How a gang of Grannies broke the boundaries of Red Dead Online

The Grannies follows a group of artistic game developers (Andrew Brophy, Marigold Bartlett, Ian MacLarty, Kalonica Quigley and friends) as they find a way to go beyond the map while playing Red Dead Redemption 2 together. Styled as a kind of digital travelogue, the work uses screen-captured footage the artists took as they played, following their explorations of the unpredictable, procedurally generated landscapes outside the game world.
By exiting the bloodthirsty world of the Wild West frontier, these artists found an abstract, seemingly endless digital space where the building blocks of the game were laid bare. Through their eyes, what might be seen as a glitch or a bug to another player piques curiosity about the materiality of the game’s environmental design. Textures collide at strange angles, revealing layers that are meant to be obscured. A strange grey cube hangs on the sky, monumental in its lack of finish and finesse compared to the landscape around it.
The unexpected terrain and landmarks The Grannies discovered out of bounds don’t serve a story or game function. They only matter because they provoked curiosity and emotion in the people who found them - not because they help direct players towards a goal.
These artists’ explorations are not just a way to escape the game’s map, but to escape the game’s expectations of how a player should act, and its methods of anticipating their actions.
Marie Foulston is a leading curator and creative director of exhibitions, installations and experiences that specialise in videogames, play and digital culture. Previously she was Curator of Videogames at the V&A where she lead the curation of the headline exhibition Videogames, was guest director of experimental games festival ‘Now Play This’ at Somerset House and co-founded the UK alternative videogame collective the Wild Rumpus. Across her career she has worked alongside a host of international organisations and leading cultural institutions including the Smithsonian, the Game Developers Conference, London Film Festival, Penguin Random House, the Design Museum, Channel 4, ACMI, the Art Gallery of Ontario and MoPOP.
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