This summer I built myself a new PC. To celebrate, I've been playing CD Projekt RED's fantastic RPG The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, based on the fantasy novels of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Sapkowski's novels have always been ahead of the curve on dark, gritty, not-so-heroic fantasy, and CD Projekt RED's game series captures that beautifully. And the timing couldn't be better, with the breakout success of HBO's Game of Thrones and, in the video game world, BioWare's Dragon Age series.
But it puts CD Projekt RED in a difficult position. Sexually, I mean. Not, like, a sexual position. But.
Bear with me.
The Witcher 2 is, according to the game's managing director Adam Badowski, "targeted to a grown-up audience." And that's true. The game doesn't shy away from sex or brutal violence, and for the most part, it tries to take both topics seriously. It has to, in order to remain true to Sapkowski's novels. The player character, the monster hunting mutant named Geralt, has several opportunities for sexual encounters during the course of the game, from his love interest, the sorceress Triss, to a goat-legged succubus. All of these are accompanied with a cutscene, often featuring full frontal female nudity. And no, you won't get in trouble for cheating on Triss (some speculate theirs is an open relationship).
Don't expect to see Geralt's naked body, though. He takes his shirt off quite a few times throughout the game (revealing the scars of a life of monster hunting), but during all of the game's sexual encounters with fully nude women, Geralt never takes off his pants.
I imagine this is because CD Projekt RED thought that their predominantly male audience wouldn't want to see the pale, scarred ass of the game's protagonist. Badowski wouldn't ever say that, of course; in the interview linked earlier, he says, "real adults don’t get excited over a nipple." And that's true! Nudity probably shouldn't be such a big deal. So why is it that the only nudity we see in the game features impossibly beautiful women?
But that's expected now, isn't it? Compare the instances of full frontal female nudity in mainstream film to full frontal male nudity and you'll likely notice a disparity. I think there's a deeper problem at work in The Witcher 2:
For as mature, nuanced, and complex as the game's story is (and it really is!), there isn't a single female character who would have survived the game without Geralt's intervention. There isn't a single woman who can take care of herself.
This took me a while to notice. The game is full of women who appear, at least at first, to be pretty badass. Geralt treats his lover Triss (and, in fact, all of the female characters) as equals. He takes them seriously, is perfectly willing to fight alongside them and even let them take the lead when the situation calls for it. The other sorceresses you meet seem independent, brilliant, and entirely capable of solving any problem they want to on their own.
But wait. They're sorceresses. They have magic. For comparison, the men who do badass things in the game don't need to use magic. Geralt uses minor magic tricks, sure, but his allies Vernon Roche and the elf Iorveth don't. They're strong enough on their own.
We never meet a woman who's strong enough on her own, and I can think of two examples off the top of my head where that's all but enforced:
- There's a female soldier you can befriend during one of the two paths through the game's second chapter. She's the only woman in her special forces unit and could probably beat any of them in a fight. Of course, over the course of the chapter she ends up raped and emotionally shattered, serving, in the end, as an emotional lure to make the player hate one of the villains. So much for her.
- On the other path through chapter two, you'll meet a woman who leads an entire army. She does so very successfully. The people of her nation idolize her and would follow her to the ends of the earth. But a couple things: one, everyone makes a big deal of her virginity (but maybe this is a Joan of Arc reference?); and two, she's not even human. She's a dragon. (That's the spoiler I was talking about earlier.) The unfortunate implication here, naturally, is that no human woman could accomplish what she has. (Oh, and you also end up having to rescue her.)
Oh, and there's this scene, during which an evil sorcerer whom you've had to work with thus far and who was always extremely competent, very powerful, and rather threatening is revealed to be homosexual. No big deal, except that in the same scene, this powerful, intelligent sorcerer is suddenly catty and vain, and within a minute he's reduced to a whimpering little child by a single angry man with a blade. And then he gets castrated and murdered. To be fair, the player likely wants to kill this guy by this point. He's evil, he's kidnapped a child, he's murdered a dozen of your friends, and he's always been kind of a dick. But all of this happens within two minutes. The man's sexuality was never even hinted at before (in fact, he always seemed rather asexual, more concerned with power than other people). Yet here he is: figuratively and literally emasculated within a minute of being revealed as gay.
Welp.
So, there's a simple way to react to this: let's just not buy any of their future games. That's how I've been treating Electronic Arts these days, anyway, as a result of their greedy business practices resulting in rushed, unfinished games with higher price tags and day-one premium content. (And yet EA stands up for civil rights; more on that in a future post.)
Recall that I earlier introduced The Witcher 2 as a "fantastic RPG." Thus I reveal my weakness: I'm probably going to buy every game CD Projekt RED will ever make again. They make rock-solid, innovative games with excellent writing quality, very difficult choices for the player to make, fun gameplay, and gorgeous graphics. Speaking just about the game's quality, The Witcher 2 is one of the best games to come out in the past decade. I expect that's why you don't see many articles picking apart The Witcher 2's gender politics (though some did point out the immaturity of gathering "sex cards" in the game's prequel): it's an excellent game on nearly all levels. Nobody wants to dislike it.
And even after writing this whole blog post, I still don't think I can dislike it.
I am an awful person. But hey, soon you'll find out why I'm pretty sure EA is worse than I am!
