This month is Romance Month! All of our articles in April deal with romance or relationships (or both!) in games.
In many respects, The Witcher is an excellent game. I got hooked on the story almost as soon as I started playing, and I found the combat system tactical and challenging, especially on Hard difficulty. But I wasn’t far into the story when it became clear that The Witcher was going to be a guilty pleasure. This realization came when I had my first romantic encounter.
Now I’m not opposed to the inclusion of romance and sex. On the contrary: as one of the most important aspects of human life, I think romance is actually under-represented in games (Rob Gallagher’s article unfortunately behind a paywall). As such, the first time a romance option came up, I welcomed the more adult content. However, examining the implementation of sex in The Witcher reveals that it is anything but “adult.”
The first romance scene occurs between the protagonist, the titular witcher Geralt of Rivia, and a sorceress named Triss Merigold. When Triss is injured in combat with a mage, Geralt must find certain herbs to make a concoction to heal her. Upon doing so, and after a short rest, Triss is feeling well enough to want to get frisky with Geralt. Pursue the correct dialogue choices, and the two of them get intimate, safely away from the camera. And you get a card, with a half-naked Triss on display! This scene is obviously problematic, but it is also one of the most disappointing in the game because Triss is actually quite a strong female character. She is a very powerful sorceress, and she’s also an openly sexual woman. Many of the NPCs even comment disparagingly on her revealing attire, calling her a “slut,” while others claim that she is “not a real woman” because she is unable to have children. Triss brushes these criticisms aside, unwilling to let others determine for her what it means to be a woman. And while her character design is certainly buxom, we shouldn’t take this as something that disempowers her, lest we parrot the NPCs in trying to say what a woman should look like. Given her characterization, Triss is not the damsel in distress which we see so often in videogames. That’s what makes the romance scene so disappointing: in order to set the scene, the writers decided to strip her of all her power, and make her the damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued. Far from the powerful woman she seemed, Triss is shown as no match for her male adversary, and must be rescued and taken care of by men. But after the sex scene, she goes back to being a hardcore sorceress, refusing to live up to the ideals of others. It seems that she was temporarily disempowered just so she could be, for a brief time, that ideal woman in need of saving, so that she could be seduced by our strong male protagonist.
If this were the only problem with The Witcher’s depiction of romance, I might be inclined to overlook it, since there are many examples of negative representations of women in games. But The Witcher is so adamantly sexual that its sexism doesn’t stop with Triss. You see, Geralt isn’t a one woman type of guy. Over the course of the game, he can seduce over twenty female NPCs, some of whom he barely talks to, and most of whom he never encounters again. Many of them follow the damsel in distress pattern. For example, the second woman Geralt can seduce, Vesna Hood, must first be rescued from rapists, and then plied with wine. Others must be won over by purchasing the correct type of flowers or jewelry. Then there are the prostitutes, who can simply be purchased. In the game, then, not only is Geralt a womanizer, but the women he seduces are either disempowered victims, or goods to be bought or exchanged for. In either case, women are passive objects in contrast to the active male protagonist. And while Triss at times breaks this mold of passive femininity, it is telling that when it is time for her to be a sexual object, she immediately becomes passive or must be given jewelry (Triss Merigold can be seduced twice over the course of the game).
This portrayal of romance can be understood as an attempt to “gamify” sexual relationships. In order to get sex from female NPCs, the player must do something: fight enemies, get a special item, or choose the correct dialogue options. This approach to relationships in games, however, is extremely problematic. As Alex Raymond argues, drawing on Thomas Macaulay Millar, games which have these types of romance mechanics propagate a “commodity model” of sex: “sex is like a ticket; women have it and men try to get it. Women may give it away or may trade it for something valuable, but either way it’s a transaction.” This model of sex (as opposed to a “performance model”) is thoroughly dehumanizing, as all women are valued for are their bodies, and their ability to give their bodies away. Men by contrast have much more freedom, being able to “exchange” a wide variety of “commodities” (time, goods, socio-economic status, etc.) to get what they want.
The Witcher not only adopts this commodity model but extends it in the reward structure for successful seductions. I am referring here to the “romance cards”: playing card style images which are earned from successful seductions, and which can be viewed at any time by the player. Aside from literally objectifying women, these cards play into the gamification of sex: undertake a challenge, overcome obstacles, and earn a reward which can be looked back on as testament to the player’s success, just like the now ubiquitous “achievements.” These cards offer themselves quite easily to analyses of the “male gaze,” with female characters made entirely passive objects for the assumed male audience to examine at their leisure, providing scopophilic pleasure. Instead, however, I would like to look at how the gamification of sex encourages the player to adopt a misogynist attitude when playing The Witcher.
Up to this point, I have omitted a very important fact about The Witcher: you aren’t forced to sleep with every NPC you see. I don’t know if you can finish the game without having sex with anyone (I’ve looked online, and I haven’t found evidence of anyone doing this), but you certainly don’t have to be a complete womanizer. However, as Rob Gallagher argues in his essay “No Sex Please, We are Finite State Machines,” sex in games often functions “less as a motivation in itself than as a particular way of signifying or acknowledging players’ achievements” (407). It’s not that all players necessarily want to see digital pornography, especially since, as Gallagher points out, there are many sources of better quality pornographic images readily available. Rather, the player tries to seduce NPCs in order to get the reward, which happens to be an erotic scene and a sex card. The real problem is that the completionist mentality (unlock all the achievements, do every side quest, explore every nook and cranny of the map) that is encouraged by the effort/reward structure of videogames compels the player to make the avatar behave like a misogynistic womanizer. The player, in turn, is encouraged to mimic this misogyny by being provided with erotic images of Geralt’s conquests. Combined with the dreadful heteronormative slant of the game (there is never any hint of same-sex relations), the paradigm of sex presented in the game is very problematic. But it’s a paradigm that, because of the way it is incorporated into established videogame structures, the player is driven to adopt.
Perhaps the most interesting, if very tentative, defense of The Witcher’s representation of sex is that made by Justin Keverne. In his short essay on The Witcher, he proposes that, “if we want mature games in the truest sense of the word then at some point they will need to engage with themes of prejudice and intolerance. … [S]uch games will need to feature characters who are sexist, racist or otherwise prejudiced and offensive. … With such a protagonist we will need to make use of game mechanics that portray that character’s inherent intolerance and communicate it to the player.” This is an excellent point: in being compelled to adopt the sexism of Geralt by things like the romance cards, the player may come to better understand his mentality, what it means, and why it is problematic. Literature is not short of examples where the reader is asked to adopt the perspective of an unsavory protagonist, Lolita by Nabokov being perhaps the most famous example. The problem in The Witcher however is that at no point does Geralt ever get reprimanded for his attitude. At one point a female NPC gets angry at him, but this has more to do with not entrusting her with an orphaned child than with his womanizing behaviour. Even after he basically proposes to one of his love interests, he is free to sleep with whomever he likes and no one says anything. You would think that the woman to whom he has committed himself might get a little unhappy when he sleeps with, well, anyone he can. But the women remain silent, and so, yet again, Geralt is free to do what he likes, while the women are passively permissive.
For all the reasons I have discussed, The Witcher is to me the epitome of the gamification of a misogynist perspective. And that’s too bad, because aside from romance, there’s lots to love in The Witcher. The narrative is compelling, and takes a nuanced stance on racial issues (despite the absence of non-Caucasian characters), exploring issues of abjection and othering. The gameplay is challenging and tactical. The setting and characters are intriguing. In taking an all too simple and problematic approach to adult relationships, The Witcher sells itself short, and The Witcher 2 does little to improve on the formula. This game series deserves better. Developer CD Projekt’s marketing director recently said in an interview with Gamespot that romance in The Witcher 3 isn’t going to be implemented in “a Pokemon way, like ‘collect them all,’” which seems like a clear reference to the first game. So maybe, hopefully, in the third installment, we’ll get the love stories this game deserves. And I can finally play as Geralt of Rivia without feeling guilty about it.
I find your attitude toward these characters itself inherently discriminative. The notion that this world has to conform to your social norms for sexual fidelity, monogamous expectations and so forth doesn’t seem to be supported by the fiction itself.
The idea that Triss’s injury at the hands of a powerful adversary ‘weakens’ her, making her available for sex via a damsel-in-distress scenario is unpleasantly judgemental. I can’t help but wonder when, in your ideal world, a female character IS permitted to desire sex with an old flame, if not in a comfortable bed, grateful for his support, following a traumatic event for both, the loss of a friend, and a mutual recovery from wounds sustained in the prologue?
The world depicts horny tavern wenches flirting with a mysterious guest, empowered self-governing prostitutes employing a non-human, sterile mercenary to eliminate a threat, then offers sex rather than coin as reward, IF he wants it… A commodity they trade comfortably, daily. Females of numerous species wishing to couple with an interesting and powerful character who depicts an intelligent mind and unusual morals and can actually converse with them in depth, unlike the rather provincial, discriminative and crude attitudes held by the majority of cultures in the period…
It’s undeniably a world populated by sexist characters and with a sexist culture but I do not see the sexism in the main character, or the game’s design. A sexually liberated heterosexual male protagonist with a variety of potential partners and a preference for informal polyamory is inevitably going to ruffle some feathers, but I don’t feel the game provides evidence to deliver an accusation of sexism, and certainly not misogyny on the part of the protagonist, the designers or the original writer. The fact he CAN have sex with a wide variety of characters does not indicate that he is intended to by the designers of the game in a given playthrough. I never knew it was so many — I think I noticed around five to ten. No more than one is intended to complete every quest line in Fallout is one intended to sex every woman in Vizima.
A sandbox RPG permits rampant violence and perversity, sustained kindness, or ghost-like stealth and uninvolvement per the player’s tastes. A semi-linear RPG with a premade character limits player-choice to a defined direction if not a single path, but remains a moral maze. What a player does via Geralt in a single playthrough tells us more about the player than the game, I feel.
The absence of same-sex relationships on the other hand is something of a lapse, but as the protagonist, as written in the novels, is heterosexual and the other characters of the world are by no means obligated to share their private lives with the protagonist, it didn’t strike me as uncomfortable. I’d strongly suspect Geralt’s closest friend is sexually open-minded, based upon his dialogue in both books and game, though…
*ponders* And, reportedly, the character Triss herself is comfortably bisexual in the books.
I digress, and lose interest in the rant, I confess.
I find your article indicates a mind already made up before you began your assessment, a lack of evidence and citation for your claims, and regard many of your statements as misinterpretations. I found The Witcher to be a refreshingly open-minded take upon sexuality in terms of relationship structures and female agency in sexuality. Far from perfect, but *interesting*, and that’s what I’m looking for in a game… Thought-provoking surprises and difficult characters, the kind of moral confusion that provokes articles and responses like these.
Well done, The Witcher. If only you weren’t badly broken after that unbearably repetitive swamp area, and if only the ending made sense…
“The notion that this world has to conform to your social norms for sexual fidelity, monogamous expectations and so forth doesn’t seem to be supported by the fiction itself.”
Well, that can be argued with though. The setting is, in many ways, reminiscent of Middle Ages Europe. There’s a Reverend who clearly acts like a Christian priest; the word “slut” is used as an insult; there’s even a speech about women being the source of all evils due to their unnatural desires and carnal lust when the angry mob of witch-hunters comes at Abigail’s cave. That’s all very much like OUR world. Why would calling a woman “slut” make sense if in this world polygamy was the norm? Why would they even have marriage as we know it? It would indeed be a very interesting kind of fantasy one which didn’t just throw elves, dwarves and magic into the mix but which also invented an entirely different social structure from the ground up, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Ello HiggsBosoff — my reference isn’t to how the society of Vizima react to the protagonist and major characters, but to their interactions amongst themselves, to put it simply.
Major magic users in this world are more often female than male, and tend to be extremely powerful — they’re free of easy judgement or control. The Dryad in the game, too, is unbeholden to the norms of the young human society in this world. The elves, the witch, and so on; the majority of Geralt’s potential romantic and sexual partners in the game are quite powerful beings, individualists independent of ‘ordinary society’ or the conventions of any given civilisation or faction.
They make a choice to partner with another ‘outsider’, the player-character Geralt, and I felt the writer of this article exhibited clear personal discomfort with this fact — or at least, a failure to understand it.
You’re correct, human society in this setting is by no means very liberal, but that’s one of the key themes of the work; humans have recently arrived in this world by magical means, spread, bred, subjugated the native races and generally made a mess of things — their conservative, judgemental crusading/abuse and exploitation of one-another and other species is comparable to our world because, as far as I can tell from my reading of the author’s works in this world, they’re hinted as actually being from our world.
They are us.
Geralt, however, is a hybrid, a product of this world’s magic and strange technology, and therefore a pariah — accepted by natives and other hybrids as a fellow reject, outsider. Something unusual, and perhaps special and worthy of note.
Rereading this with a female friend well read in sexuality, gender equality and alternative relationship systems, we’re stunned by your inability to see Triss’ character as strong *during* her indulgence in sexuality. She defends her friends, none of whom are as powerful as her, is injured in the service of her allies, is subsequently healed by the efforts of her grateful friends, and invites one of them into her bed with casual confidence.
That IS Triss being a strong character. It isn’t the failure of her strength or some hasty rewrite to ’empower’ the male protagonist. Are you unable to observe a female character exhibit free will and agency in sexuality without feeling she’s somehow being exploited? Your writing reeks of the insecure ‘feminist white knight’, leaping to the defense of the feminine ideal that *does not need to be defended*.
All this talk of seduction, these inaccurate suggestions that Geralt can simply pick these females — more often, the female characters select Geralt, and declare their intent. I was most surprised by how submissive Geralt could be, occasionally even wrong-footed by the smirking forwardness of the powerful female characters who periodically take an interest in him.
Jakkar, I am sorry for the delay in replying to your lengthy comment. I didn’t check my post often after it was published, and I wasn’t notified via email that there were comments made on the essay.
First of all, while you clearly didn’t greatly enjoy my essay, I am happy that you took the time to respond to it. I am always open to criticism, and you have made some good points.
That said, I disagree with some of your critiques, especially that I am promoting traditional monogamous relationships. I am not claiming that Geralt (or anyone else) needs to be monogamous, I’m only commenting on the approach made to polygamy in the game, one which entails a clear power relationship which favours the male. Take the relationship between Triss and Geralt, or Shani and Geralt. In both of these relationships, there is never a hint of polyamory on the part of the female participant, whereas Geralt is free to sleep with other women without it even being brought up. If the characters were ever shown discussing this, and agreeing on polyamory, I would be fine with that. Conversely, if either of the women were portrayed pursuing other men, that’s fine too. But in the game (I haven’t read the novels) there is never any hint of this, which makes polyamory exclusively male territory. This, I would say (and perhaps should have included in the essay), implies that a woman shouldn’t be sexually active with more than one partner (i.e. should be monogamous), while it is perfectly acceptable for a man to be polygamous.
As for player choice: you are perfectly correct in saying that the player doesn’t have to pursue the romance options. What I tried to argue in the essay is that the player is encouraged to do so by the reward structure of the romance cards. And you are also absolutely right about games of this kind being a moral maze, balancing the player’s beliefs with those of the protagonist. What makes it interesting to me is the way the player is driven to adopt a certain attitude due to the game’s mechanics. But, if you didn’t feel the romance cards worked in this way, that is a fair argument to make, and I would be interested in hearing your take on the mechanic.
The last thing I would like to discuss is Triss. Triss is a very interesting character, who, as I say in the essay, is a strong woman, and who embraces her sexuality.
I think you’re looking at the romantic encounter between Geralt and Triss in isolation. What worries me more is that it is part of a pattern, wherein the women Geralt sleeps with are shown in a moment of weakness or distress just before the romantic encounter. Another instance of this is Abigail, another strong female character. But when Geralt sleeps with her, she is at her most vulnerable and is in danger of being lynched by a mob. I think a good question to ask is why couldn’t there have been a romance option with Triss or Abigail before these moments of vulnerability? Why choose these specific moments to make a romance scene? It isn’t that it is somehow wrong for a woman to have sex with someone at a moment like that, but when it becomes a pattern, I think it warrants interrogation.
You make an interesting point about Geralt sometimes being taken advantage of by female characters, and that is definitely food for thought.
Again, thank you for your comments, though I am a little puzzled about the rather personal tone of some of your criticism. I don’t think of myself as a feminist white knight: I simply found a topic in a game that interested me, and the content of that topic happened to involve discussions of sexism and sexuality. My other writing isn’t focused on these themes, and I am certainly not on any kind of crusade.
I think you’re falling unwittingly into the patriarchal notion that is unfortunately prevalent in Western society that while it is perfectly fitting for a woman to be sexy, or to display her sexual attractiveness, it is inherently demeaning for her to ever be sexual, or actually, you know,*have sex*. Freely chosen, consensual sex does not automatically disempower a woman, and I am peturbed by your inability to see any of these instances of sex (many of which come about at the express suggestion of the females in question) as anything other than ‘seduction’.
Furthermore, your dismissive attitudes about sex work are perpetuating cultural stigma – IIRC, the sex workers in the game are functionally Unionised, and as such, acting with as much agency as any other worker of any profession. Sex work is work, and no more deserving of automatic shaming than any other job.
I also think you need to do some reading about Polyamory/Ethical non-monogamy before dismissing the practice as inherently oppressive to women (in reality, most polyamorous communities slant strongly Feminist, as do a great many of the seminal writers on the subject). Your assumption that women will automatically desire/require exclusivity more closely fits the Evo-Psych rantings of MRA’s than anything resembling Feminist discourse.
To be completely honest, this piece leaves me with the impression of a long drawn out apology for your own unexamined predjudices, and resultant awkward-patriarchy-boner – methinks you need to educate yourself further on the matters you are discussing, given that you views frequently run contrary to the interests of the various disadvantaged groups you are discussing in their absence, and furthermore check your goddamn priviledge.
This (and Jakkar’s trio of comments above) feels needlessly vindictive, and also kinda misses Alex’s point, that the Witcher treats women like commodities: something to be purchased or earned. This is particularly troubling in the context of those “romance cards” the game offers you — trophies for successfully conquering a woman. Further, while “ethical non-monogamy” may be a valid way of living, it’s my understanding that you have to talk to your partner(s) first, rather than just assuming they are totally down with you banging whomever you please. While I haven’t played the game in question, Alex suggests that no such conversation happens. And half a sentence about how there are also prostitutes in the game from whom one can purchase sex does not necessarily demean the profession.
I confess I didn’t find quite as many problems with The Witcher’s treatment of sex as Alex or Bill did, mostly because I found the deliberate conflating of the assumed player’s desire to “collect all cards” with the Witcher’s constantly mentioned past as a womanizer pretty clever. That said, treating sexual partners as trophies through the romance card system is pretty obviously sexist, regardless of the individual characters preferences– the issue isn’t really (to me), how the characters handle themselves, but the way the game views the characters.
And no, Triss and Geralt never discuss monogamy, or lack thereof. You can assume they have that conversation off-screen (other conversations certainly do, although I never found any reason to assume Triss’s temper would be cool with it), but there’s no real reason to make that leap.
Thank you for your comment, Persephone, and as with Jakkar, I apologize for the tardiness of my reply. That said, I am utterly confused by the tone of personal attack in your comment. As far as I know, we have never met, and I don’t think you have any right accusing me of demeaning sex workers or of being against polyamory. Criticizing my essay is fine. Accusing me of being personally against a whole slew of complex topics is going a bit far.
As I said to Jakkar, it is not polyamory itself which is problematic in the game. It is rather that it is completely one-sided in favour of the man. There is never any indication that Triss or Shani have relationships with anyone aside from Geralt, and, as Bill says, there is never any discussion of polyamory in the relationship.
As for sex workers, I think you’re stretching my argument a bit far to find that I am actively against the trade.
You fool. Having free sex is, in fact, the most disempowering thing a woman can do, aside from getting raped. Not to say she shouldn’t be allowed to do it. But none shall deny imposed roles. To do so would be to counter truth, and to counter truth is to be unreasonable. Fuck off with your feminist nonsense.
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feminist cucks… sad.