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Can You Conduct A Census In Red Dead Redemption 2? | Any Austin | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Can You Conduct A Census In Red Dead Redemption 2?
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This content details an ambitious attempt to conduct a demographic census of NPCs in the video game Red Dead Redemption 2's town of Valentine, using observable in-game characteristics to infer employment, income, age, and health, and comparing the findings to historical data from 1907.
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Did you know that 30% of the people in
the town of Valentine in Red Dead
Redemption 2 have at least one tooth
missing? You want to know how I know
that? Because I conducted a census. Sort
of. It turns out that conducting a
census, which is like a giant survey
where you try to figure out who lives in
a town and what their lives are like, is
kind of complicated in a video game
where you've got over a hundred unnamed
NPCs that respawn every morning and
don't tell you anything about who they
are or what they do. In real life, you
literally just go up to people, give
them a sheet with questions, and then
they fill it out using their human
brains. But video game characters don't
have human brains, which means they
definitely can't fill out surveys. So, I
need to figure out a way that we can get
some type of survey information [music]
from these NPCs without using normal
survey tools. For a real census, we
would have lots of hyperspecific
questions like what kind of housing
everyone lives in, how old each member
of the family is, whether they have
internet access, and so on. But in a
video game, a lot of these questions
don't make sense and would be impossible
to answer. So, I decided to focus on the
big broad things you would see on a real
census, but simplified down to what's
actually visible and inferable in a
video game, which means we're really
going to look at five things. Number
one, employment status. We're going to
figure out if each person has a job or
not and sort them into unemployed or
employed. Number two, employment
industry. So, if someone is employed,
what industry are they employed in?
Number three, we'll look at their income
level. So, based on their job as well as
what they're wearing and where they're
located, we're going to make a guess as
to what their income level is. Number
four, age. This one should be pretty
easy, but uh rather than a specific age,
we're just going to sort everyone here
into three categories: children, adults,
and old. Lastly, number five, health. We
are going to try and determine how
healthy all of these people are based
solely on what they're doing and how
they look. We'll get into the details of
the criteria for each category as we go,
but for now, these five questions are
going to serve as our census. As I
alluded to in the intro, Red Dead
Redemption 2 NPCs are kind of divided
into two types. You've got static NPCs
with names like bank teller, bartender,
sheriff, or store owner. And these
people can be found in the same place
day after day. And then you've got
unnamed NPCs called strangers who wander
around and do all sorts of funny random
things. The second group, those
strangers, is obviously going to be
much, much harder to survey. So, let's
start with the first group. The first
guy that I tried to survey upon entering
the town of Valentine was the sheriff
because I figured that he would be
amanable to assisting someone on
official government business with an
important bureaucratic task. Uh, but I
was wrong about that.
>> Okay, move yourself along. No fuss now.
>> Would you relax?
>> Relax. You guys are shooting a
government worker. It's not good. I'm
going to talk to FDR about this or
whoever. Who's president? Woodrow
Wilson. The good news is that we don't
have to get too close to people to
determine what kind of job they have,
especially when it literally says
sheriff in their name. So, this guy
definitely employed. [music]
Most of the other named NPCs are in
hospitality and food service with two
employed bartenders, a hotel front desk
worker, and a lady who will give you a
bath at the hotel if you want. And then
you've got your standard old west
positions like a town doctor, a banker,
a general store owner, and a gun store
owner. Add in a few other weirdos like
this guy who has some kind of movie
theater and you end up with a chart that
makes it look like a fairly diverse
economy with lots of people working many
different jobs like a cute little hippie
commune or something. But this place is
not a hippie commune. It's not what that
sheriff did to me. And in fact, when we
survey all of those unnamed NPCs I told
you about, this graph is going to go
from looking like this to looking like
this with over half of the jobs in the
city taken up by one industry. Any
guesses what that industry might be?
Well, let's wrap up this survey and then
we'll go figure that out right after I
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FB for 1 year. Now, let's talk about how
much money we think all these people in
Valentine are making, shall we? The
average American household income in
1907, which is the year that our survey
takes place, was around $700. And yes,
that is $700 annually, which adjusted
for inflation is equal to about $50,000
of buying power today, which is lower
than the median income in America now,
but uh really not nearly as bad as I
would have expected. Based on that,
let's try to estimate what some of our
named NPCs might be making in a year.
When we look at someone like this small
town doctor, he was probably making
significantly more than the median
income, maybe something like $2,000 per
year, which would put him in the upper
class of people in this area.
Congratulations to you, sir. But the
rest of our workers probably aren't so
lucky. This bank clerk might be doing
slightly better than bad, but he's
likely making around $700 a year at
most, right around the national median.
This hotel owner might be a little
better off since he seems to own this
hotel, but probably no more than about
$800 per year. And then the rest of
these folks, the bartenders, the bath
attendant, the shopkeepers, etc., are
probably all making no more than $600
per year, probably less. Which means our
income spread of the named NPCs looks
like this. Most of them are solidly
working class and then the doctor is the
only person who we [music] might
consider truly upper class. But we do
have a lot more people to survey. Let's
move on to age. And unsurprisingly, all
of the named NPCs are going to fall
squarely in the adult category. It's a
little bit of selection bias because we
are specifically only doing people right
now that have notable roles in the town.
And those people are going to be
definitionally employed and of age. And
then lastly, maybe the most interesting
question we have to cover here is
health. Coming up with a criteria to
judge health based off of nothing but
looking at somebody is of course a
little tricky. So when I first was doing
it, I just started out by kind of vibing
it out, you know. Well, he's a little
red around the nose. His skin's
definitely looks a little worse for
wear. This is so mean. He's he's
leaning. He doesn't have good the small
muscles in his back are not supporting
him. You know, he's obviously tired.
Little little grime under the little
dirt around the hands. So, he's not
washing his hands enough. And for the
most part, that seemed doable,
especially once I got the hang of kind
of what I was looking for. Things like
whether people had clean hands or
redness in the face or how their posture
was. These aren't going to tell us
anything about underlying conditions
they might have. But, and I say this as
someone with bad posture, they do
indicate something about somebody's
overall health, at least
probabilistically. How's his health?
We're going to assume good cuz he's a
doctor. Hands absolutely pristine. Look
at that. His skin's looking pretty
rough. He looks tired as heck. He's
nodding. He agrees actually. However, I
had a revelation upon examining my sixth
NPC, and this this was crazy to me.
Every character in this game, all these
people have unique teeth. Wait, how many
teeth are missing? He's missing one
tooth in the front. [laughter] This is
crazy. He's got some He's got some
plaque build up.
>> In the back. Holy cow. I can't believe
we can tell. This is crazy. What are
these game developers doing? His his
wisdom teeth kind of came in funny back
there. I don't know. Somebody can a
dentist count these teeth and tell me if
he has a normal amount of teeth. I can
see his uvula.
>> I'm still kind of in awe of this because
I inspected lots of NPCs, well over a
hundred by the time this survey is fully
completed. And there were easily more
than 10 unique sets of teeth, if not
more, across these characters, including
different amounts of remaining wisdom
teeth for different people, different
levels of decay or plaque buildup, and
different teeth missing from different
people. It's legitimately insane that
they did this. Like they must have had a
dedicated dental modeling supervisor
working there. Hopefully that wasn't one
of those people they fired the other
week. If it was, you better bring them
back. We need realistic teeth in GTA 6.
Anyway, teeth end up being a great
indicator of overall health. And once I
was able to add that into my formula, it
was surprisingly easy to map it all out.
I ended up considering anyone with no
obvious defects to be in good health.
Two or fewer defects was fine health,
and more than that was considered poor
health. So about half of the named NPCs
that we surveyed are in fine health,
with the other half split just about
evenly between good and poor, which
honestly seems pretty good for 1907. So
with that, we have all of our data from
all of the named NPCs in Valentine. Now,
let's talk everyone else. So like I
said, the problem with everyone else in
Valentine is that they are not
persistent, meaning they don't have
names, which is going to be very
annoying, and you can't talk to them at
all, which is going to be even more
annoying. But they also don't even exist
across multiple days. Look at these
photos I took of these same two
buildings from one day to the next. All
the same slots are filled, but they're
filled by totally different NPCs. So,
how can we possibly survey these
constantly changing people? Well, I
wasn't sure quite yet, but I knew that
the first thing I needed to do was
figure out how many of these NPCs there
are in total roughly at any given time.
I did five separate frantic runs around
the city at peak times of day to try and
count them as quickly and loosely as I
could. And then I took the average of
that number because I figured sometimes
I would miss some people or double count
some people. And I ended up with roughly
100 unnamed NPC slots at any given time
in Valentine. I'm sure this isn't quite
right, but it'll be close enough for our
purposes. So great. Right now we just
have to go do 100 surveys of all these
people and we're done. Easy.
If only it was that simple. The problem
is that even though there are 100 of
these people present at any given time,
the game is randomly filling in these
100 NPC slots from a mysterious pool of
possible NPCs, which is why they change
from day to day. And we don't really
know anything about this mysterious
pool. [music] It could contain hundreds
of possible characters that the game
picks from or just a few dozen. But that
mysterious pool is really what we're
trying to survey. So, can we do that? I
think so. But we can't do it using a
direct survey like we did before. We're
going to have to get more creative. So,
what I decided to do is pretty simple if
you think about it, but it's sort of
genius. I divided the town of Valentine
into a perfect impartial grid and
labeled all of the squares. Then, I
paired all of those grid spaces with
eight different time slots throughout
the day that I felt would represent the
spread of different NPC layouts that the
town might have in a normal 24-hour
period. After that, I used a random
selecting tool to pick out 25
combinations of times and locations. And
then I used those combinations of times
and [music] locations to conduct surveys
of any NPCs within those grid squares at
those times. By spreading the surveys
out like this and taking lots of random
samples, I wasn't counting the same
types of people over and over. I was
getting a real mix of whoever happened
to be in town at that moment. And once
you combine all those tiny snapshots
together, you can actually build a
pretty accurate picture of what
Valentine looks like on a normal day,
even if the NPCs themselves are always
changing or moving around. So, I spent
an entire realife day running back and
forth across the grid in Valentine,
surveying people as quickly and
efficiently as possible within the times
that were selected, gathering all of
that data in a spreadsheet so we could
analyze it later and draw conclusions
about it. Now, um, full disclosure, I
tried to make it sound like I came up
with this survey method myself because I
wanted to build Mystique around my
creative genius, but this is actually a
very wellestablished method of doing
surveys called time location sampling.
It's basically the same methodology that
realorld researchers use when they can't
track every single person in a given
population. They sample times and
locations and then let probability do
the rest of the work. I discovered a lot
of awesome details about Red Dead
Redemption 2 from this portion of the
survey because we had to use a lot more
context clues to determine employment
and income level. So, let me share with
you some of those observations. Now,
first up, check out these pink things
tied around this guy's knees. These are
called knee wraps, and they're often
worn by people who worked in ranching or
hurting to prevent their pants from
riding up and exposing their legs or
knees to cuts and scrapes cuz, you know,
they'd always be walking through stuff
that scrapes them. And it also helps
their pants last longer because the
wrapping would get scraped up when you
kneel down rather than the pants
themselves getting scraped up at the
knee. This one small detail was enough
for me to conclude that this guy was
probably employed likely as a ranch hand
or cattle driver, meaning he likely
makes workingclass levels of money. And
a quick look at his teeth shows us that
he's missing one, but otherwise in fine
health. Another great detail was this
guy standing on the porch of this house.
We assume that he owns this house,
meaning he's fairly well off, and he's
relatively well-dressed with good teeth
and clean hands. But how did he get his
money to buy the house? Well, in his
backyard, we can find two big old sacks
of army payroll. It's probably obvious,
but having giant sacks of cash meant to
pay military servicemen sitting in your
backyard probably means you're up to no
good. Ergo, we determined that this guy
is probably a white collar criminal,
which may be a little naughty of him,
but it does still count as employment.
There are lots of great details in the
characters and environments like this in
Red Dead Redemption 2. But the real
question is whether or not those details
were enough for us to build a full
assessment of the demographics here in
Valentine and whether or not those
demographics are accurate to history.
So, let's take a look at the results,
shall we? Compiling all the results
ended up taking a bit of time because,
as you might have guessed, when we did
our time location sampling, we weren't
actually counting specific people, but
rather the overall proportion of people
in a given group. So, I had to take the
results of that study, apply those
proportions to the unnamed 100 NPCs that
we estimated existed at any given time
from earlier, and then add that number
to our initial count of the named NPCs.
But I got it done. I built my pie
charts, and I officially have some
fascinating results for you about the
way people in Valentine are living.
Starting with age. Okay, this one's not
that interesting, but all the people
here are adults with only a few elderly
people and zero children. Rockstar games
generally don't have children in them
for obvious reasons. So, it's no
surprise that there are none here as
well, but in a real frontier town like
this, you would definitely have children
running around, especially for the named
NPC type people who clearly live here
and work here over the longer term.
Something very strange would have to be
happening here for there not to be any
kids at all. Next up, let's talk
employment. Almost everyone in Valentine
is employed here. 90% of people have
jobs, 5% [music] are unemployed, and 5%
are not applicable, meaning that the
town overall has an unemployment rate of
4.5%. What exactly does an unemployed
person look like in Red Dead 2, you
might ask? Well, here's a guy who spends
the entire day in a bar, not drinking,
and stabbing himself with a knife. So, I
would say that that seems pretty
unemployed, especially if he can't even
afford to buy a drink. Everybody in this
game drinks. Everybody in America drank,
I guess, at that time. Now, a few
interesting aspects of the employment
situation here. First of all, there were
very few not applicable people in our
survey, meaning we didn't really see
many stay-at-home parents, which back
then would usually be a mom. This is
both unrealistic, but also very
different from pretty much every other
unemployment survey we've done in a
video game. The one caveat here is that
the houses themselves generally aren't
enterable. So, we could infer that maybe
each house has at least one person
[music] staying at home taking care of
the non-existent children or whatever,
but we didn't see those people. So they
don't count for the survey.
Additionally, the real life unemployment
rate wasn't really calculated until
after the Great Depression. Meaning a
real life point of comparison here
probably isn't going to be super
accurate. But there is a historian named
Stanley Lur Le Stanley Lurban who
estimated that the annual average
unemployment rate in 1907 was probably
around 1.8% countrywide. It was
obviously a completely different economy
at that time, but this is a lot lower
than we're seeing in Red Dead 2. even if
4.5% isn't super crazy. Next up,
employment industries. In terms of
industries, the final graph looks a lot
different from the initial one. So,
let's do a quick comparison. The graph
when we only included the named NPCs was
dominated by hospitality and retail. But
after adding in the 100 or so unnamed
NPCs, basically every industry pales in
comparison to the number one industry in
Valentine, which is, drum roll please,
agriculture. Over 50% of the town works
in some sort of agriculture or
agriculture adjacent industry, which
makes a lot of sense given that nearly
half of the area of the town is made up
of a huge livestock auction house and
lots [music] of properties also have
their own small livestock farms. The way
we figured this out was twofold.
Firstly, lots of NPCs were just actively
on the farm working. So, that's easy to
deduce. But there were also NPCs we
found around town, especially around
lunchtime, who were very clearly dressed
for ranch work, but just weren't
actively doing it. Their clothes were
dirty, their faces were dirty, they had
pistols and knee wraps on. There weren't
any other good options for what they
might be doing. The other big chunk here
is entertainment, which may look
surprising at first, but I decided to
include sex work as entertainment. And
there's a good uh gaggle of gals who all
work in the saloon at night doing just
that. The only non-sex worker
entertainers are the guy who works at
the movie theater and this piano player
at the bar. All these smaller slices
here are made up of basically everything
else. hospitality, public safety,
construction, business owners. Pretty
much everything you'd expect to be
represented here is represented here.
Which of course begs the question, how
realistic is this makeup of industries
for a frontier town in 1907? Honestly,
based on my research, it's actually
surprisingly close. It wouldn't be at
all unrealistic to have over half the
town working in agriculture in 1907. And
in fact, as of 1910, 35% of the entire
US economy was still agriculture. And
that includes the huge industrial cities
in that average. So over 50% in a more
rural area like this would not be
surprising at all. The only two things
that stand out as potentially odd here
would be the entertainment number and
the construction number. You'd probably
expect entertainment to be a bit lower
if this was real life, even including
sex workers. And construction you would
expect to be a little bit higher. But
aside from that, this is a really solid
set of representative data. Nice job,
Rockstar. The last economic indicator
here is going to be wealth distribution.
And as we can see, the town of Valentine
is dominated by working-class folks at
about 70% with middle-class people
making up 20% and the upper class 10%. [music]
[music]
Tiny little bit over there uh for the
poor people, but it was really just a
couple folks who fit that description.
To be honest, the main thing that
separated the classes in our survey was
just how people were dressed and how
dirty they were, which is very shallow
of me, but I feel like it worked. And if
it's correct, then it shows a town
that's not really in horrible shape in
terms of wealth inequality. Now, in
reality, a frontier town would probably
be a little bit poorer than this with
more working-class people overall, but
it's not super out of the question to
have a a distribution roughly like this,
especially if it was a busy few years
for Valentine and they had to, you know,
raise wages to draw more workers in or
whatever. And then our last survey
question overall, how healthy is
everyone in Valentine? Well, half of our
survey subjects were in fine health
according to our scale. about a quarter
of them are in poor health and the last
quarter are in good health which is
almost exactly the same as it was when
we were just talking about the named
NPCs. It's important to note that with
this particular question we are sort of
normatively loading the word fine to
basically just mean average in this
context. So it's sort of a foregone
conclusion that most people would be
fine and also that fine in the context
of 1907 is probably way way worse than
fine in 2025. But if we want to
determine whether this is uh you know
realistic in terms of how healthy people
were back then there is one way we can
very easily do that and that's going to
be by using their teeth because that's
one thing that we have very solid data
on from all the way back in cowboy
times. So about 30% of the people we
surveyed had one or more teeth
completely missing which seems very
high. That seems pretty bad but it's
actually probably significantly lower
than it would have been in real life in
that era. According to a 1919
congressional report called, this is
really what it was called. I didn't name
it, okay? They were much rudder back
then, defects found in drafted men, 40%
of men who were drafted into the
military age 25 or above were missing at
least one tooth. And most scholars of
the period agree that missing multiple
teeth by the age of 40 would have been
extremely common. So, if anything, this
is actually unrealistic because people
have too many teeth in Red Dead
Redemption 2. Surprisingly, this means
that even down to the hypersp specific
details that you would dig up in
something like a census, Red Dead
Redemption 2 is really a pretty amazing
representation of a slice of American
history. Obviously, it's video gameified
in a lot of ways, but not as much as you
might guess in others. And in terms of
employment industries, proportions of
workers in certain fields, and overall
wealth distribution, it's probably about
as good as you could hope for and a
whole lot better than you would expect
from a video game normally. The only two
categories in which things got a little
unrealistic are when it comes to age and
health. And in fact, those are really
the only two big things that would need
to be corrected in order for this to be
like a really very accurate
representation of a frontier town on a
census [music] form. You have to put
kids in the town. Towns have kids.
People who live places have families.
It's just like part of what a lot of
people want to do. So they need to they
would need to add kids. And then the
other really big thing that I think they
should fix if they ever do a Red Dead
Redemption 3, our teeth. These things
were just in so much worse shape than
Red Dead Redemption 2 makes it seem like
they were. This cannot be overstated.
They need to go in there and just really
[ __ ] up people's teeth. But if they do
that, thumbs up for realism. I'm Annie
Austin. Thanks for watching. If [music]
you don't like the way you write my songs
songs [music]
[music]
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