However, in the case of Red Dead Redemption, this game does more than circulate genocidal narratives; players are sutured to John Marston, taking up his subjectivity and therefore the ideological stance of the frontier Western

particularly black and Latinx citizens,

As of 2018 the U.S. housing and mortgage industry—the lifeblood of the American Dream—is still recovering from the 2008 collapse. The housing market in several key areas in the United States has not bounced back; in Tampa, Florida, “thousands of homes have been lost to foreclosure in the past decade.”10 The Pew Research Center released a report in 2017 that revealed the American middle class has shrunk over the last two decades “compared with those in many Western European countries.”11 Increasing numbers of Americans, particularly black and Latinx citizens, are finding it harder to participate in the culture of property ownership and accumula-tion that has traditionally defined American success and dominance over other countries.1

From television shows like Fear the Walking Dead (a zombie Western that first aired in 2015) to games like Ubisoft’s Gunslinger (2013), the Western (particularly frontier Westerns) make the struggle of the American middle class not only palatable but an apparent necessity to being a strong American citizen.

Is it any wonder that the Western has seen a resurgence since the economic collapse?

While Silko is referring to Laguna Pueblo stories, there is a lesson here that stories make our worlds plausible, real, and even aspirational.

o literary genres, particularly durable ones, like the Western and hard-boiled noir, have an internal dynamic that is repeated, and through this repetition readers learn the formula of the genre and in turn gain knowledge from the formula that they can apply when needed.

This “law of the law” is certainly true of noir, which is a notoriously broad and loose genre.

o prove my point, I track how the Western and Hollywood noir, particularly the hard-boiled variety, operate in two popular game worlds: Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011).