the witcher

“Old people are like that”

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One of the best things about The Witcher so far?  Geralt telling people to “shove off”.   It’s so ….. understated.

The Witcher is set in a world where men are men, and women are waitresses, nurses, nuns and sex workers.  I think I’ve been spoiled by games where you can select your sex at character creation and it makes no difference to the story.  I’ve become so used to seeing women police officers and women soldiers that it comes a shock to find myself in such a male-dominated environment, with no chance to do anything about it.

But, as I said in my last post, I grew up in that sort of environment.  I’m older than most gamers.  I remember the days when girls had to do cooking and sewing at school while the boys studied the “manlier” subjects.   I’ve had to work with people who thought I should be at home, keeping house.  The fantasy world of the Witcher is just a reflection of reality.

Meanwhile, I’m still struggling with my Geralt, whose conversation choices often leave him seeming rude, dismissive or aggressive.   Maybe that’s the way he’s supposed to be, but oh, I miss my Commander Shepherd being able to give somebody a hug, or even talk them into being a better person.   Making somebody a better person: so close to impossible in real life, so easy and satisfying in games.

Here’s an example of my possible dialogue choices.  My Geralt had wandered into an old lady’s house, and she’d thrown him out several times.   Finally, she allowed him to stay and he spoke to Shani who was lodging there.   Shani told him the old woman was making her life hell, and I was given the following selection of replies for Geralt…

1. Girls your age should be married 2. Old hag ... she should have died years ago 3. Old people are like that

I couldn’t decide whether to insult women in general (and Shani in particular), to insult old people in general, or to wish death on somebody.   There was no option to point out, for example, that a single old woman might be justified in throwing out a slightly scary looking  hired killer who had entered her house without asking.  (Or to ask why Shani is disguised as Peter Pan).

I finally chose “Old people are like that”, because after all, Geralt isn’t in his first flush of youth, so would surely be saying it with an ironic self-deprecating tone.  Maybe I should have explored the “women should be married” angle instead.  It would have been interesting to see if Shani agreed.

Why do the old women all look the same?   Even down to the mole?  (Old woman eats her tea while I root through her cupboards)

Isn’t this the same person I met at Shani’s house?  And in the swamp?  Strange how you never see them in the same room together.    When I first saw an old woman in the game, I was impressed that the effort had been made to make her look aged, instead of just putting different skin complexion on a young body model (Wynne from Dragon Age, I’m looking at you).  I was disappointed when I found out that it had only been done once: all old women look exactly the same.

And it’s not just the old women.   While some of the key NPCs have an individual look, I seem to be getting a sense of deja vu with the rest.    It’s great that there are different body models rather than just a choice of male or female, but I’d have loved to see more individual variation.  Some of the scenery in the game is stunning, and it’s a shame that there doesn’t seem to have been so much love put into creating the people of The Witcher.

“Old people are like that”

Being Geralt

somebodysmum, , , , , 3 Comments

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.

Being Geralt

Slavery, racism, and the lure of the good side

somebodysmum, , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Goodness me, it has been a long time since I’ve posted here.   Not only has real life got in the way, but I’ve spent my gaming time gaming instead of blogging.

As both of my readers might remember, I was very taken with Dragon Age and its opportunities to develop relationships with NPCs and make choices which affected the outcomes of the game.   Since then, I’ve played through more Bioware games with similar aspects: Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Jade Empire and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.  I also replayed Planescape: Torment, one of my favourite games, and one which has some of those aspects I liked about Dragon Age.   These playthroughs have confirmed for me that I really, really do like those aspects of the games.    At the moment, I’m playing Lost Odyssey, and after the above run, I am continually frustrated by the lack of dialogue choices.   Actually, no dialogue choices.  The dialogue consists of clicking through to the next part.  It all feels so wrong.

Jade Empire was a very pleasant experience, partly because I didn’t expect so much out of it as the others.  And there was a great twist!  As in most of the above games, my characters actions defined whether they were a “good” or “bad” character.  I know good/bad is too blunt a description, but you know what I mean: paragon/renegade, light side/dark side, or in this case open palm/closed fist options.  And yet again, I found myself leaning towards the “good” side.

Why is this? In real life, of course, I like to think I’m a reasonably decent person.  I don’t use violence to achieve my ends.   In fact, I sometimes even balk at the “good” actions in games.  I don’t support capital punishment, and why would I want to kill anyone without a trial, even if they are an evil slaver? I mention slavers in particular, because in these games, killing slavers always seems to be justified as a good action, and supporting them in any way always seems to be bad.   Because I’m contrary, that just makes me want to find a way to justify slavery.   After all, if execution without trial is justified in terms of the setting being a different time and place, different politically, economically, traditionally and so on, then why can’t slavery be justified by the same means?   And where’s the line between outright slavery and “employing” people who have no other option?  You get the picture.  Anyway, I think that the games partially deflect some of the moral questions by having slavery as the exception rather than the rule and generally frowned upon.   It would be interesting to have your character have to deal with slavers in a setting where slavery was completely accepted, integrated and universal.  Not that the games completely avoid ambiguity.  I do remember the slave I rescued and employed in Dragon Age 2, who seemed confused, and possibly felt unprotected, by her new status as “servant”.

But I digress.   I wouldn’t kill slavers, or anybody (except in self defence, etc) in real life, so never have to make that sort of moral decision.   On the other hand, although I do give to charity, and like helping people out now and then, I wouldn’t, for instance, give a large amount of money to a stranger in need who asked, or put myself in danger for them in the way that I might do in a game.  So why do I find it so difficult to play closed fist/renegade/dark side?

I think that one reason is that there is a satisfaction in doing good deeds in a game, that you don’t get from doing evil deeds.  I love the feeling I get when I make the “right” choice to help a child or a grateful peasant.  I’m just wondering whether that feeling is the warm glow of charity being its own reward, or whether there’s a bit of smugness and self-righteousness.  After all, I don’t actually have to sacrifice anything tangible to be nice.   It’s a game.

I also feel that there’s a tradition of rewarding “good” actions.  Sometimes, if you say that you don’t need a reward, you get one anyway.  Or you help somebody and they fight at your side later.  Or you get xp.  Or you get a better ending.  So although people will tell you that video games like these are violent, in reality, they are rewarding good behaviour.  (And maybe encouraging killing slavers).

What about racism?  It takes a peculiar slant in these games.  I think most of us agree that racism is bad.  It seems to be shown as such in these games, but instead is presented as, I suppose,”speciesism”.    Rather being directed at other humans, bigotry is shown towards other species, turians, quarians, elves, dwarves, geth, etc.  Generally, we don’t normally have a problem with speciesism.  It’s just taken for granted.  It’s hard to imagine how our society would function if non-humans had the same rights as humans on this planet alone, never mind on other planets.

But essentially, the non-humans we’re talking about in these games are human in all but name.  Even visually, most of them look pretty human, in terms of size, number of limbs, etc.   To listen to, well, they are human, with human voice actors.   What is supposedly alien and non-human, is really more cultural.   The members of a species have particular characteristics in common, such as, say, a love of fighting, strong sense of duty or a Scottish accent, but some of these are things you might see in humans too.   Others, such as an exceptionally long life span, telepathy or an exoskeleton are clearly non-human, but not in a way that affects the essence of the person.  And they all speak English.   Honestly, if you listen to your non-human companions talking about their human emotions in their human voices, it’s clear that they are essentially human.

So you are not really making decision about speciesism, but maybe about racism-lite.   Which actually makes the decision easy, because we already know racism is wrong.

Slavery, racism, and the lure of the good side