We’ve now arrived at the part of the series where I talk about – well, it’s not quite the elephant in the room. It’s maybe something like the hippopotamus in the room (hippopotami, while smaller than elephants, are still pretty big). You see, when The Witcher 3 was first released, there was nary a person of color to be found anywhere in the game. Some in the games media noticed this, among them Tauriq Moosa, who wrote an article for Polygon titled “Colorblind: On The Witcher 3, Rust, and Gaming’s Race Problem.“
I’m not aware of any reliable statistical measures by which one can measure the size of an internet brouhaha, so I usually just eyeball it: the brouhaha was medium-sized, and, as brouhahas go, I think it was more productive than most. Any time a hot-button issue like this gets raised, some percentage of the arguments that follow are made either in bad faith, at cross purposes, or both. Accusations of racism unavoidably activate people’s defensiveness, and, well, you know how the internet can be.
I’m aware that as a white person, I risk making a hash of this, but the only other option is to not talk about it, which can be harmful for its own reasons. Paraphrasing the many objections to the absence of people of color in The Witcher 3 is a tricky business, but paraphrasing one of the most common defenses isn’t. It goes something like this: “Why would you expect there to be people of color in the game? It takes place in a setting based on medieval Europe, and partly on Slavic mythology, and it’s made by a developer based in a country that’s overwhelmingly white. There’s no sinister motive here.”
I happen to agree that there’s no sinister motive. I don’t think CDPR’s developers ever sought to deliberately exclude non-white characters. But I also think that racism isn’t only gauged by intent – it can also be gauged, and perhaps more accurately gauged, by its effect. Meaning something can be racist by accident. If anything, it’s more common than being racist on purpose.
This picture comes from a book called the Cosmographia, written in 1544. On the far left is a Sciapod, from Ethiopia. They have such big feet because they use them like umbrellas to escape the hot Ethiopian sun. Second from the right is a Blemmyae, from India. His face is in the middle of his chest because he has no head. Scholars now believe that 16th-century European depictions of non-Europeans may have contained inaccuracies.
The idea that everyone of consequence in medieval Europe was white is neither accurate nor politically innocent. It’s an idea that has, over the centuries, been deliberately crafted by a relatively small group of people, and then spread through unconscious habit by a much larger one. I have neither the time nor, frankly, the qualifications to make this argument comprehensively, but I can link to a website that makes it far better than I can: this series of articles by The Public Medievalist, which is also the source of the image above.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Racism and Fantasy”
Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.
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