I’m a big advocate of using video games as a coping mechanism for dealing with the stresses of real life. I usually get very ingrained in the characters’ lives and problems and forget all of my own stresses just for the time I am playing. I find that this is the best way for me to cope with my own anxiety and depression.
When I’m having a particularly anxious spell, I feel stuck in my problems like I can’t move forward or even begin to resolve them. In video games, I can see real quantifiable progress as I complete quests and gain experience.
I can play four to five hours at a time given the chance, which I know some people would find very strange or even a waste. Usually, it depends on what the game is.
Since real life is so open-ended, problems have no real black and white solutions, and meeting objectives is usually not a linear endeavor. I enjoy the rigid black and white world of video games. Sure, the most recent generation of games is aiming to be grayer and less defined, but the very fact that someone programmed a series of choices and outcomes makes the game digital overall.
This is not a bad thing, I like the fact that video games have hard and fast rules that I can learn and use to my advantage. I like that I can’t make any mistakes so bad that the world changes fundamentally and I like that at the end of the day, all of my problems are eminently solvable.
Recently, I have been playing through the Witcher 3, my console of choice is the PS4 and it has basically enslaved me for the best part of a month. This game feels different from any other I have played. Many reviewers have raved about how it has changed the landscape of RPG gaming and raised the standard of narrative and quest design. While this may be true, there are deeper implications for this change.
Being a perfectionist, I also strive to do video games correctly. I want to get the “good” ending. I want to collect everything and I want all the good characters to like me and all the bad characters get their comeuppance. If I do something wrong, I am always tempted to reload and try again rather than living with my flawed actions, I get enough of that in real life! I try to not look at guides to the storyline to manipulate the game to my desire and I try not to correct actions but sometimes, it is so easy to just try again when you have that conversation with an attractive female character that didn’t quite turn out how you were hoping.
In the Witcher 3, it is actually quite difficult to see the puppet strings. You make decisions important to the game without even realizing it, innocuously seeming NPCs take on an entirely different and unexpected role and there is no way of knowing what the right choice even was. Consequences can happen hours after the event when you barely even remember what could have caused the outcome. The game introduces you to a vaguely familiar character or situation and says…
“Hey, remember this random thing you did that you thought I wouldn’t notice? Well here’s a steamy bowl of consequences, and if you don’t like it then just reload back a few hours!”
…Knowing full well you have long saved over that timestamp and you couldn’t bear losing the character progression. Well played Witcher 3, well played…
Well for a person like me who likes the fact that I can do everything “right” in video games and no screw-up is too large. It was hard to deal with at first. I thought I had done the right thing, played by the video game rules, only to find out that what I did had done had dire consequences for the future.
Warning: Spoilers for the Witcher 3 beyond this point
For example, I met a random guy tied up on a riverbank by bandits… Pretty cut and dry, don’t even think there was a quest, just a random event, untie him, send him on his way, he promised me a big reward when he got back to his camp…
Several hours later…
Bump into the same guy at a camp, turned out he is head of the bandits now and murdered a camp full of innocent men, women, and children and is so grateful for me helping him he offered me a bunch of gold that might as well have had blood literally dripping off it… So I turned down his gold, murdered him and his friends, and tried to forget that my actions got a bunch of random people killed.
Then there is Fyke isle… Long story short, no one goes there because it is terrifying as balls and haunted. I meet the ghost at the top of the tower. She tells me a heart-wrenching tale about how she was eaten from the inside out by rats while in a paralytic state, able to feel the pain but not cry out. I thought that sounded pretty nasty so I agreed to help her put her spirit to rest at last. I chose to release her from the tower and…..
…she murdered her ex-boyfriend who she blamed and then disappeared into the ether to wreak havoc on more innocent lives across Novigrad. Great. Good job me, you fell for a soppy story and released an insane spirit on the innocent.
So it seems nothing is as it appears in the Witcher 3 and regular video game tropes don’t seem to hold up at all. I could do nothing once I realized my mistake, other than take it and walk away. No second chances, no righting my wrongs, just live with it.
Then there’s the Witcher contract to hunt a prostitute killer… I trace him to a brothel, burst in to find him about to kill a prostitute he tied to a chair, so naturally, I kill him… Only to find another body much later on… apparently, the guy I caught literally red-handed was the wrong guy. Or at least he had an accomplice that I didn’t bother asking him about as his head rolled across the floor.
Then you have the love interests, Triss and Yennifer. Naturally, I assumed that no bad could come from seducing both because that’s how video games work. I’m the hero so they should both be lucky to have me. I seduce both for the whole game then expect to have a grand moment of choice scene at the end and choose a winner while the other goes her separate way with absolutely no negative consequences…
Well, come the end game and things were better than I could imagine: a threesome! Just as I predicted, the hero always gets his way…
Except it was actually a trap and I ended up embarrassed, alone, and tied to a bed… WTF! And that was it, I had failed and was doomed to be alone thanks to my own selfishness.
There are many more scenarios, but I think I made my point.
So what the Witcher 3 teaches us is that we should choose a partner, be faithful and spurn the advances of all others. Then we can live happily ever after. So kinda like real life then… In real life, I would never act the way I made Geralt act. The worst part is that throughout the game I couldn’t stand Yennifer, she acted more like my mom than a lover and I really liked Triss. Yet, when push came to shove I saw no problem in telling Triss I Geralt loved her only to go and cheat on her with Yen.
Why? Because that’s the old video game rules, I can have it all! If I wanted to be monogamous and not murder everyone who looks at me funny, I’d go outside! And I was genuinely pretty disappointed that I Geralt ended up alone in the end because of my own poor choices.
I mean come on! Even Lambert ended up with Keira! And he was a total A-hole the whole game!
But there you have it, video games have changed, no longer does being the protagonist guarantee a happy ending with no consequences of your actions. and now I will have to be a lot more careful about the decisions I make.
Just on a random aside: How awesome was the ‘mission’ where you get drunk with your Witcher friends, dress up in Yennifer’s clothes, and drunk dial a random mage on the mage phone in an ill-fated attempt to invite over some hot sorceresses to the party. One of the funniest scenes in a video game of all time.
Featured photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash.
