The vocabulary may draw mostly from Northern German, but the voice acting seems to play up the romance language accents. The way that the Chamberlain and Emhyr stretch out the vowels, and trill the “L” and “R” speaks to a Latin influence.
Speaking of vocabulary, the Nilfgaardian language is descended from the Elder Speech, which was predominately an Elvish language.
As you may know, the Elves use the word dh’oine sneeringly to refer to the lesser humans.
Funny enough, the real-life Moors used the word dhimmī to refer to their second-class citizens.
Fantasy worlds and video games are wonderful, precisely because they let us project worlds that are reflections upon our own. It is a gift for us to be able to use fiction to help us better understand our world. Insisting on only one true interpretation of fiction is the domain of religious fanatics.
What’s neat about the Elder speech is how it appears to be based on Gaelic rather than the typical pseudo-Latin. I’m not 100% sure, but that may be true in the original Polish as well rather than just the English translations, which is pretty cool.
QFT. I’m thinking that maybe it’s about time BB began a separate thread for video games + culture/politics so we can talk at length about this kind of thing without limiting it to this particular game. (Cultural politics? In my video games? It’s more likely than you’d think!)
I don’t know, I thought it was interesting to get the perspective of a bunch of Europeans who are sick of the US perspective on race monopolizing the concept of multiculturalism. I think that’s a really legitimate position, and I feel I’m richer for having been exposed to it.
I’d like to elaborate on this. Racial differences develop when populations are reproductively isolated from each other for a long time (on the order of millennia). If such populations do meet, and treat each other as equals, they will interbreed and produce some sort of normal distribution of traits - an average majority plus few outliers that more close closely retain the traits of one or other race. So a mixed population with clear racial distinctions would have to either be segregated (non-interbreeding) or the mixing would have to have happened recently (on the order of centuries at most).
If a fictional setting presents a society that includes various races, it warrants explanation of how this came to be. Is it a result of colonialism and slave trade? Then we should probably see the kind of racial issues we see in the Americas, or have some explanation how they were solved. Was there a war of conquest? Did one population have to flee some natural disaster? Are the races incapable of interbreeding? There should be appropriate reflections of that in the setting. I agree with @JesusCouto: treating racial diversity merely as a matter of skin tone misses many interesting questions surrounding race, and it makes the setting weaker.
One recent game that did this right is Pillars of Eternity: the base of its setting has a lot of standard, Tolkien-esque fantasy elements, but the game takes place in what resembles early-modern colonial times more than the usual medieval feudal fare. The races (both the fantasy sort and the color-of-skin sort) have their places of origin, but after centuries of seafaring, colonial empires rising and falling, settlers moving to new lands, plus states that were founded on culture and politics rather than race, there’s plenty of explanation for all the diversity you see in the game. You can play whatever character you like, and it will not break immersion in the setting.
That said, there’s no need to put racial issues into settings just for the sake of it. Most places through most of history have been inhabited by mostly homogeneous populations, and they had different issues to deal with. I see no problem with The Witcher games having an (almost) entirely white cast, for the reasons explained by others in this thread. If the developers choose to include nonwhite characters that is fine too (keeping in mind the setting building caveats above), but I see no grounds to demand it or act indignant if that doesn’t happen.
Originally I thought you were questioning whether having an “unexplained” diverse cast was really better than having a homogenous cast, but it seems like actually you were just literally saying that the Witcher 3 is more politically correct than Dragon Age: Inquisition. I don’t really care about those specific games, so I’m not really interested in arguing that particular point.
But your argument about cultural relativism does feel a little like passing the buck:
The American audience who buys the game says “I’m not against diversity, it’s just that the designers of this game are Polish, so you know, they don’t have black people over there.”
And then the designers are like “Actually we’re not against diversity either, it’s just the game is based on these novels where everyone’s white…”
And then the author is like “I’m not against diversity, I just based my novels on Polish folklore…”
And the folklore is like “Yeah, maybe I am against diversity, but my authors are all dead or unknown, and anyway it was a long time ago, so you can’t really be mad. It’s culture!”
So the practical result is we have a ton of Americans playing a completely white game and it’s nobody’s fault, because everyone down the chain has an excuse. But for each link in that chain, that party could’ve chosen to do differently also. The Americans could have bought a different game, but they chose the white one. The designers could’ve based their game off diverse, international fiction (there’s plenty), but instead they chose some white novels. And the author could’ve integrated diverse elements into their fiction, but they chose not to. These are all decisions, and they should be recognized as such.
Only White Anglos would deem their moral views the loftiest without classification and then demand that the world all conform to it. Witcher is a series that explores racial and religious prejudice without being ham-handed and it does so by incorporating fantasy tropes. I could not think of a worse example to make this case. Is Gears of War a better story because of it’s Hispanic lead? Is GTA: San Andreas deals with race better because it’s based on gangsta aesthetic of the early 90s? Is the new Assassin’s Creed game somehow more ethical as it whitewashes centuries of oppression by shoving a Token Indian in Victorian London? I feel extensively that the term Diverse is now a politest of racial slurs.
Since the English language Internet ties credibility to your race, sexual orientation and gender, I am non-white cisgendered straight male. Put that in your algorithm and apply the credibility score to this opinion.
Like, if you depicted the death of Oda Nobunaga and there wasn’t an African samurai there, your depiction would be historically inaccurate
Most people’s reaction to this would probably be “there has to be a story behind this”, and there is. A generic native samurai doesn’t require a back story. The exceptions to the general rule often do.
Do you need see the irony is saying this, after blatantly declaring anyone who disagree with you was white, despite that not being the case with many of the articles in question?
Doesn’t that strike you as just completely and utterly hypocritical?
That is not what I said. You can read what I said , since you are literate, which as concise as I can make it in my second language. But you have chosen to interpret it to suit your own need and then go on to make this about my credibility rather than the opinion at hand.
Even if you were correct, Hypocrisy is an over-rated vice. Even if I am a hypocrite, that only means I am a hypocrite, not that I am wrong.
-Critics who talk about the overwhelming lack of diversity in gaming and how it doesn’t reflect the actual audience, and how that audience is being underserved.
they more often run ad-supported blogs or sit in some departments (or so).
i think you’re being disingenuous. most media critics aren’t grubby click hounds. they are people with deep interest in the media at hand.
when people of color play video games, and only rarely see characters with their own features – when all they see is white, white, white – it’s hurtful. worse still is when poc are portrayed in a negative light because of their skin tone.
( women, of course, have similar issues. )
so now you come to people of color ( and women ) who are critics. should they remain silent? i struggle to understand how you could think that.
-People who send death and rape threats to the above person.
The latter are overwhelmingly just hobbyists.
on the other hand, we have the white people who are privileged to see themselves well represented in every media. they have no lack for complex, interesting role models.
these people are afraid of sharing their privilege, even though sharing would greatly enrich both the media they consume, and their own personal lives.
the complaints of this group about sharing helps to create an environment in which yet still crazier people thrive. this subset are actively fighting to try to keep games – and society in general – a white male playground.
when even in the most privileged of privileged societies people are killed – 9 of them just the other week – because of nothing more than the color of their skin, death threats become no joking matter. they don’t even make a good “devil’s argument”.
privileged representation and actual physical violence against the disenfranchised are not unconnected. they are both symptoms of the same problem.
your argument is the exact same as the “historical accuracy” argument in different clothing.
Read the books and/or ask the author.
was it a chose-your-own-adventure? if not, then i suspect the developers decided to not just transfer the book to cd-rom for convenient television reading, but worked many long hours to adapt the book to the video game genre.
at that point, anything goes. anything to improve and enrich the experience.
if we were to say shakespeare never wrote parts for women ( all actors at the time were men ) – and therefore we should never “let” women act in even female roles, let alone in male roles, let alone “allow” a person of color to play king lear – shakespeare would enjoy a much smaller legacy than the one that it enjoys today. shakespeare is rich because we enrich it.
a related thought, did the author introduce every character by describing how white they were? ( “boy bob was white. why he was so white, snow looked dirty.” ) or do we just assume the characters are white, because that’s normal. that – as the article says – is “neutral”.
while i’ll admit i haven’t read the books – witcher is no shakespeare. and it’s not enough to simply move the blame to the original author’s feet.
instead, it’s worthwhile to advocate that developers think through these issues and make intentional choices with clear rationale. not just lazily fall into their own defaults.
such an excellent point! this is what happens to women who play games, and more so still to women who program.
women and girls played lots of games at the very start. and, women were some of the earliest computer programmers. the term “software engineer” was even coined by a woman.
but, we “white wash” history. we grind it down – even in just a short 30 or 40 years – to the lens of today. all the important contributions of minorities get overlooked to the convention of the overarching american white male narrative.
and then people say “but it’s always been this way” and we nod. and we say “things are getting better” and we hope. but, actually things were different, and in some respects may have been better, before.
i’m sorry that you have such a dearth. maybe if there are more games which work to include more diverse people you might have a chance to experience the feeling – even if only fictionally. or, might i suggest travel?
ah – but, there’s no reason for these people to actually be depicted. this makes sense. thank you for explaining it so well.
someone else addressed ( in the sea of the above ) the point that from afar some might see “asian” as just one thing, but it’s actually pretty diverse. it might not make sense for “three kingdoms” to have a lot of africans ( unless eastern trade routes are in question ) – but diversity of some sort.
as for witcher, it’s a good example just because it’s a recent, big budget game, and beloved by many. the company is polish, but it’s also worldwide. as is the game’s audience. the development and the marketing teams knew that from the start. and just targeting an eastern european market wouldn’t be sustainable.
so then, why not ask for more diverse games? i think that’s really the question.
all that said: i really wish the author had tried to contact the developers for some comments!
allowing race to be an expression of the structure of a world – not just a token presence, but integrating non-white lives into a fictional setting – i think it could only make that world feel more real and alive.
players could actually extrapolate where witcher’s non-european elements came from via the people they encounter. rather than, say, just those same facts from a book they pick up.
The best argument against this article was written by a polish game reviewer. The book is based on Polish folklore and mythology. It’s not a made from scratch rpg. So you are denying Poles their heritage by insisting the game be something it is not.
What if there was a game based on Native American folklore dating back well before Columbus… Would you insist there were Africans and Europeans in it?
Of course not as it would be highly offensive to Native Americans to have their mythology tampered with for the sake of political correctness. Why does the author not grant Poles and their mythology the same respect?
