Addressing the racial politics of their game head on, two Witcher III: Wild Hunt developers talked about their game’s handling of race and gender politics in the first minutes of an hours-long panel at PAX in Seattle this weekend.
I’ll say upfront that I have played this video game, and I liked it quite a lot, and I have opinions about it, some of which I have written about elsewhere.
But, the way that senior writer Jakub Szmalek and translator Travis Currit talked about the game’s handling of issues like sexism and racism is interesting no matter how you feel about the game.
The Witcher 3 is adapted from a series of Polish novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, and the panelists were asked about why they didn’t simply adapt the books’ material into a narrative game experience.
“It’s really difficult to retell the same story and make a good game out of it,” Szmalek said. He went on to talk about how some books simply don’t make for good game experiences, mentioning H.P. Lovecraft by name.
“Some games have attempted to do this and some have been quite good, but they don’t usually reach the AAA tier because generally you don’t enjoy playing as a character that doesn’t have influence,” he said. “You don’t enjoy the feeling of powerlessness. Games are very much about being in control and influencing the course of events.”
When it came to the much-discussed exclusion of people of color from The Witcher 3, Szmalek was frank.
“You might have noticed, or you might have heard the controversy about it, that The Witcher does not have people of color,” he said. “And some people argue that this is some sort of an omission, or maybe a statement on our part. Where it definitely is not. We just tackled certain issues from a slightly different perspective.”
Specifically, he said that the Polish experience of racism and chauvinism is different than the American experience is. Currit explained that in Poland, racism generally takes the form of anti-Semitism, and of brutality between ethnic Poles and Ukrainians.
“That’s a huge reality that informs the world in which these games and stories were created,” Szmalek said. “Basically, we tackle the problems of racism and chauvinism through our own lens, our own cultural experience, which might not resonate with a wider audience. The problem is that you don’t remember that, necessarily, when you play. So it comes out awkwardly.”
You can watch the video of the entire panel here.
