The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)
Impartiality Is A Political Stance
Content warning: given this is a discussion of a game that has violence (against women in particular) woven into the fabric of the narrative, this post will talk about that element in some detail, including graphic descriptions of scenes that some readers might find upsetting. Skip this if you're likely to be triggered by this kind of content.
I loved The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a constant disappointment. The world in The Witcher 3 is horrible. The world in The Witcher 3 is stunningly beautiful. The women in The Witcher 3 are complex, and fascinating, and have their own motivations and dreams. The women in The Witcher 3 are really uncomfortably-written.
I still have no idea how to grapple with this game, all eighty-five hours that I've played of it (and the forty or so that I'll doubtless play in the coming months). There are already some really good pieces about it - Austin Walker's discussion of race in the game is great, and Arthur Gies's review for Polygon, while including a review score (and review scores are always nonsense), is nicely balanced and doesn't let the narrative get off scot-free.
One of the strangest things about The Witcher 3 is the oft-repeated maxim that Geralt, the protagonist, has a duty not to mess in the affairs of others - he's impartial, taking contract work for pay and only ever slaying non-sentient monsters or those who pose an active threat. Characters frequently poke fun at this stance throughout the game, given how infrequently Geralt actually sticks to it, and the more I think about it, the more I think that's appropriate. Because in The Witcher 3, there's no way to be impartial without tacitly sanctioning all manner of horrors. Simply by being an extremely powerful mutant in a world full of injustice, inaction becomes a decision of its own. In my playthrough, I very rarely refused to act, even as I was offered the opportunity to step back and let things unfold time and time again.
Before I really sank into the politics and goings-on of the world of The Witcher 3, I was struck by how beautiful it is - visually, I mean. Yes, after a while, you start to recognize ambient lines of dialogue being repeated over and over again, but each vista and blasted heath is beautiful. Sunsets are breathtaking. The environment feels appropriately hostile in a way that Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur never quite managed (or, to be fair, attempted) - often, I'd find myself killed by monsters I wasn't strong enough to face, prompting me to reload to an earlier spot. It's not just monsters, though - areas are properly overgrown, and the weather is brutal, with harsh flurries of snow and heavy thunderstorms frequently descending on the environment. I kept turning to Arden in the opening hours and pointing at my monitor, open-mouthed, at each impossibly-beautiful backdrop. Yes, I'd only just upgraded my PC, but there's an attention to environmental detail in The Witcher 3 that deserves real appreciation.
Quest design, too, is a high water-mark for RPGs, with even basic fetch quests turning into multi-part adventures that keep you guessing as to their true nature. One highlight saw me out to slay some fairly rudimentary monsters, only to find that the whole thing was a trap by four sentient monsters convinced that, as a witcher, I was responsible for the countless deaths of their kin. It's a quest you can only wriggle out of if you've previously been decent to other monsters (which include trolls, werewolves, succubi and godlings, among others). To get to that point, I had to decipher some childlike drawings, find the entrance to a hidden cave, and wait until midnight at a designated spot to catch the monsters plotting their next move. All of this stemmed from taking on a job posted on a notice board in the backwoods of nowhere, and it was a quest that was symptomatic of the game's larger attitude to quests, rather than a rare exception. Every non-essential quest has something interesting going for it.
One point where I disagree with Arthur Gies's review is that the women in The Witcher 3 largely exist to be compelling but ultimately doomed characters, but I'm fully aware that part of that might be my playstyle - in hindsight, there were plenty of instances where I could have sent women to their certain deaths through action or inaction (I just didn't take them because I'm a good person).
I still have no idea where I fall on the issue of women in this game. I think the little that I've concluded amounts to this: Geralt really likes women, and a version of him (the one I played) will do anything to alternately empower and protect them. He'll often surrender the stage to them (indeed, the game frequently jumps to his daughter's perspective, allowing you to play in her shoes). But the world in which those women exist absolutely hates them. The world Geralt traverses is one at war, and there are frequent casual references to rape and a few extremely graphic scenes where women are tortured and/or sexually assaulted. There's one scene in particular that I'm aware of where, if you go for the stealthy route, the female lead of The Witcher 2 and your possible love interest in this game has her fingernails ripped out as you attempt to glean information from her captor. I knew about this scene before I got within sight of it, and naturally opted to kill every man in sight instead. The game affords you that opportunity, at least. But it's always an opportunity, not a given. The men in this game see the women as resources to be expended, and bodies to violate. Cruel temptresses, at best.
Here's what I mean about impartiality being a political stance - often, the quickest way to get ahead in this game is by tacitly allowing the suffering of women (or mages, or non-humans) to continue unabated. The game lets you do that. There's a scene where a man who openly confesses to beating his wife regularly is given the chance to have a heartfelt speech about how the drink made him did it, and there's a version of Geralt who can nod and sympathize. There's a version of Geralt who hears a woman screaming as a soldier assaults her within her home, and then says it's none of his business and walks away. There's a version of Geralt who can hear the sound of the love of his life being tortured, and do absolutely nothing about it. It's not the Geralt I played, but it's a possible Geralt, and one that some people have doubtless played. And I don't know how I feel about that.
The reason I don't know how I feel, rather than being outraged by it, is that I think there's a place for deeply unsympathetic, even outright sexist protagonists. I don't think a character being a bad person - even one the player is controlling - should rule out their existence in the first place. This isn't an issue of wanting to censor stuff like this. In fact, there's a version of The Witcher 3 I'd have loved to see that outright relies on its hallmarks of graphic content, but executed in a smarter way. And maybe that's it - there are parts of The Witcher 3 that are just not very smart. Violence against women is an unfortunately effective but endlessly overdone way to shock players, and The Witcher 3 frequently uses it. Even when Geralt is being particularly chivalrous, there's something uncomfortable about the whole thing - chivalry, after all, is just a strangely pleasant byproduct of the same sexist setup.
The difficulty is in trying to account for this important element while still extolling the virtues of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as a video game. Because I loved it - I really, really loved it. Put it like this - let's say, for argument's sake, that unnecessarily lazy writing featuring violence against women accounted for 8% of this game, and that I played 100 hours. That means that I had to deal with shitty writing for eight hours in total, which is longer than a lot of independent games with far better writing. Maybe I encountered that in specific quests, and maybe that time also includes the sum total of all the uncomfortably-sexist ambient dialogue that's peppered throughout the game. But I also played a far better game for 92 hours, and I can't forget that. There are thrilling horse races, and impossible monsters, and caves to explore, and political disputes to settle, and intrigue, and daring heists, and in the end the world is saved by a young woman. I can't just put this aside. I have to reconcile the two.
Time is only one factor. As someone who personally knows a fair number of survivors of sexual assault, and who tries to stay wired in to how sexism manifests in the world, that 8% probably actually accounted for about 20% of my overall impression, because I'm a lot less inclined to give it a pass. For others - maybe including those survivors, though I wouldn't presume to judge - that might go up to a level where the game isn't worth playing. For others, it likely gets ignored, because (newsflash) a lot of people are sexist and are kind of the reason that narratives of violence against women are so openly encouraged in multi-million-dollar franchises. There is an element of subjectivity to all of this. I think there are more concrete points to be made - that 8% is still there, regardless of its personal significance, and deserves as much of a close eye as the rest - but even after you critically analyze the work to death, there are still going to be different gut feelings that are a lot harder to override.
Now that I've finished The Witcher 3's main story, I'll likely go back soon and slay some monsters here and there, and get caught in local disputes and intrigues, unravelling mysteries and doing odd jobs that say nothing grand or universal about the world of the game, but instead delve into minor lore and history - things that the game really excels in. Even after so many moments of ugliness, I'm looking forward to it. When you have a game as big as this, it's impossible to isolate into one continuous experience. Instead, you have hundreds of vignettes that defy easy collection into one big impression. The world where I was riding on galloping horseback through snow-covered mountains, hunting for a griffin, seems so far removed from the one where I found and killed a witch hunter torturing a nude woman with a poker in a city brothel, but it's still - inexplicably - the same game. I'm excited to discover more of the former, and crossing my fingers in the hope that incidents like the latter are kept out of the way. We'll see. It's a risk that, for now, I'm willing - and, luckily, able - to take.
