain cat. Experiencing resounding hardship in life can jade you, make you self-centered, and influence you to push others away for fear of further pain. However, when I came across those struggling amidst this harsh, western landscape, I was shocked to discover that I sincerely wanted to help them. Even though I was enduring an overwhelming emotional pain, and that such an important part of my life fell apart, this experience hadn’t changed the person I was. It gave me hope that I could find a way home, and it reinforced the fact others are struggling with their own hardship, and the better angels of our nature allow us to see through our own pain and help to ease someone else’s plight. It was a light in the dark, and even the tiniest of lights can help illuminate the beginnings of a path to home.

As I played through the main quest and side-stories of RDR, the parallels between Marston’s positive effect on the world around him and my getting to a better mental, physical, and emotional state materialized. Marston didn’t always know if what he was doing was right, and I felt uncertain about my personal baby steps towards recovery coming to fruition, but the philosophy of doing “the best you can” under given circumstances seemed beneficial to both myself and to the provinces of New Austin, West Elizabeth, and Nuevo Paraiso. With demons from his past finally vanquished, it seemed Marston had finally made his way home to his family. However, his story was not over and neither was mine. It seemed that life and the world of Red Dead Redemption had one more lesson to teach, and that lesson was Kharma.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not played through Red Dead Redemption, and do not wish to know its ending, please skip ahead to final paragraph.

Death can come in many forms, yet a sense of being robbed, of being deprived of time spent in happiness, is always a constant in its wake. When John Marston was callously gunned down by agents, shortly after finally making his way home to his family and to happiness, I saw my own feelings once again manifested in Red Dead’s narrative. I deeply empathized with Marston, for the fact that I was experiencing the feelings of knowing the happiness found in a place in life where you can set your roots and grow, and then having that ripped away from you. John had fought so long, and so hard to get home, only to have come to the realization in his final moments that his dream of a life of happiness with his family would remain just that, only a dream. This forced to finally accept that the life I had known was gone, never to return, and yet the world still moves so I must move with it.

When I took control of Jake I knew exactly what I had to do - to settle a debt, and not all debts are comprised of the repayment of an act of charity. When I dealt justice to Edgar Ross, it reaffirmed that Kharma does exist in the world; that the deeds we do can indeed come back to either haunt us, or as I would come to learn a short time later, bless us in life. By the time I had finished Red Dead Redemption I was feeling hopeful again for the first time in months, and life would just so have it that in my journies I would come across another lost soul in my own life. An old acquintance from college contacted me and we met up for coffee. When I saw her, I could see a pain behind her massive, crystal blue eyes, along with a resounding strength. I knew in that instant I just wanted to take care of her; to let her know she could battle away her demons and find happiness again. Our friendship grew as Winter gave way to Spring, and blossomed into a romantic relationship.  We are together to this day, and she has tought me lessons about life and love I could have never hoped to learn. She is my best friend, and proof that life can lead you to true happiness if only you have the conviction to ride through the dark night to get there.

The best advice now that I can possibly give to those enduring hardship is this: chase the horizon. Know that there is more to life and to the world than your own strife, and that a frontier calls to you. People do not undertake journies so far from home when they are feeling content and comfortable, they pursue them when they feel they have nothing to leave behind. There is an overwhelming amount of beauty and wonder in the world waiting to be discovered if you’ll only seek it out. If you’re feeling hurt, defeated, and lost, simply pack a bag, look to the horizon, and resolve to live. The question of “Are video games art?” is a topic for another blog, but what I do know is this: that one of the most noble things art can do is to provide hope to those in need of it, and Video Games can do this as decisively as any other medium and as this blog can attest, even moreso.

So here we stand, both the community and the creators of PixlBit, on the dawn of a new day. It's a time when we can all dream of what this site can become, and watch as those ideas come to life. To the staff at PixlBit - Thank you for welcoming us all with open arms, and we all look to this new horizon with enthusiam and a sense of wonder.