The hamster wheel turns

designislaw:

I have finally completed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in it’s entirety, and finally feel qualified to comment on it. It is a triumph for the medium, and manages to be the most profound game about war to be conceived, in a way that is uniquely Polish - and I feel the need to address some rather incompetently hashed together arguments all around, some of which overlooking Poland’s rather unique history, and others missing the forest for the trees. I feel it time to use our words, and apply a little nuance to find a core intellectual truth to all this.

Poland, home of the Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, as we know it now has only been an independent country since 1989. In fact, it’s been a land that has had countless occupiers over the course of hundreds of years, but in the 20th Century alone, we must remember it was the incursion by the Nazis themselves that initiated the Second World War, the gravest conflict of our times, and Poland was a host to numerous camps, not just concentration - but outright death camps, such as the infamous Auschwitz itself. Now, to the east of Poland lies the great Soviet Union, the Stalin led Communist beast that Hitler tried to take on and nearly succeeded - and then the Red Army had to push the Third Reich all the way back, to Berlin - and mind you, Poland itself was again caught in the middle.

Dan Carlin of Hardcore History details in his podcast series “Ghosts of the Ostfront,” and I would beg you to consider giving it a listenin its entirety, because only then will you be able to properly comprehend the raw brutality that took place, the scars laid deep into the very earth many armies have marched upon through the years, the blood that has made the grass grow season after season. We are talking mass rape, executions, and all sorts of horrors beyond typical human comprehension. Some would say this was the only way to crush the Nazi menace, and I am not here to entertain those arguments one way or another. I simply am here to point out this key point in history.

Of course, World War 2 ended, and who had their grubby paws all over Poland? Oh, right. Joseph Stalin, a man so cruel and brutal to have orchestrated the Holodomor genocide not too soon after. While there are those unironic Communists in the circles of games discourse who may try to handwave these atrocities away, or even those who would go so far to deny they even occurred and that Joseph Stalin was Actually Good, let us not waste our time with those who have the inability to comprehend what is ever so easily accomplished under a totalitarian regime, and dig into the real history.

You see, the Soviet Union sought to absolve its constituents of their personal identity, their history, their culture. While they didn’t go outright and burn books much like their Nazi competitors, they had other methods. I quote Tatiana Nikolova-Houston, Department of Classics, The University of Texas at Austin in her paper, “Increasing the Visibility of Slavic Medieval Manuscripts.”

“Slavic medieval manuscripts, appearing at first glance to be poor orphans, have revealed themselves to be giants of human dignity. They represent the survival through unimaginable sufferings of marginalized people during truly evil times.”

The entire paper is a fascinating read, even if you have no interest in preserving religious texts - but the key takeaway is that, “From 1944 to 1990, Soviet governments restricted study of manuscripts in an effort to rewrite history,” in locking up these historical documents of culture and myth under poor conditions in the hope that they would be lost away to history.

That is what the article Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency fame shared so carelessly dared to claim - “Slavic mythology isn’t really a thing…lost to history,” as if a certain totalitarian regime didn’t go out of their fucking way to try and make this so. As if a certain Communist machine didn’t try to destroy this very history to assimilate them under the banner of the simple “worker.” So many people that I respected and looked up to in the circles of games writing shared that piece without bothering to criticize it, without bothering to verify its claims or even consider the tumultuous history of the Slavic people, that I am quite frankly ashamed. I thought we treated history with better care than this.

I guess we all forgot that the omission of truth is still a lie, to paraphrase an old Starfleet captain - provided that it fortified our personal views with regards to the intersection of social justice rhetoric and games criticism. Much of the discourse around Witcher 3 centered around its lack of PoC representation, and I found it astounding how so many felt the need to limit games as a medium instead of engage with the material, its creators, and the culture in earnest. Some were quick to decry it as racist, and its creators racist.

Europe is not, unfortunately as it would make a lot of things simpler, a monolith. Poland itself has a long and storied history dating back centuries of outside oppression, and there is still bigotry against Slavic immigrants across Europe to this day (check out the French & Netherlands sections) - arguments very similar to what we Americans hear about Mexicans from a certain Presidential candidate - they steal, they’re thugs, rapists, etc.

Beyond that, if we as socially justice minded people are going to make the argument that the scars of slavery still hold an effect on modern day society, which we would undeniably be correct to, we cannot simply turn around and give the finger to the Polish, who in The Witcher 3 have brilliantly tied together elements of their own culture and myth with more familiar elements of Western fantasy, into a setting largely analogous to the Northern Crusades of many hundreds of years ago - the Nilfgaardian Empire an allegory to the Christian kings that sought to bring the last of the Pagans under their sphere of influence.

It is this very setting, this very rendition that CD Projekt RED have managed to make a game that conveys the true realities of war - in a way that so many dedicated titles like This War of Mine, Spec Ops: The Line, etc. have utterly failed to do so. The orphans in the woods stealing chickens, the writer romanticizing the battles taking place between raping and pillaging of the land and its people, the battalion captain trying to feed his soldiers off the backs of the occupied villagers. The fresh battlefields full of bodies. In the wars of men there are no heroes, no honorable souls as we are quick to learn. There is no “gotcha!” heel turn twist we’ve seen many times before, there isn’t a singular moment, but an onslaught of witnessing the brutality that the common people caught up in the conflict of the powerful. It is, quite frankly, exhausting - and yet, compelling.

There is a certain bittersweet romance to the fantasy; that the crimes and misdeeds of the people are what brings the demons and the monsters out to play - a miscarriage becomes a blotching that must be put to rest, a curse must be resolved by settling a dispute, two serfs pray and leave donations to an underground troll taking advantage of their plight, wraiths haunt the training ground of a boy who was to become a monster hunter until he is properly laid to rest, so on and so forth. You sense a certain desire for this to be a reality, a sort of “just world” that many people believe to be how the world works when this couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

This is truly the best element of Wild Hunt - while the main quest line is competent and well presented, the sublime experience is found in travelling from town to town on horseback, resolving the monster problems, curses, and disputes of the common folk forced to summon a Witcher. You meet so many different people with so many different personalities and stories simply looking for help that its hard not to empathize with them, and sometimes even with the monsters they’ve hired you to slaughter. A mediator of the paranormal, if you will, and how you’re forced to decide how to handle these issues without knowing the true consequences of what might happen is an exhausting ordeal as you shoulder this responsibility time and time again.

There was a recent piece about the raw humanity of The Witcher, which I mostly agreed with until a line shaming it for going into the realm of the occasionally grotesque, which I take strong issue with. Much too often does our entertainment sanitize brutality, or worse yet take pleasure in it, much like a certain HBO fantasy melodrama that lost its teeth long ago. Wild Hunt drifts into this territory of the unsanitary, the unsettling not for pleasure, but because its necessary - its real, in a way that grounds it in a reality that is rather unique to the Slavic experience.

Another piece (was on Medium, I forget the name) attempted to deal with the placement of Geralt as a “neutral” character, in an attempt to criticize the way it handled racial issues, and I find the need to furrow my brow - there is a brilliant encounter rather early on that justifies this approach, a Nilfgaardian captain who has recently taken a town, and is appropriating supplies from its civilian populace. He tries to play the good guy to a local farmer, trying to reason with him about how much grain he needs to feed his troops - and its a rather human moment in how perceptions can, and are consistently challenged through the hundred plus hours of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Geralt is portrayed as neutral so the player may inject their own biases and perceptions into him, as a meld between the player and player character - a rather effective approach I wish more games would attempt.

To touch on the portrayal of elves and dwarves as racial allegories, they do not exist as a stand-in for people of color, but instead marginalized identities of Polish history - the Roma, for example, are quite a heavy influence on the Elvish you encounter time and time again. While the socially justice minded games critics may throw their hands in the air and decry any arguments about “historical accuracy,” and play slaphands with incoherent gamer gators who lack the intellectual fortitude to commit to making coherent arguments as most of these interactions take place on a corporate controlled discourse platform with gamified mechanics that affect the psychology of how its users interact with it and one another, I refuse to fall for such shallow ultimatums that limit what games are capable of.

The fact of the matter is, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt touches on the matters of war and its human cost, of oppression and brutality, of the inhumanity of man in a way that no game has come even close to. There is an argument to be made that the culture and history of the land where it comes from, and how they bleed into the seams of the game is something that could only come from Poland. To deride it as just another Tolkien knockoff RPG is to sell the potential of games and what can be done with them short, and I’m ashamed to see games sold so short. Witcher is a uniquely Polish cultural export that has a raw humanity in it we’ve never really seen in games - and to be frank, comparing it to Tolkien is more of a compliment than its critics really seem to understand - the battlefields of places like Verdun during the first World War were a direct inspiration for the land of Mordor, and that War overall was a colossal influence on what made Tolkien’s work so timeless and powerful, his own self-admitted flaws with handling race aside.

Racial representation in games is still a paramount issue that should not be disregarded, nor ignored - but reducing the medium to the likes of Dragon Age: Inquisition, a wholly unoriginal universe of MMO corridors with a comically ineffective villain and his green horizontal version of the red vertical portals from Oblivion being effortlessly defeated time and time again by a blank slate protagonist and his gang of merry Whedon knockoffs is far from a real solution. The truth is that there is people of color in the universe of The Witcher, down south in a land called Zerrikania - a land that is constantly referenced to in numerous forms, from loot to flavor text to dialogue, and they share a relationship rather similar to Ancient Rome and the China of that day. Of course, with a massive civil war going on as well as all sorts of bigotries, those people are largely avoiding the area. Y’know, since there’s an attempt to ground the mechanics of The Witcher’s universe in ties to actual human behavior. Criticize it if you must, but you can’t fault them for trying. 

We need more games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, from more parts of the world, from those underrepresented places with such rich histories, like West Africa, the Middle East, South America, so on and so on, that manage to export their culture in a format that communicates a raw, uniquely human experience and perception that couldn’t come from anywhere else. Cultural exports packaged in this format are a fantastic way to share culture, similar to how Lucha Underground brought the thrill of Mexican professional wrestling to the States in a format that revolutionized how professional wrestling can be portrayed, including an actual dragon and ancient Aztec medallions that grant immortality. 

Yes, Poland is a 95+ percent white land with an extremely white history - but they are Slavic, a unique identity to Europe that we Americans know nothing to little about clearly, and to attempt to criticize how they deal with racial issues and portrayals in their cultural exports is a unique sense of liberal imperialism I think we fail to properly comprehend. It is the power of Whiteness in America, to wash and wipe away all the intricacies of identity and wash them under one banner, much like the Soviets attempted to destroy the Polish identity and history in order to absorb them under the Hammer and Sickle. If we are to deny these unholy assimilations their power over humanity, we must refuse their temptations, even when they can forward our ideological goals.

As far as accusations of CD Projekt Red’s biases or perceived racism is concerned, let us not forget this entire discourse started with a piece on Polygon.com, which claimed that Witcher 3 has a race problem because it lacks black people - although if you check Polygon’s staff they have yet to hire a single black person. So why do they feel entitled to profit from the pageviews of a piece commentating on black representation in games when they can’t even be bothered to hire an actual black person? (Also note, the writer of this piece for Polygon immediately blocked anyone on Twitter who dared bring it up, even if the critic in question was an actual black person.)

Mind you, CD Projekt Red actually did, the creator of the Cyberpunk tabletop game, as part of the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 RPG. There’s a very fantastic video detailing a black creative’s vision of a cyberpunk dystopia Los Angeles as part of the pre-release marketing which I would highly recommend. To think that they would simply whitewash a 2077 Los Angeles so carelessly when so much nuance and effort was put into communicating so many uniquely Polish (I’m not even going to entertain the comments arguing the lack of “purity” - a term I hope to never see again in cultural criticism) elements of Geralt’s universe is foolhardy, frankly.

I have previously commented on this blog my frustrations with the diluting of discourse on gamified discourse platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter, and its negative effects on social justice minded criticisms has yet to be properly engaged with. Yet I watch as we have become so quick to abandon our intellectual rigor, to forget even recent history, and spread outright misinformation for the sake of being right, instead of doing right. I refuse to stand for this, not here, not anywhere.

I wish we had more games that had the gravitas to engage with the realities of war like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and that we had the critics to properly engage with and unpack these human ideals, communications, perceptions, cultures, and maybe even celebrate a little, because The Witcher 3 is a massive step forward in turning games into a global medium for sharing our unique histories in a palatable format.

I shared e-mails with Tatiana Nkolova-Houston, and I feel the need to pull thise quote:

As a librarian, I have experienced lack of interest in Slavic literature and folklore, academic departments folding, and library collections of Slavic books, very very small. That’s one of the reasons why Slavic mythology is not popular here in the US. The language barrier prevents Slavic scholars to popularize their research on Slavic mythology, for example, and other subjects too. Nobody has prevented them for doing research and publishing in any of the countries of the former Soviet-bloc, but they are published in their local language.

Hopefully with Wild Hunt there might be a few who take up a renewed interest, and this field might have some new life breathed into it, instead of some snark asshole on Twitter lamenting British accents in voice acting to get a bunch of easy retweets. Intersectionality isn’t some bullshit ruleset for a bad RPG to decide who is the most bad and who can do and say what, but a tool to understand how various structural oppressions interlock with one another so we can better practice empathy, and discuss our criticisms on a stronger intellectual standpoint. I hate to watch us as a critical community fall for the seductions of the former’s simplicity.

If you take away anything from this piece, I beg of you that it be this simple fact - the realities of the world, much like many of the decisions you and Geralt might face going up against the Wild Hunt, are complicated, with many intricacies and possible perspectives to take on them. Patience, intellectual rigor, and taking the time to actually have some nuance to our opinions instead of rallying behind simple banners of moralized pseudo-intellectual supremacy will be what saves us from ourselves.

Design is Law is an independently run joint hosted on a bad website. If you enjoy my writing, please consider throwing a few bucks in the tip jar towards my Metal Gear fund. Thanks!

nickholmes:

source (thanks @lauratiz)

Reminds my of the time I went to a convention in Antwerp. In hindsight it was funny, but I’m pretty sure at the time my face was transfixed into a permanent state of horror.