Gaming Therapy: How The Butcher of Blaviken Saved My Life
I spent years trying to turn my parents onto video games — not to have something in common with them, or because I thought they needed to play one game in particular, but because my family is obsessed with physical fitness. (Yes, I know that sounds counter-intuitive. Hear me out.)
My dad downs fistfuls of supplements to maintain a marathoner’s physique late into his 50s. In college I was so endorphin-addicted that I’d go running even when fever-wracked and puking, terrified that I’d lose endurance if I went three days without a workout. My mom can’t sit still for the length of a meal. Locomotion was our weapon against anxiety and complacency. Stillness was the enemy, to be all-but-eradicated outside of the realm of sleep.
But in time, I saw my dad sprain his shoulder return again and again. I saw my mom run herself ragged on deteriorating knees. And I concluded that, once their bodies had aged beyond their minds’ needs for motion, video games might make the most tolerable surrogate. It was a step down from exploring the real world, of course. But at least it offered alternatives. Discovery for discovery. Knowledge for wisdom; strength for dex.
I would never have guessed that my body would go down first.
This part’s sort of a bummer, so I’ll keep it short. I’m a lifetime endorphin addict and since 2013 my knees and wrists have been eating themselves, deteriorating from the inside without any signs of regeneration and sending pulses of pain through my system in my every waking moment. I can no longer backpack, or hike, or run, or climb, or walk, or bike, or canoe, or wrestle, or box — all of my limbs are out of commission. Everywhere I derived self-worth, everything I identified with, every weapon in my mental illness-managing toolkit, everything I dreamed I’d get to do in my lifetime — backpack across Asia; climb a mountain; even just walk to the grocery store to feed myself — disintegrated along with my joints.
What I’m trying to say is, The Witcher 3 saved my life.
I was in a particularly grim period in my medical history, having moved back in with my parents for two straight months of ceaseless, fruitless medical testing. For sixty days I was a bristling pincushion of needles, which slid in behind my femur to push assorted murky fluids into the hollow behind my kneecap. I was foggy and fatigued from the cocktail of experimental drugs trickling through my system. I was unemployed. I was dependent. My parents helpfully took care of everything, which of course largely helped me to feel absolutely worthless — regressed so far it was like I’d crawled back into the womb. It turns out that when you’re 25 years old, the womb is as emasculating as it is boring.
[Spoilers follow]
I needed a way to get out of my miserable shambles of a body. I’d been told more than once that the Witcher 3 would be up my alley, so finally I folded and made the purchase. A month later, I’d laughed and cried my way through Velen and Novigrad and Skellige; I’d fallen head over heels for the incomparable Yennefer; I’d rescued my daughter only to watch her save us all; I’d gone head-to-head with the Man of Mirrors and won; I’d smoothed things over between the Queen of Toussaint and her long-lost sister. I was the White Wolf, the Butcher of Blaviken, Gwynbleidd, the greatest witcher who’d ever live — a yellow-eyed whirlwind of blades and cunning. I tried to dye my hair silver, for fuck’s sake.
Mechanically, the Witcher 3 is incredibly tight. Combat is fast and challenging, built around three different skill trees: traditional hack-and-slash, witcher magic (which gives you the power to spit fire, temporarily shield yourself, or weave magical traps around your enemies), and alchemy (which lets you brew performance-augmenting potions, creature-specific poisons, and an assortment of bombs). Like many RPGs, it suffers a bit from late-game easiness — as you level and then over-level your character, it grows increasingly possible to move through enemy encounters without taking a scratch — but more than makes up for it with its brutalizing boss fights.
What really sets the Witcher 3 apart is its world. I’ve played an open-world RPG or three in my time, but never have I been transfixed and transported like this. Grizzled and gruff he may be, but Geralt is no cookie-cutter troubled white male protagonist. He has a past, which the game makes no bones about discussing with little regard for whether the player has context — this was Geralt’s story, after all. I was just along for the ride.
Never have I encountered an RPG where every sidequest was nuanced and clever and surprising, with a bevy of outcomes depending on who you sided with or how deeply you decided to investigate. Never have I encountered an RPG where every NPC is not only morally complex but arguably salient in their reasoning. Never have I had such an issue with over-leveling, because every side-quest was so compelling I couldn’t bear to pass one up. I accidentally went to Skellige (the game’s third act) before Novigrad’s Act 2, simply because I found myself above the necessary level cap in the right place at the right time, and a man on the continent asked me to hop on a boat and fetch him a pearl.
Geralt’s relentless ferocity in his hunt for his daughter, the absolutely flawless (and optionally canonically queer — I opted for yes, obviously) Cirilla, was infectious to the point of all-consuming. Over the course of the main quest you’re always one step behind her, panicked by your first-hand knowledge of the terrors she’s fleeing but also confident in her ability to survive the worst as tenaciously as her old man. At times the narrative lets you step into her footsteps, helping you to understand just how much Geralt is fighting for: a jaunty, swashbuckling young thing, a hero’s heart swathed in bravado and pluck and youthful recklessness.
Beyond Ciri, the game’s treatment of women was…troubling, at times. The Witcher 3 defaults to the common videogame trope of “sexual violence as ambiance,” leaning on violence against women as a narrative crutch to indicate the evilness of a given villain. In one particularly hard-to-watch sequence, Geralt arrives at a mob boss’ headquarters to find women’s corpses strewn about as literal setpieces — dangling from ropes overhead or draped limp over tables, still bleeding from the torture that accompanied their assumed rape — all just to make sure we understood that a villain we’d already watched try to murder our daughter was, in fact, really a bad guy. And I snorted a bit at the way the game went out of its way to provide a canonical in-world reason to make all Enchantresses beautiful (they go through a magical transformation, like if the Trial of the Grasses were sponsored by Maybelline. The process also makes them barren, which means lots of exuberantly risk-free casual sex for all).
But for all its casual misogyny, the game redeemed itself through Yennefer, light of my life, fire of my loins, coolly domineering and absolutely in the power position our tumultuous relationship. Yen was beautiful, yes, but she was also fierce and complicated and haughty and sad, with motives of her own that she rarely deigned to share with Geralt. Our fearsome Geralt, in turn, was lovelorn to the point of pathetic. In the previous game he’d lost his memory and entered a relationship with another Enchantress — Triss, a forgettably wide-eyed ingenue, all admiring stares and unsubtle puppyish adoration — so when he finally finds his memories of Yen, he’s in the doghouse and he knows it. As she puts him through the paces, he knows if he asks any follow-up questions he’ll get a whack on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper; all he has to do is trust her completely and unquestioningly, do what she asks without any context whatsoever, fumblingly flirt when the timing seems right, and maybe she’ll touch him again. A little casual humiliation and a few tests of valor are hardly too much to ask to win back the trust of such a titan of feminine power.
Tight, visceral combat and deeply-developed, high-investment relationships come together with a three-dimensional, believable world to form a more immersive game world than I’ve ever known. At a time when I desperately needed to be anyone but myself, all of a sudden I could be.
I have a vivid memory of sitting on my parents’ porch on a cool November night — one of those nights where the humidity hangs heavy in the air, thick in your lungs and lush like satin against your skin. I sat on the stoop and drank in that thick dark air and thought about how it would feel against my face if I could run through it; thought about how on a night like this three years ago I would’ve plunged out into the dark, forayed into far corners of town, hopped a fence to watch the moonlight play off the surface of the sound. I took a moment to sit with the absolute despondency of loss. And then I went inside, mounted my horse, and rode up a hillside right into my very first wyvern — a fanged, scaled ruby-red monstrosity that howled and screeched and outleveled me by eight. I drew my silver sword, and I went to work.
