The early stages of The Witcher 3 feel slow. The main quest follows the typical RPG nesting-doll pattern—to do A, you first have to help someone with B, only to run into C along the way. Meanwhile, the noticeboards at village entrances, periodically refreshed with side quests, and all the icons scattered across the map seem to tell the player, “No hurry. Take your time exploring.” (Hence the familiar complaint: “Your daughter’s in danger and you’re still running all over the world doing quests and playing Gwent.”) But this slowness is arguably necessary. It gets players engrossed in all the game’s digressions, giving them a sense of a rich, believable world. This is where The Witcher excels: many of its NPCs are not just character models stationed at crossroads. They have troubles of their own—missing lovers, wives who have left, the first half of a life spent far from home. This texture of lived experience also slows the game down.
And this slowness suggests a split between two kinds of time: everyday time and the time of radical change. In other words, the moment of saving your daughter Ciri—of fulfilling this purpose that hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles—must eventually arrive. Before it, though, lies a long stretch of time in which waiting for that arrival becomes everyday life. To save your daughter, you have to run all sorts of roundabout errands in search of clues, seemingly unconnected to that goal; keep exploring areas and clearing side quests; craft gear, allocate skill points, build your character; prepare for the final battle. As we work through these smaller goals, we often seem to fall under an illusion: that final goal will never quite arrive, and we will go on roaming the world, endlessly repeating these little everyday tasks.
In terms of narrative rather than game mechanics, how does the game make the transition from this seemingly endless stretch of everyday time to the time of radical change? To answer that, I want to talk about something else: Geralt’s identity as a witcher.
In the game, a witcher’s work is not simply a matter of slaying every kind of monster. It also involves talking to clients, haggling over fees, and uncovering what lies behind a contract. Witchers have superhuman senses: even many years after an event, they can pick up traces that bring the truth to light. A common side quest unfolds like this: Geralt takes a contract, discovers as he investigates that there is more to it than meets the eye—some history or hidden circumstances—and finally makes a choice, deciding which side to help in light of what he has uncovered, and so on. What is really interesting here is not the truth behind the contract, but Geralt’s intervention as the witcher who accepts it. In effect, the player, too, becomes involved in the NPCs’ stories, involved in their experience of life, involved in personal histories that will eventually disappear and that even those who lived them may forget. In one side quest, you can read a wife’s diary about her happy life after fleeing: just as things were looking up for the family, she was wrongfully killed and became a wraith, unable to rest. In the Bloody Baron’s story, his apparently missing wife and daughter turn out to have fled because they could no longer bear his domestic abuse; a baby lost to miscarriage becomes a monster, and the story ends with the Baron’s reburial of the body and his repentance. Geralt wanders the Continent, recording so many people whose lives are brief against the span of an age, recording their life stories. What role is he playing here? Here’s a bold claim: he is a savage detective of the kind Roberto Bolaño writes about. The two works have more in common than their portrayals of detectives tracking people who have vanished in an age that moves too fast. (The Witcher 3 takes place in an age of incessant war, monsters running rampant, and human lives counting for nothing. And Bolaño? An age of exile after the shattering of the Left’s dreams.) Both also reveal a certain powerlessness after the fact—and the power of redemption after the fact.
What does this have to do with the radical change and everyday life we discussed earlier? To my mind, the seeds of radical change lie hidden here. Most obviously, in these everyday quests Geralt reconnects with old friends, who will help him in the final battle against the Wild Hunt. Less obviously, as he takes these detours toward his ultimate goal of radical change, Geralt brings radical change to the NPCs as well. Granted, the world of The Witcher 3 is so torn by war that “everyday life” hardly seems to describe the NPCs’ existence. But notice what happens when they post a reward on a noticeboard and keep waiting for someone to take the job and resolve the predicaments in their lives: they, too, must wait endlessly; they, too, are trapped in an everyday routine of waiting. The sharp-eyed reader will point out at this stage that what I am talking about seems to be a convention of RPGs, not something confined to The Witcher 3. Everything above could apply to another RPG. But my point is that, within the RPG tradition of taking quests, helping kill monsters, rooting out evil, and helping old ladies across the street, some of The Witcher 3’s quests also show us particular possibilities for radical change. Another kind of possibility, waiting to be interpreted.
Take the Bloody Baron’s story again. We can imagine that, if Geralt never arrived, the Baron would keep offering a reward for his missing wife and daughter, who could never come home—even though he knew perfectly well that his abuse had driven them away. He would remain stuck in an everyday routine of waiting for them. Does Geralt’s arrival, then, amount to nothing more than going straight out and bringing his wife and daughter back for him? Probably not. He merely digs up a long-buried history and, through it, shows the Baron: you don’t have to wait; you can act for yourself, rather than wait for someone else. Your own history contains not only grave sins—or, put another way, the weight of history—but also the possibility of redeeming all this. That possibility is realized through his resolve to repent and his burial of the abandoned baby.
“The past bears a temporal marker pointing toward redemption. A secret agreement binds earlier generations to the generation now living. Our birth was long anticipated. We, like each generation before us, have been granted a weak messianic power; this power belongs to the past.” When Walter Benjamin wrote these words, he surely could not have imagined Latin American literature a century later, or a video game adapted from Polish novels—but never mind. What these words mean is that the past has granted the present the authority to transform the past and bring the future into being. What I mean is that Geralt is not doing what historians supposedly do in the vulgar view: recording things to no avail, tagging along behind events that have already happened. On the contrary, he is acting for the sake of the future, freeing the past from the past so that a future can come into being. When Geralt uncovers the truth and gets the Baron to bury the baby, this means more than a reckoning with the Baron’s sinful past—or rather, its redemption. It also means that the Baron can finally have a future. It means that only by digging into the past again, going over it again, and reckoning with it can we truly gain a future; only then can we truly begin again, breaking out of time that has been brought to a halt. Why does everyday time always seem endless? Because it pretends it has no need to look back at the past. Its relationship to the past is already fixed; like a train, it always runs from past to future. It is trapped in a rigid connection to the past: a powerless extension of a mechanistic world of social networks, causal relations, and clockwork, a continuation whose outcome is already in plain sight. It suggests that you cannot change what has already happened, and that everything, by the time we become aware of it happening, has already happened. So you are powerless to change anything. So everyday time is simply the endless time of the past. But the time of radical change is different. It means changing the past, rediscovering the unexpected elements of change concealed in past time. It acts by looking back and retelling, again and again. At this point we can finally see that “savage detective” refers not only to people like Geralt or Arturo Belano, who take action to record, but also to all the literature and art that records everything, including those who act.
We often lack confidence in literature and art because they are powerless to directly change the way things are, are often fragile, and are all too liable to become mouthpieces for evil through one vulgar interpretation after another that monopolizes meaning. Likewise, Geralt may be a virtually invincible witcher, a slayer of monsters, but he is powerless to help the many people in these stories who have died unjustly. He can only track the traces they leave behind. But powerlessness can become power. That means digging in earnest, retelling, searching once again through the boundless, tangled expanse of everyday time or past time for the time of radical change or deliverance, breaking the shackles already in place. This is precisely how every revolution is born.