I am sitting in a graveyard drinking with a vampire. Or, more precisely, my character, Geralt of Rivia, is sitting in a graveyard catching up with his old friend Regis, who happens to be a higher vampire. During the conversation, Regis asks a number of questions, and I have the option to have Geralt respond or try to deflect. This ostensibly tests whether I trust Regis, but I do not choose to answer because I trust him (even though I do trust him somewhat, because he intervened on my behalf at great personal risk). I choose to answer these questions because I want to hear Geralt’s response. It’s not that I like the sound of his voice (although voice actor Doug Cockle gives a fantastic performance), but rather that I don’t know precisely what he will say and I find myself briefly in Regis’s rather than Geralt’s position–wanting to learn more. While I control Geralt of Rivia in most respects, directing all his gameplay actions, Geralt of Rivia is NOT a custom avatar of mine. Our choices and thoughts regarding the world of the game are not in sync, as he takes actions and makes statements of his own during cutscenes, and even when I select dialogue I select only a vague sentiment to be expressed, not the details. All these things are not new to the medium of course—far from it—yet this scene got me thinking about what makes the character in this particular game (assuming a player has no knowledge of the novels, which is a different matter).

As I edit my dissertation, I am finally finishing The Witcher III: Blood and Wine DLC. I ultimately decided to focus on the second game for my dissertation, as it allowed me to focus on a particular portion of my argument without worrying about the addition of more open world gameplay in the third game. However, I continue to think about the third game, and the series as a whole, including my relationship to Geralt of Rivia and what kind of window I have to his interiority.

The degree of interiority invested in game characters, as well as how closely that interiority is associated with the player, has varied quite considerably. Many early games offered hardly any impetus for musing about the characters’ inner thoughts and feelings. Adventure games from the past to recent action-adventure titles such as Uncharted and the Tomb Raider reboots offer access to the interiority of their characters primarily during cutscenes in a manner similar to film. On the opposite side of the spectrum, in open-world RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls games there is little separation between my character and myself. I can certainly make a conscious effort to construct a character and adhere to it, but I must do most of the work— such games do not seek to offer any specific character interiority. In fact, I would argue by defaulting to a first-person perspective such games encourage the conception of the central character as “myself if I were in this story world.” The avoidance of complex player dialogue gets around the the at-times-jarring break between player dialogue choice and the specifics of what the character actually says. In between these extremes, traditional Western RPGs such as Bioware games may at times seem to cater to the idea of player-character as self with their broad range of choices. Yet, due to the necessities of complex interactive narrative, a better description would be that they offer a number of character types or molds which may or may not overlap with the characteristics of the player. Being presented with these molds may even encourage a certain amount of playing with types altogether different from the player’s own characteristics.

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So where does The Witcher fit in relation to the games discussed above? Much of Geralt’s interiority is conveyed during cutscenes, yet the player has considerably more choice than in the typical action-adventure game. Besides, the player may pick up considerable insight into Geralt’s character bit by bit through his mutterings in response to certain things encountered while wandering the game world over the course of the hundreds of hours necessary to fully experience the series. Clearly, however, I am not perfectly aligned with my character in these games (in the sense of Murray Smith’s use of alignment). The Witcher games follow the Western RPG model of choice and character access for the most part, but I believe there are some interesting differences between this series and a series such as Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, or even Mass Effect. In those Bioware games, the choices available are usually in such opposition to each other that they would not feasibly be considered by the same person. This is not the case for Geralt.

In The Witcher series, different player choices can indeed prompt widely varying results—to the point that in The Witcher II a choice made in Chapter One can be the difference between two entirely different games with hardly any crossover of material. However, these choices are all choices that could conceivably fit within the mind of a single character, choices that could be justified through some values the character holds but condemned by other values he holds. As I play this series in its various permutations, I sometimes ask myself, “Who is the real Geralt?” Is the Geralt that chooses to side with oppressed non-humans (some of whom could nevertheless be quite accurately described as terrorists) in The Witcher II the same character as the Geralt that chooses to side with Vernon Roche, who has gone out of his way to clear Geralt’s name and whose primary goal is to restore order and stability to the land (even though Roche has several bigots among his men and the order he restores would undoubtedly have within it some continuance of systemic oppression)? Is the Geralt that allows a demon to claim the soul of the obviously flawed and by many counts evil Olgierd von Everec the same character as the Geralt that chooses to risk his own soul to oppose the demon? I would argue that they are indeed all the same character and that the choice options themselves, not just the cutscenes that follow them, are a window to Geralt’s interiority.

A character is more than the sum of his actions. Character also includes deliberation, those actions considered but not taken, and the justification for choosing one action over another. Each choice in the game represents a value that Geralt might espouse–in the first example, stopping oppression and opposing bigotry vs opposing terrorism and upholding safety and order for the greatest number of citizens; in the second example, allowing an evil man to suffer the consequences of his actions or opposing the greater evil that tempted him. The key is that a person might quite reasonably hold all these values simultaneously, even though in a particular instance they contradict—in making this choice we are forced to emphasize some of these values as more important than other values also held. Each choice in the game is an access point to a particular aspect of Geralt’s interiority, akin to that troublesome pull we ourselves feel at any big decision point in our lives. In the game, of course, Geralt is not in control, the player is, but we might consider our direction as players to be like the pull of intuition that drives us when we must choose between equally appealing (or equally disgusting) options. Geralt’s handling of that choice, his justification after the fact (which he sometimes offers us a glimpse of in dialogue) is yet another window on the character. Ultimately, Geralt’s character is not, strictly speaking, my character. How I direct Geralt’s choices may reveal something about my personal character, but they are choices already delineated by values belonging to the character of Geralt. The choices, and the particular ways in which Geralt follows through with those choices, do function as probes into his interiority though. After spending hundreds of hours with the character, one could almost say I know him as well as I know many of my friends. Parasocial relationship research, however, is another argument altogether and deserves its own post.