Enlightened Play
A promotional video for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt depicts the preparations of a young woman’s execution. Her alleged crimes are murder, looting and cannibalism, we hear it read it outloud as three men wrestle her to deliver the conquesting empire’s justice. As the beating takes place, arrives the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, collecting the reward for slaying a beast. The juxtaposition emphasizes categories of man and animal, individual and collective, and guilt and innocence, punctuated by the contemplating protagonist as he utters “If I’m to choose between one evil and another, I’d rather not choose at all”, before murdering the executioners.
The video’s title, “Killing Monsters”, and the protagonist’s actions subsume the aforementioned categories to good and evil, or rather, evil and evil that produces more evil, provided murder falls under the category of evil. But if we were to accept such an explanation, then we’d have not much to choose from either! So we shall join the protagonist’s journey in unfolding what he calls evil that needs to be conquered.
Punishment
Of the aforementioned categories of man and animal, individual and collective, and guilt and innocence, the latter pair shapes the former categories if we consider execution as a category that deals with guilt and innocence. When theft was punished by severance of the hand that committed the act, we may follow Foucault’s thoughts in “Discipline and Punish” and consider execution as the separation of parts from the whole. The whole body would be associated with innocence, and parts that commit crimes with guilt. These need to be separated, hence the removal of the guilty limb to keep the innocent body intact. This symbolic gesture doesn’t prevent further transgression though, because the purified body still has a hand left to carry out theft. Furthermore, one may commit crimes by proxy that needs no limb to carry out the act, or the crime remains hidden if the theft goes unnoticed or the perpetrator escapes conviction. In the former case, we deal with guilt as infinite, while the latter falls outside the part-whole relationship as there is no body to inscribe with meaning of guilt and innocence.
The symbolic that deals with parts and wholes in a separation of a limb from a body is thus doesn’t give us a full picture of an execution. To illustrate this, consider that taking a hand prevents one from stealing with said hand, while alluding to the loss of the other should its subject succumb to theft again. The execution thus produces fear in its subject, as well as on whoever witnesses such symbolic act with an able body. The implication is that one may lose a hand as well, should they transgress, which relies on the conjecture that a body with a hand is like another one with a limb capable of theft. Theft is thus invisible and independent from any act, as any person can be convicted, provided they fall under the criterion of sin, which in our case of an execution, is an able body with a hand. Execution thus makes the invisible visible on the grounds of guilt that it inscribes on a body it conceives as sinful.
We may say then that execution subsumes the mind-body duality under the conception of sin as object that the execution separates in this public dissection. The object becomes a whole by the execution as meaning is inscribed on the body, and then taken apart to parts of mind and body. This line of thinking is preceded by and leads to ideas that a person consists of mind and body that’s separable, which separation allows for a closer look at parts and wholes of persons. In such a relationship between parts and the whole, the execution creates and recreates the idea of individual through executioner and executed, as well as the collective through the cheering crowd. By disassembling a whole, its parts are exposed and reassembled by the event of execution in association with the whole collective and their parts of individuals. It is the likening of wholes to parts and parts to wholes to create the whole of a collective and the whole of an individual where the latter is part of the former. How can we reconcile this differentiation of undifferentiation where an individual considers themself as part of a whole, that is, the inside, while carrying out this analysis from the outside?
An execution leads to an analysis that comes from the outside, by a place of power, by the will of the people, and through the means of violence. Cause and effect cannot be separated as violence is the cause for the analysis of mind and body as well as the effect that separates parts from a whole body. The inside cannot be found as the violent event makes a relationship between the outside (law) and the outside (people) by making the individual its object. To understand why the event brings our attention to the outside, consider the relationship between subject and object, for instance, by asking who’s the subject that makes an individual the execution’s object. Is it the executioner, the people, the monarch, or the law? Any and all can make up a conception of the individual that can only be constructed from the outside while contemplating about it from the inside (about ourselves as ourselves).
Justice
Now, let’s consider these categories in light of The Witcher 3, by returning to our earlier idea about evil and evil that produces more evil, and substitute it with the category of the individual. If an individual is evil in relation to another individual, say, by the potentiality of sin that’s made visible by an execution, then every individual is evil in approximation to another. Yet, Geralt is able to differentiate between man and monster, guilt and innocence in a war-torn land, while acting as judge, jury and executioner, all at once: a witcher. What categories does this agent rely on to carry out such differentiations?
Going by the aforementioned video where Geralt killed the empire’s executioners and put the life of the remaining one in the hands of the peasant who received the death sentence, we may deduce that it is about justice. But it is with Geralt’s actions and monologue in mind with which we may assess any notion of justice, since we don’t know anything about the local girl and her alleged crimes, nor about the conquesting empire’s agents as they are about to act on these allegations. We only see executioners and the executed in the proceedings of an execution from where we may make an assessment based on approximations, where one may “choose between one evil and another”, as Geralt puts it, before executing one person after another.
The ground is set with an execution where one must choose execution. The context and available actions are defined prior to any (individual) “choice”, as the role-playing genre likes to characterize it, where one may deduce meaning by approximation from what is depicted, such as the protagonist’s self-righteousness and the conflict between the local peasantry and the expanding empire, as is the case in The Witcher 3. One way to approach these motifs by considering such dualities as a conflict between colonizer and colonized. Like with the mind and body duality, we may say that an external force of conquest aims to flatten people into populace, that is, parts into a whole. It is carried out by use of violence by a whole between parts and wholes to a construction of a whole. It is a reduction of people and cultures through a series of violence, from the outside, to an object of colonization. Meaning is inscribed on this object, like with analysis following capital punishment that flattens people and culture to its object of analysis.
Hegemony
Several such analyses have been made as it pertains to the game’s depiction of people and culture, see Majkowski’s article titled “Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 Between Epistemic Disobedience and Imperial Nostalgia” for a more extensive of them all.
What I’m interested in is what colonization produces and where the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, takes place in all of this. Majkowski’s argument explores colonization as a domineering force that creates ones that dominate and others that are dominated over. He locates this in the context of a historical understanding of XIX-XX. century Europe that outlines a divide between Western countries with more economic power and the eastern bloc with less, the latter where the Polish production studio of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt RED, belongs to as well. Majkowski describes a historical process where domination produces dynamics of itself on the dominated. Such conceptualization of totality then purports that one object can be assessed as “better” by differentiation with another object, like a country’s culture, that which at once can be described as worse in comparison to a different object. The author provides examples from The Witcher 3 where folk superstitions are portrayed as “backwards” in contrast with Enlightment’s rationalism. The latter places feudal sentimentalism in a series, where the sum of evaluation expresses the ordering’s rationality and its character in order (that comes out in proportion with what is ordered as “better”), even though the evaluation may not be carried out by such ordering. We may say then that in the whole and its parts relationship, that the evaluation of culture is a category error, because it looks at different parts that are subsumed by the evaluation, be it called better, or worse, or both as contradictory or “paradoxical”.
To wit, the colonizer states that there’s a clear divide where one emerges to be better than another one in the comparison. But how, we may wonder, when categories seem to be subsumed under notions of domination. Before we get there, we shall summarize Majkowski’s argument as it pertains to domination. In this relationship, the dominated recognizes how domination produces ideas that are better in this totalizing view, while at once resenting that it produces subjugation and dependence. Majkowski astutely associates this dynamic with events in Poland’s history and likens it to the cultural hegemony of American videogame production. From the standpoint of the dominated, a totalized view of Western hegemony is considered to produce superior cultural products and rational modernity as well as abolish local particularities. In this view, The Witcher 3 stands in parallel in its depiction with an understanding of Polish history and the global culture industry by being subservient to a hegemonic market while also “rebelling” against it. He characterizes such production of domination as “benevolence” that makes it possible for the colonized to go through configurations of self-colonization.
Like with Poland’s history and its temporality in the global videogame economy, the evaluation splits them in two (as dominator-dominated) to ascribe a value-judgement onto one them (benevolent dominator) that continues to retain the character prior to its separation. From the colonized and colonizer to dominator and dominated, to end up with benevolence that retains the dual character of the foremost separation of colonizer and colonized, to show, that as if a third category, outside of these pairs, have been doing the ordering and separation, a self-like category with the capability of intent that carries out colonization.
Self
This conceptualization of a self is of interest to us. It seems to crop up in imprinting parts of itself on the dominated (colonization), as well as parts of domination on itself (self-colonization). This line of thinking shows no clear distinction between colonizer and the colonized, subject and object, or the dialectic movement of colonization, but rather characterizes it as totality that affects colonizer and colonized alike. Such is the notion of sin that leaves no body untouched by the potential of violence as we’ve shown through the logic of execution, where violence comes from the outside, which then turns into the inside. Through the form of execution, violence is inscribed on the body as sin that becomes internal from the point of view of an individual. Colonization similarly appears to internalize the external by the conception of a self, where both the colonized and colonizer create selves by self-colonization.
To weave this conceptualization of (self-)colonization together with the inside and the outside as they relate to the self, let’s consider the idea of self-righteousness as it appears in the aforementioned promotional video with its numerous implications and as it relates to indivudalized choices in videogames. In these examples, self-righteousness may be conceived as an idea that externalizes the internal, that is, a configuration of the self (e.g. sin) turned outward (i.e. righteousness). If this configuration of the self is made internal from the external (e.g. with murder), then an appearance of such externality (sin) invokes the internality (sinful self) as external (sin), but different from it, like with the case of righteousness, an inverted form of the initial externality (sin).
If we consider this movement between parts to a construction of a whole, then judgement is a movement that produces parts we may call righteousness into a whole that is the self. With this, we say that judgement creates selves that temporarily form the self whose righteousness makes the internal external and by doing so, reshapes the internal. With this, we cannot differentiate the internal from the external, as they are equally reshaped by movement to parts that may assemble into wholes, as self-expressions that leave impressions. Since movement creates these expressions followed by impressions, then we may call these as the production of judgement. Judgement calls, evaluations, and so on, that reinsert the totality of the self into judgement.
Judgement then totalizes by flattening the internal and the external in an imagined self, while murder totalizes by flattening sin (external) and righteousness (internal) in a public execution. But as we’ve shown with capital punishment earlier, these internalities and externalities, as if rushing ahead, already inscribe meaning to imagined parts while parts and wholes remain intact, hoping to reinforce such connections by maiming and execution. Colonial logic, as outlined here, appears to similarly rush ahead with its inscriptions (benevolence, self-colonization), as if by trying to prescribe its parts with judgement and self-recognition it aims to self-castigate, that is, negate its parts it deems undesirable, as if attempting to cut off these parts.
But such attempts are self-selecting, where the conquesting empire only appears benevolent in comparison with a concurrent empire, i.e. another dominating force. Thus by what one conceives as domination, carries out judgement calls to imbue this preconceived notion with configurations of its judgement, only to find itself face to face with the totality of itself.
Totality
When facing itself, rather than turning to God, the self makes movements it considers commensurate with itself, be it rationalism, dualism, empiricism, or something else that is not wholly itself. The part (of the self) then reveals itself incommensurate with the whole (of the self), to which it reconfigures itself to appear as a whole again. Such a reconfigurating motif in The Witcher 3 is the notion of control. Ciri, another controllable character besides Geralt, is portrayed as someone who is yet to know itself: of who they are to society (outside) and who they are to themselves (inside). Her unlimited power is a metaphor for a self that is yet to be realized by control, a notion of rationality while standing in midst of powers coming from the outside and the inside. Geralt, portrayed as her mentor, is the manifestation of the benevolent master who exerts control upon their pupil. From the player’s perspective, he is another self exerting control upon the potential self of Ciri, to see what shape she will take by the end of the game.
What we refer to as the “player’s perspective”, is in truth are controlled by the system’s of a game that allows for controlling enemies during combat, controlling items within the constraints of the game space, and controlling these interactions through a controller. Through the metaphor of the rational, one may see what self and selves they may construct that becomes separated from these wholes by being referred to as control. It twists and turns by constructing control, controlling control, and rebelling against control that makes movements of control when referred to by domination, colonialism, modernity through analysis, or as “choice” that one makes in role-playing videogames. The latter may be evaluated as “difficult” through a series of calculations that are under control of systems of control, from where parts that make up “difficult choices” construe a whole in oneself alone. The notion of “benevolence” may be conceived similarly as it pertains to the conception of colonialism when conceived as hegemonic totality, which when comes face to face with conception of selves, shatters to pieces from which parts a whole is constructed in the conception of “benevolent colonialism”. This aims to modify what it conceives as a whole in relation to the subject as part of this whole and as a whole of itself, to construct conceptions that supersede the former and retain the latter as rational self.
This conception of the self and its rationalizing movements construct conceptions of wholes in society as wholes in persons and as parts between these that preconceive the real. This reality is where the metaphorical character may reveal the real by a controlled push on the controller through an imagined player that is constructed by systems of rationality: a self-realization of a self (character) by a self (player) where these selves are constructions of the rational. To play in this system is to self-realize by the rational.
