The early hours of The Witcher 3 feel slow. It is not only that the main story unfolds through the classic nested RPG structure in which, to accomplish A, you first have to help somebody do B, only to run into C along the way. The side-quest notice boards that keep appearing by village entrances and all the icons scattered over the map seem to be telling the player, “Don’t rush. Take your time exploring.” (Hence the familiar complaint: “Your daughter’s about to be in trouble and you’re still running quests all over the world and playing Gwent.”) But this slowness is necessary. Through it, the game successfully draws the player into all of its branching detours and makes its world feel full and believable. This is one of The Witcher’s great strengths. Many NPCs are not just models standing at crossroads. They have troubles of their own: a missing lover, a wife who has left, half a life spent far from home. That texture of lived life is also what slows the game down.
This slowness, moreover, points to a split between two kinds of time: everyday time and the time of rupture. Saving your daughter Ciri—fulfilling the objective hanging over your head like the sword of Damocles—is a moment that must eventually arrive. Before it does, however, stretches a long time in which waiting for that moment itself becomes everyday life. To save your daughter, you have to run countless errands and search for clues that seem only indirectly related to that goal; explore regions and clear side quests; craft equipment, distribute upgrade points, build your character; and prepare for the final battle. While pursuing these smaller goals, a strange illusion often sets in: the final objective will simply never arrive, and we will go on forever, wandering the world and repeating these small, everyday tasks.
Leaving game mechanics aside, how does the narrative move from this seemingly endless everyday time into the time of rupture? To answer that, I want to discuss something else: Geralt’s identity as a witcher.
In the game, a witcher’s work is not simply a matter of killing every variety of monster. It also involves talking with clients, haggling over payment, and digging into whatever hidden story lies behind a commission. Witchers possess superhuman senses; even many years after an event, they can pick up faint traces and bring the truth to light. A typical side quest develops like this: Geralt takes a contract; as he investigates, he discovers that the job is not simple but contains some buried history or secret; finally he makes a choice, deciding which side to help in light of what he has learned. What is truly interesting here is not the truth of the commission itself, but Geralt’s intervention as the witcher who accepts it. His intervention means that the player, too, enters the stories of the game’s NPCs, enters their lived experience, enters private histories that are destined to disappear and that even the people who lived them may eventually forget. In one side quest we can read a wife’s diary: after fleeing, she had begun a happy life, and just as her family seemed finally to have a future, they died senselessly and she became a lingering wraith. In the Bloody Baron’s story, the apparent disappearance of his wife and child turns out to be flight from domestic violence; a miscarried child becomes a monster, and the episode eventually reaches a kind of conclusion through the Baron’s reburial of the child and his repentance. As Geralt wanders the Continent, he records the countless fleeting lives of his age; he records their life stories. What role is he playing here? To put it provocatively: he is a savage detective in the sense of Bolaño. The resemblance lies not only in the fact that both works depict detectives tracing vanished people through an age moving too quickly—The Witcher 3 through years of war, rampant monsters, and lives treated as cheap; Bolaño through years of exile after the dreams of the Left have collapsed. Both also show a certain powerlessness in coming after the fact, alongside the redemptive power that action after the fact can still possess.
What does this have to do with the rupture and everyday life discussed above? In my view, the elements of rupture are already hidden here. Most obviously, through these everyday quests Geralt finds old friends who will later help him in the final fight against the Wild Hunt. Less obviously, along the circuitous path toward that final moment of rupture, Geralt also brings ruptures into the lives of NPCs. The world of The Witcher 3 certainly looks so torn by war that we may hesitate to associate NPC life with anything “everyday.” Yet when NPCs post bounties on notice boards and wait indefinitely for someone to accept them and resolve the crisis in their lives, they too are waiting without end; they too are trapped in an everyday life defined by waiting. An alert reader will object at this point that what I am describing is not unique to The Witcher 3 but belongs to the traditional pattern of a whole class of RPGs. Everything above could be said about other RPGs as well. But what I want to argue is that beneath the familiar RPG tradition of taking quests, killing monsters, punishing villains, helping people, and escorting little old ladies across the street, some quests in The Witcher 3 also show us special possibilities of rupture—another possibility that calls for interpretation.
Take the Bloody Baron story again. We can imagine that, if Geralt never arrived, the Baron would go on offering a reward for the missing wife and child who could never truly come home, even though he knows perfectly well that his domestic violence drove them away. He would remain stalled in an everyday life of waiting for them. Does Geralt simply arrive and bluntly help him retrieve his family? Hardly. He digs open the buried past and, on that basis, reveals something to the Baron: you do not have to keep waiting; you can act for yourself rather than waiting for someone else. Your own history contains not only the crushing weight of guilt—the weight of history—but also the possibility of redeeming all of it. That possibility is realized when he resolves to repent and bury the abandoned infant.
“The past always comes with a temporal sign, one that points toward redemption. A hidden compact joins earlier generations to the present. Our coming into the world had already been anticipated. We too, like every generation before us, have been granted a weak messianic power, and this power belongs to the past.” When Walter Benjamin wrote those words, he surely could not have imagined the Latin American literature of a century later, or a video game adapted from Polish novels. That does not matter. The point of the passage is that the present is endowed by the past with the power to transform the past and bring the future into being. What I mean is that Geralt is not doing what, in a vulgar conception, historians do: futilely recording events, trailing behind whatever has already happened. On the contrary, what he does is an action for the sake of the future, an attempt to free the past from the past so that a future can be produced. When Geralt discovers the truth and makes it possible for the Baron to bury the infant, this is not only a reckoning with, or redemption of, the Baron’s sinful past. It also means that the Baron can finally have a future. Only by excavating, repeating, and settling accounts with the past once again can we truly gain a future; only then can we begin again from time that has been brought to a halt. Why does everyday time always appear infinite? Because it pretends that it does not need to turn around and look at the past. Its relation to the past has already been fixed. Like a train, it always runs from past to future, trapped in a rigid connection to what came before: the powerless extension of a mechanistic world of social networks, causal relations, and clockwork, a continuation whose end can already be seen. It implies that you cannot change what has happened—and that everything, at the very moment we become aware of its happening, has already happened. Therefore you are powerless to change anything. Everyday time is thus directly equivalent to the endless time of the past. The time of rupture is different. It means changing the past: excavating once again those unexpected, transformative elements hidden within past time. Its method is to look back and retell, again and again. At this point we can finally see that the “savage detective” is not only someone like Geralt or Arturo Belano, who acts and records. It also names all literature and art that records everything—including the actors themselves.
We often lack confidence in literature and art because they are powerless to change the present situation directly. They are often fragile, and under repeated monopolistic and vulgar interpretations they may even become echoes of evil. Geralt, likewise, may be an almost invincible witcher who cuts down monsters, yet he is powerless before the many people in these stories who have died unjustly. He can only follow their traces. But powerlessness can become power. That means sincerely excavating and retelling; searching once again, within the infinitely tangled time of everyday life or the past, for the time of rupture or salvation; breaking the existing fetters. This is how every revolution is born.