(2 edits; one correction, and the added section Extra IV)

I - This Is Hard To Write About

Talking about social issues is always a challenge. Nuance, especially in text, especially on the internet, is incredibly hard to get across. I always have this fear, when I talk about certain things, that people are going to assume that I mean the worst.

I write in the hopes of making things better for other people. If I mess up, I trust you to be kind enough to understand that. I really do want the best, or I wouldn’t be writing this today.

I think some of this could be read in a tone that I wouldn’t say it in. Imagine me in earnest conversation–that is how I am writing this piece.

Please.

Please.

PLEASE understand that I would rather talk to you about this than simply throw this article out to the world and let it be the be-all, end-all. This is my response to a statement made. I welcome and appreciate the discussion I hope this generates.

Some of what I say here may come across as harsh. Just know that I’d rather be talking to people about this over burgers and soda, and in my ideal world, we all come away from our conversation about this feeling better about the people around us. No animosity.

II - Nuance Is Difficult To Achieve On The Internet

So, there’s this article on Polygon, by Tauriq Moosa, which feels like an expansion of their The Witcher 3 review. It’s about how gaming still struggles with race. You can read it here.

I am going to contend part–and only part–of the article.

An unfortunate problem in games discourse, and really, modern discourse in general, is that trying to have nuanced discussion is hard.

I’ve encountered a scenario like this time and time again: Person A argues something good, but does so in a way that’s bad (”let’s gentrify this district!” that leads to racial discrimination, for instance). Person B brings up the potential issue. Persons C-Z shoot down Person B because “the main point is good.”

Just because “the main point” is good doesn’t mean that the way we got there is. I knew a man who got an awful lot of people talking about the problems with capital punishment, for instance. Problem is, he did it by killing a dozen people over thirty years. Just because someone makes a good point doesn’t mean they did it right.

Okay, that’s an extreme example. I wanted something flashy, something that stuck in your head. I’m not equating this article with murder, just pointing out, once again, that a “good point” can be introduced the wrong way.

I believe this article introduced a good point in a bad way.

III - Gaming Has A Problem With Race

The part of the article I fully agree with is the idea that video games do not do enough to represent as many people and perspectives as they could. I know that many of my non-white, non-male friends feel poorly represented, that they wish people like them could be on the cover of the big, awesome games.

It simply is not fair to them that Assassin’s Creed has a gruff white man on the cover every year–that the games with the female leads and the games with the African and Chinese leads, are the side games, the spinoffs.

I don’t really get wanting to see someone like me on the covers of video games, just because I play games to be anyone other than me, but I respect that others want this.

The simple fact of the matter is this: if you want to play a video game character who is like you, you are going to have a hard time doing that unless you are a white male. That is simply the reality of the demographics in video games, and I personally do not believe it to be an ideal reality.

Moosa’s article is about this, and I agree with him on this point.

However, I feel he used the wrong game to illustrate his point.

IV - The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3 is an open-world video game based on a Polish series of books by Andrzej Sapkowski. The series is a source of great national pride in Poland, to the point where the Polish prime minister gifted a copy of The Witcher 2 to the United States President, Barack Obama.

The universe of The Witcher is a low-fantasy version of thirteenth-century Poland, as I understand it. Apparently, the world was just like ours until a cataclysmic event called “the conjunction of the spheres,” when a bunch of worlds crashed into each other, and monsters like trolls and dragons came to life.

So, basically, imagine going back in time to 1200s Poland only to discover that all the monsters people wrote about were real, that superstitions were something more. Then imagine that some people, like the eponymous Witcher, fought them.

The game takes place in an area of the world called Velen and the Skellige islands off Velen’s coast.

That’s The Witcher 3.

V - The Objection

The Witcher 3 Doesn’t Feature Any Non-White Characters, And It Should

VI - The Rebuttal

A game set in a medieval world heavily influenced by Slavic folklore wouldn’t need to, because that isn’t realistic.

VII - The Rebuttal to the Rebuttal

Really? Dragons and elves are more realistic than people of color? We should have people of color, because it’s just another game that isn’t including people of color. If you’re willing to have blue-skinned monsters called drowners, the least you could do is have a black guy or something, right?

VIII - On International Cinema

Let’s take a break from this exchange and zip across the Earth to Japan. It’s 1954, nine years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, and Ishiro Honda has made a movie called Godzilla. Now let’s fly to Argentina, in 1984, to the screening of a film called Camila, by Maria Luisa Bemberg. We could also stop off in 1991 China to watch Raise the Red Lantern, or go to 2002 Brazil to watch City of God.

These are good films, important films. They are the products of their culture and time. They reflect the world, the lived experiences, of the people who made them. Sure, Godzilla is not real, but Godzilla represents something real–the nuclear attacks on Japan. Camila is based on a true story, though Bemberg never lived through it.

Go anywhere, to any country, and you will find a rich cinematic culture. You will find a citizenship that is proud of the films their country has made.

I am a student of international film precisely because I love seeing cultures other than my own. It is absolutely wonderful to witness creators sharing stories that only they can, spreading their rich culture and heritage to the world. There is a beauty in the pride someone has when they express something as personal as their cultural heritage. It is wonderful.

IX - On Hollywood

I remember someone (who would know) once saying that Hollywood isn’t interested in making American movies about, say, growing up in Texas, such as Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. Hollywood is interested in making only one thing, and that thing is money.



Hollywood makes movies international audiences want to watch. These movies are stripped-down. They don’t really represent the American experience. They have Exciting Situations Where Things Explode and Sexy People Do Sexy Things.



You don’t really get “American Movies” when you watch Hollywood films, you get Hollywood movies.

Because Hollywood is interested in making money, and because Hollywood has an awful lot of money behind it, Hollywood is the sort of the artistic default for much of the world.

Some countries fight this–Korea actually limits the amount of Hollywood films that show in Korea in proportion to Korean films.

All these other cultures are making their own movies, but these movies tend to appeal primarily to the countries that made them. Hollywood goes after the international markets better than anyone else, plain and simple. However, to do this, a lot of the ‘personal stuff’ that matters has to get cut out. An audience in China isn’t going to want to watch a movie about growing up in Texas, but they’ll probably have a blast watching The Avengers 2: Age of Ultron.



In other words, because Hollywood wants to make money, it’s often culturally dull, but it’s precisely because of this dullness that Hollywood relies on to make money.

X - What This Has To Do With Games

Games are basically the same way. The biggest publishers in the world are all making games with as broad appeal as possible. It’s unlikely that EA is going to make a game about Inuit culture, for instance, because not everyone is interested in Inuit culture. Sure, I’d play it, but the guy next door only cares about his K/D ratio in Battlefield. More people want to play Battlefield than Never Alone.

Publishers want to make money, so cultural expression is kinda lost on them.

Thing is… stuff with white people on the cover makes money. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for this, but I don’t feel qualified to talk about why that is. If you stick a woman on the cover, people won’t buy your game. Look at No One Lives Forever; it’s one of the best games of all time, but people actually returned it to the stores because they “had to” play as the woman on the cover, and they didn’t want to do that.



So “Hollywood,” or the video game equivalent, makes a lot of bland, culture-less games with white people on the cover. It’s the cheese pizza approach to video games, something so bland and inoffensive that everyone will eat it, even if they deserve better pizza than that.

Which brings us back to the part where The Witcher 3 is a game featuring white people, and a bunch of people are tired of every big game featuring white people, so this massive, excellent release that everyone’s talking about gets criticized for being yet another whites-only game.

XI - The Witcher 3 Is Different

See, here’s the thing: in the context of “all video games I can possibly buy,” yes, The Witcher 3 is another game that features white people. But… The Witcher 3 doesn’t exist within the “Hollywood” system of video games. Yes, it features white people, but it’s not because these Polish developers are trying to make a giant Hollywood blockbuster. They’re trying to make the best Polish game they possibly could.

Have you ever seen Pan’s Labyrinth?

Pan’s Labyrinth features an exclusively-white cast and fantasy creatures. One might argue that it should feature a non-white cast. Except, well, Pan’s Labyrinth is a work of Spanish culture that’s set during the Spanish Civil War. We, the audience, understand that it’s Spanish and features Spanish people. It doesn’t need to feature anyone else. It’s about Spain.

The Witcher 3 is about Poland. It’s by Poland. It’s something they’re proud of, something that should be lauded. When I read about the invasion of the Northern Kingdoms by Nilfgaard, I can’t help but think about how, throughout the history, Poland keeps getting the short end of the stick.

Poland lost its independence in the late 1700s, only to finally regain it in 1918. Germany robbed Poland of its independence once again in 1939; after WWII, the Soviet Union took over Poland. It maintained its grip until 1989. This is a country and people who have, for hundreds of years, been abused and mistreated.

This game is the product of a country and people with a rich past and history, who’ve been trampled on for centuries and come out the other side stronger than ever. It is a source of national pride. This is not just another “Hollywood” video game, this is a valuable cultural artifact from some of the most oppressed peoples in history.

So when someone comes along and says “yeah, whatever, your past, your culture isn’t as important as mine. Your game should appeal to my interests,” it strikes me as nothing less than offensive.

XII - You Are The Oppressor

I remember a fellow film student who didn’t like some of the foreign films we were watching because they didn’t represent her American values. She would regularly spout off in lectures how the characters should do this or that, or how the films would have been better if they’d featured Americans. She wanted these special, wonderful, valuable movies to be Hollywood films. She didn’t like the movie we watched about Lolicon (EDIT JUNE 4, MY BAD, LOL) Lolita Fashion culture, for instance, because she would never dress like that.

She ignored what the films meant to the people making them because she wanted them to appeal to her. She criticized an entire culture because she felt movies that didn’t cater to her wants and needs were bad movies.

This is cultural imperialism.

Here, from Moosa’s piece:

“Whitewashing takes over the limited space people of color have to exist in the entertainment industry as complex, multifaceted individuals, and then shuts them out completely. "Whereas: "Racebending… counters that, in a way. It demands a space for people of color to exist in franchises where they are severely underrepresented.” Thus, wanting more people of color in stories that focus on mythology for a predominantly white culture doesn’t work the other way. Wanting white people in spaces dedicated to people of color ignores that stories of white people already dominate this and other creative industries. It’s “What about me?” when everything is already about you.

Yes. I get it. You, here, existing within the Western ecosystem of video games, are not served as you should be. But to apply your value system to a game that’s coming from a completely different culture is not right or good.

Moosa’s argument makes sense in Western video games, made by our Hollywood equivalent. It doesn’t make sense when you consider this game as a valuable cultural artifact of an oppressed people, which is what The Witcher 3 is.

This is also why it does, in fact, “work the other way.” Because it’s not. You’re trying to fit a non-Western game into a Western value system. Expecting The Witcher 3 to fit our values is exactly like expecting art that’s Indian or African or Asian or whatever to feature people from outside that culture.

There’s more to culture than melanin, and it is absolutely ignorant to believe otherwise.

Neither you nor I have the right to demand that this culture cater to our culture.

Devaluing someone’s culture because of their skin color is racism. Saying to the oppressed that they must change their work because your oppression is more meaningful by virtue of your skin color is, by most definitions, racism.

If The Witcher 3 were made by Americans for an international audience, you’d have an argument. If CD Projekt’s next game, Cyberpunk 2077, based on an American tabletop game (by Mike Pondsmith, an African American), features exclusively white people, again, you’d have an argument. But… right here, right now, we have The Witcher, a series by Poles, about Poles. A series rooted in Slavic history and culture.

This is not for you or I to change.

XIII - Remember What I Said About Nuance?

Nuance is hard, but I’ll do my best to reiterate it.

You have needs. I get that. You are not properly served by Western video gaming. Absolutely.

Poland has needs too. Every culture has needs.

We can’t just pretend there’s only one set of needs in existence. We can’t pretend that gaming is a zero sum situation, that if one culture has its needs met, that another one doesn’t.

We need more games featuring people of color, but The Witcher 3 is literally the last game in the world that should be the game to do it. Why couldn’t we have this conversation about Dragon Age, or Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls? We need a mainline, not-crap Redguard game, after all.

Yes, plenty of games have white protagonists, but how many games speak to the Polish people the way The Witcher does?

I think people have gotten in a bad habit of assuming that the color of a person’s skin alone means that their cultural needs are fulfilled, that all anyone needs to appreciate art is to see people who look like them. And that’s absurd. Absolutely, completely, totally absurd.

We can’t walk all over the Polish, like a bunch of other oppressors have done, just because they made a game that speaks to them more than it does to us. We have no right to demand they bend their cultural expression to our whims.

XIV - There You Have It

Okay. I’m done. Does that make sense? I fully admit that I’m not Polish and I’m only talking about it as best I understand it. There may be other people who feel differently. I’m using my background in international cinema to talk about games, so it’s a bit wibbly-wobbly.

We shouldn’t try to dominate other cultures with our own.

You can stop reading now. I’m going to talk about a couple more specific things, which you’re welcome to read, but that’s the main point. This is kinda nitpicking.

EXTRA I - Factual Errors n’ Stuff

Quoth the article:

The Witcher world itself features Zerrikania, whose inhabitants seem very much inspired from the Middle East. In Witcher 2, a prominent Zerrikanian character is named Azar Javed, an Arabic name. Like mine! Culture and names are welcome, but skin color, it seems, is not.



Okay, where to begin.

1) Yes, Zerrikania does seem inspired by the Middle East. The Witcher’s monsters come from Slavic mythology. The first game, however, features Azar Javed, a Zerrikanian, summoning an Ifrit, which comes from Arabic culture instead.

It’s a little nod to how the world of The Witcher works–basically, every fantasy in every culture is true. In the Witcher’s Middle Eastern equivalent, Arabic monsters exist. Presumably, in their Aztec equivalent, you’ve got Quetzalcoatls, and in their Japanese culture, you might encounter a kitsune.

One monster is hardly evidence enough, but still, I think we could make the argument that yes, other cultures do exist.

2) Azar Javed does not show up in The Witcher 2, because he was killed by Geralt in The Witcher. I assume it was a typo, because the only other option is that Moosa simply did not play the first two games.

3) “Skin color, it seems, is not.”

Maybe it’s not a typo; I don’t know how anyone who played the game could say that considering that Azar Javed is absolutely not a white man.

4) Zerrikanians are pretty rare in the game’s universe, due to the fact that it’s physically very far away. Basically, there’s lots of them, but–like how you didn’t exactly see a lot of Chinese people in Renaissance Italy–most of them aren’t exactly interested in going to the Northern Kingdoms.

EXTRA II - The “It’s Fantasy” Argument

So, way, way, way above, you remember the bit where I referenced arguments about the absurdity of not featuring people of color in a game that’s perfectly at home with fantasy monsters? Let’s get back to that. Here’s Moosa on that very thing:

Further, the defense of excluding people of color from a fantasy game is nonsensical. We are talking about being comfortable with the inclusion of wraiths and magic, but not the mere existence of people of color. Accuracy and realism flew out the window with the harpies.



This is a failure to understand how storytelling works, and here’s two arguments.

ARGUMENT A is that this is a Polish cultural artifact. Specifically, it’s one rooted in Slavic mythology (in truth, it’s got a little bit of everything–Chapter IV of the first game is all about Arthurian romance–but it’s predominantly Slavic).

To put it another way, this is a game set in 1200s Poland, but enhanced with the cultural mythology. It is a mirror of that world in that time, of its superstitions brought to life. In other words, that’s not merely “wraiths and magic,” that’s fiction bringing life to Slavic culture.

Just because a Japanese story features a baku or kitsune doesn’t mean suddenly Africans should show up in it, simply because Japanese culture is over-represented in video games and because baku and kitsune aren’t real.

The argument is nonsensical. Stories are not told based on what is real and what is not.

What matters is a representation of the culture. This is a representation of 1200s Polish folklore. It’s like how you’re not going to have any Incan people in your Greek mythology, because Greek mythology is centered on what the Greeks knew, and the Greeks didn’t know Incas. So a cyclops makes more sense in Ulysses than an Incan person would, even thought he Incans were real, and Polyphemus was not.

So. That’s Argument A. It’s all about respecting cultures other than our own.

ARGUMENT B is that the real world has rules and fictional beings do not. Here’s an example: we know that spices tend to grow best closer to the equator. Most of us would laugh at the idea of a world in which wineries were found in the antarctic and sugar cane was grown in the tundra, because that’s just not how the world works.

It’s easy to believe a dragon exists. You can make up any rules you want for a dragon. Dragons aren’t real. That’s what is cool about them.

But once you introduce real things, you have to start playing by the rules. You can’t change human nature, for instance, or the audience will say your story stinks. It doesn’t ring true. You don’t write about how the Norwegians are just really great at long-distance running, because we know human physiology, and we know that the high altitudes at which the African long-distance runners train are better suited for making long-distance runners than a Norwegian fjord.

Geralt, the pale “white wolf” that he is, would have a terrible time in the desert. He’d probably die of skin cancer or sunburn.



So as it turns out, nearly all fantasy novels ever tend to be set in times where people rarely traveled more than a few miles from where they were born. When this happens, you tend to end up with these really culturally homogenous areas. Or, in other words, if your fictional novel is set in Sumeria, you probably aren’t going to meet anyone from South America, simply because people didn’t exactly travel around the world on airliners back then.

Yes, this is a world with magical monsters, but we still tend to think of people as rarely moving more than a few miles from their homes, in which case, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find a lot of melanin in people from “the Northern Kingdoms,” and you’re going to get a lot more of it when you travel southwest to Zerrikania.

…because human beings, physics, whatever… they all operate on a particular set of rules that we all understand. Basically, even in magical fantasy land, we still assume that baseline humans operate like baseline humans. Yes, you can turn a guy into a mutant in this world, but his melanin is gonna be largely dependent on how humanity adapted to its living conditions and the need for Vitamin D.

Argument B, in other words, is basically the idea that in storytelling, people don’t stop being people just because dragons show up.

EXTRA III - Why Romani are not a thing

This is a game set in the 13th Century, and the Polska Roma wouldn’t show up until the 16th Century. To give you an idea how far apart that is, just consider the fact that George Washington only died two centuries ago. So add another century to that.

EXTRA IV - Why Lipka Tartar are not a thing

THIS IS A NEWLY-ADDED SECTION

Someone remarked on my piece suggesting that there were minorities in Poland at times roughly equivalent to The Witcher, mentioning the Lipka Tartar and the Polska Roma. I included the Roma in the original draft, but thought I’d address the Lipka Tartar too. Unfortunately, a cursory examination indicates they showed up in the 14th Century. Again, The Witcher takes place in the 13th. Apparently the Lipka Tartar were located in one small region of the nation, so it’s conceivable that even if they were roughly contemporary with Geralt’s story, they might not make it into a game that mostly takes place in a 10 km^2 area of the world.

Like… um, guys, one hundred years ago, movies had no sound and World War I was nowhere near ending. That’s the kind of gap we’re talking about between Geralt’s time and the Lipka Tartar. Double or even triple that for the Polska Roma.

OKAY BACK TO THE REGULAR BITS

I SHOULD PROBABLY CONCLUDE OR SOMETHING

Yeah. So, as you can tell, this piece doesn’t do it for me.

I agree with the sentiment that people of color deserve better in games.

I disagree with some of the logic made to argue these claims.

I believe Moosa fails to acknowledge The Witcher 3 as what it is and mistakenly attempts to apply it to a culture that it did not originate from.

I believe video games can do better. I just also happen to believe that The Witcher 3 is part of the better, because it’s a great game that introduces its audience to a valuable piece of Polish culture.

I don’t think we get enough opportunities to see games that are products of the non-Hollywood culture.

In short, let’s criticize our own cultures for failing to live up to muster, but let’s avoid trying to control what other cultures do, okay?