Inescapable Violence? Racism? Those Are Features!

Here’s a gameplay overview trailer for The Witcher 3, posted on April 10th. (Love the thumbnail, guys. Very subtle.) 

And here’s one for Mad Max, posted earlier today.

So rest assured, you can have your violent open-world game starring a violent, emotionally stunted, gravelly-voiced white male loner in either fantasy or post-apocalyptic flavor.

As this style of trailer–a somewhat detailed, narrated overview of the various gameplay features we can look forward to experiencing–becomes increasingly common, I’m struck by a few things. 

One is the way in which they tout incredibly commonplace aspects of these games, aspects that most people who play the occasional big-budget action-adventure game starring a violent white dude would just assume will be present, as if they’re somehow noteworthy or interesting. Take, for instance, basic systems of combat, equipment, and leveling up. Predictably for an open-world fantasy action RPG, The Witcher 3 lets you “invest in sword skills to develop special moves, level up your alchemy skills and gather rare herbs to create potions and bombs, or master the arcana of magic signs, and annihilate your foes with a twist of your fingers.” The Mad Max trailer manages to sound even more generic, stating that  “you will need to equip yourself with armor and weapons in order to stand a chance against your enemies. As you progress, you will also need to upgrade your gear and abilities to survive against the brutal forces of the Wasteland.”

So, wow, these games feature skills I can acquire, and gear I can upgrade? They might as well just say, “You know that thing games do where they make you feel good by letting you become increasingly powerful and letting you get better and better stuff as you advance? This game totally does that.” If movie trailers touted such typical stuff, we’d have trailers saying things like “In Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s character, Bob Taken, sometimes shoots a gun at his enemies. But he has a wide variety of other tricks up his sleeve, too, like punching, strangling, and smashing people into nearby objects.”

image

What I find more interesting about these trailers, though, is the way they expend energy to help establish the cultural conditions of the worlds in which their games take place as natural and inescapable, and because they are doing so in the context of promotional material, those elements are inherently being presented as special and interesting. The Mad Max trailer says that because the game’s villains “are merciless, lethal, and relentless in their thirst for blood…You must be ruthless. The Wasteland is no place for a conscience.” There you have it, done and done. Kill or be killed, violence is required. This is par for the course in video games, and something most of us just accept without ever questioning it, but stating this explicitly in a trailer both works to reinforce the inescapable, unquestionable necessity of violence in Max’s world and makes the way it’s handled here seem like some kind of feature. But this is not some bold artistic choice. Nothing about it is special. This is literally the most standard, commonplace relationship games ask us to have with violence. 

image

The issues of worldbuilding and cultural reinforcement are a bit more complex in the Witcher trailer. The narration begins, 

“At CD Projekt RED, it has always been our goal to take you on adventures both legendary and grounded in reality, to tell you stories where breathtaking magic, fantastic creatures, and age-old prophecies are interwoven with religious fanaticism, war crimes, even racism.” 

The trailer doubles down on the emphasis on so-called realism, concluding with the assertion that the game lets you “forge your own adventure in the most realistic fantasy of our times.” 

But this, then, raises the question, “What makes something realistic?” Is a world in which you “play as a witcher, a monster slayer for hire, mutated to have superhuman abilities” really more realistic because RACISM? More realistic than what, a world in which you play as a superhuman mutant where racism does not exist? Why? 

It’s not that I don’t want games to engage with issues like racism. Of course I do, but not by saying that racism inherently makes a fantasy world more “realistic.” This approach suggests that racism is just an inherent, unfortunate but inescapable element intrinsic to human life, something unchangeable that we both have to accept as a reality in our world and also should actually want present as a kind of feature in our fantasy worlds because it makes them more “realistic.” 

Anyway, I’m pretty excited about The Witcher III, because as the trailer says, “You might be a killer for hire, but you decide what kind of man you are.” Really looking forward to exploring the flexibility of that system. I think my Geralt is going to be a radical feminist witcher with a deep commitment to nonviolence and a desire to organize likeminded individuals in the hopes of affecting political change. What kind of witcher is yours going to be?