The Witcher: Enhanced Edition - 10/20 hours

How do you draw the line between sexism and depictions of sexism? I ask this, because over the last five hours, I managed to save a witch from being burned at the stake, and witnessed, as a consequence, some really horrific sexism. And I'm not talking about the overly-sensitive, politically correct version of sexism, where maybe the people who perpetrated it are actually just a little misguided, but seriously old-school violent misogyny, with the whole "women are the spawn of the devil who tempt men into evil with their wicked lusts" spiel.

And I'm not sure how I should react to that. The game doesn't endorse that view. It comes from the perspective of some dipshit villagers that I eventually wind up fighting, so it's obviously not meant to be a credible source. On the other hand, the game also does not make much of an effort to critique the villagers' sexism, and that can send the message that it is not their hateful misogyny, but the fact that they attack the player that makes them the enemy.

For example, during the whole witch-trial thing, the sins of the various men around town are revealed, and one of them, Mikul the gate guard, is a rapist. However, he's not present at the brawl. You don't see him again until after you defeat the Beast and are ready to move to the next area. He shows some small bit of contrition, but after literally one second the whole matter is dropped and never mentioned again. The rape of Ilsa is treated as unarguably a bad thing, but apparently not so bad that anyone has to do anything about it (maybe that's why she committed suicide).

If I were inclined to defend the game, I'd say that the sexist attitudes and injustice are a trait of the fictional society that makes up the setting, but that's not actually an argument that has a lot of traction with me. The question that leaps to mind is "why this society?" "Why these attitudes?" And the only answer that seems to make any sense is that the world of The Witcher is meant to be a grimy and unpleasant place, and the mistreatment of women is meant to act as a kind of shorthand to convey that. It all feels very exploitative.

Like, if you were setting a game in Earth's past, you'd have an excuse. You're just telling it like it was. Women did not have a very easy time through much of history, so changing things to make them more comfortable to a modern audience is to make your game at least somewhat fantastical. Similarly, if you were making a game about fighting for justice for women, then you'd also have reason to do this sort of thing. If you're going to have awesome feminist avengers, you're going to need some gender-based iniquities for them to rail against.

The Witcher, however, is neither of those things. It is a game about fighting ghosts and assassins, and violence against women is a mere backdrop. What's more, you can't divorce it from the context of its sex minigame. I'm not inclined, by temperament, to take an especially hard line against the game's sexy trading cards. They're cheesy as hell, and literally objectifying, but they are so incredibly stupid an idea that they possess a certain camp charm. And if I were in a generous mood, I'd say that there is an intersection between campiness and sentimentality that makes it almost sweet for a player to collect a tangible memento of the video game ladies he has once loved (full disclosure - I'm almost certainly saying this because I myself possess both those qualities in abundance).

Yet the way those cheesy card are acquired dovetails with the game's setting is unnerving. I've so far seen three of the sex scenes, and with the exception of the very first one (which was merely hilariously inappropriate in its abruptness) they have all had an element of the coercive to them. Not anything that I'd say crosses a line, due to the fact that they were both proposed by the ladies themselves, but they were nonetheless creepier than they were sexy. The second sex scene was with Abigail, the witch, who propositions you (possibly as a bribe) right before the mob of villagers comes to burn her at the stake. The third was with a prostitute who offers you a "freebie" for rescuing some of her fellow prostitutes from gangs of thugs. It's all very gross, and serves to paint a picture of a society where the feminine is completely degraded. Basically, if you ever wondered why the philosophy of political lesbianism would appeal to somebody, all you have to do is try and play The Witcher as a "ladies man."

(You may, at this point, be asking the obvious question - if it's so gross, how do you know so much about it? I'd like to say it's because of my intrepid doggedness as a reporter, and that I'm braving the seedy underbelly of the game so I can blog about it honestly, but it's probably more accurate to say that I'm triggering these sex scenes out of prurient curiosity. I keep wondering if they could possibly be as bad as my imagination makes them out to be, and so far, they are.)

What this all means is that I feel like The Witcher uses the mistreatment of women as material for entertainment, but it hasn't really earned the right to do so. In theory, you can take a pandering, cheesecake approach to erotica if your idea of sex is fun and goofy, and you can populate your "dark fantasy" setting with the bleakest horrors of history if you're otherwise conscientiously sensitive to the plight of downtrodden people, but to take The Witcher's approach is to combine the worst aspects of both.

The main redeeming factor of the game is the fact that this dubious gender stuff is like, 10% of the game. For most of the last five hours, I've been slaying monsters and running around a vaguely medieval town gathering clues about a criminal conspiracy. This mostly involves talking to npcs, getting a new, misleading quest marker, and talking to another npc across town, with the occasional punctuation of a sudden betrayal, but the individual subquests are short enough that they fall under that ineffable "just one more" threshold, so the game as a whole is moderately addictive. It does mostly feel like filler, however. If I were to summarize the plot since my last update it would be - saved a witch from an angry mob, discovered the villagers were in league with the people I'm chasing, killed a hellhound, and then went to the city to try and find the gang, where no one individual was able to give me a particularly large bit of help. Presumably, the devil's in the details, but I doubt they would be very interesting to someone reading along.