I don’t tend to play myself in games. Obviously not. I’m somebody’s mum. I go to work, do the housework, take some light exercise and enjoy my leisure time. There’s not much call for me to save the world or the universe, or even my immediate neighbourhood, and should the call come, I wouldn’t have the resources to answer. So clearly, I don’t play as myself. I suppose I role play the character, maybe including aspects of myself. It’s not so much “what would I do in that situation?” as “what would I do if I was that character in that situation?”.
So I’m quite happy playing characters who aren’t me in terms of gender, age, abilities, etc. But for some reason I’m having difficulty with Geralt in The Witcher. It’s not that he’s male. I’ve got on fine in the past when I’ve had to play male characters, and I sometimes even choose to play male. Is it that he doesn’t seem to know who he is himself? That could be it, although I loved playing the character of the Nameless One in Planescape: Torment,who suffered from the same problem.
Is it something to do with his voice acting or animation? It could be. Although the scenery looks fantastic, Geralt doesn’t. He seems kind of flat, but maybe that just fits in with his background and story. He doesn’t seem to be capable of changing his expression, so it’s difficult to work out what he’s feeling.
Or maybe it’s that he’s just not close enough to me in what he says. The things he says and the way he says them seem a long way from what I would choose.
Maybe I just need to take control of the character more. It feels as if the game pushes him to be a drinker, a gambler, a womaniser and generally a fairly unlikeable hard nut. But there are choices to be made, and I can choose not to drink, gamble or womanise and choose the most likeable route. I speculated about my motivation for choosing the “good” options in other games in a previous post. Maybe another motivation is simply that I want to like the character that I’m playing.
It’s not that I’m particularly against drinking, gambling or womanising. I do wonder if gender comes into it here: if it was man-ising rather than womanising, would I be able to identify more? Perhaps, and maybe I’d find it amusing to collect the cards. But there’s something about the way sex and romance in the game has been handled so far that isn’t appealing to me at the moment. I was trying to put my finger on it, and I think it’s perhaps that it’s so skimmed over. The casual sex might be interesting if you saw a little of it, maybe a kiss at least, and perhaps had to choose some dialogue that would change its course. Instead it seems to be a quick agreement that you’re both up for it, then a flash of a card, like a notch on a bedpost. It all felt a bit juvenile and detached.
But then I completed a quest where, just after sex with a woman, I had to choose whether to save her or give her up to a baying mob. Suddenly, there was a point to the sex. Having done it seemed give some extra meaning to the following scene where Geralt had to make that choice. Of course, giving her up to the mob would be bad enough, but to have had his way with her first would make him an out and out cad. Although I’d still like to see a little more substance to his sexual encounters, however brief and fleeting, I think I will feel much more drawn to the character if his liaisons had some meaning in his story.
Where Geralt is at a disadvantage, is that he’s finding his way in what appears to be quite an old-fashioned, sexist world. There’s a general atmosphere of misogyny that I find disturbing, and perhaps it’s harder to subvert it when playing a male, rather than a female character. I’ve become overly used to games which show a world where woman have the same status as men. Sadly, Geralt’s world perhaps has more in common with the world I grew up in. Meanwhile, I have to try to develop a connection to Geralt, a man in a man’s world.
Somebody's Mum 