How The Witcher 3 Made Me A Better Person

Even though the game The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt came out in 2015, I didn’t buy it until 2018. That’s because, like with all things, I’m cheap frugal and I wait until AAA games get a steep discount on Steam. So, it wasn’t until late 2018 or maybe even 2019 that I finally got one of the good endings in the game — and even then, only after I looked up videos of how to get them.

The solution — stop playing like a stereotypical male chad hero and let Ciri have the role she wants in the game.

To be clear, at this point I had long moved away from my stance as a “socially liberal, fiscal conservative” alleged centrist Republican into a full-fledged “woke liberal.” And I thought I was an aware ally to the women and minorities in my life.

But I just couldn’t understand on my own how to get one of those good endings in the game. In fact, even after watching the tips videos, it was still to me more of a game dynamics issue and it wasn’t until I played through it for the first time that resulted in a good ending that I realized what all of those necessary steps meant.

Ciri needed to have her own agency to feel good enough about her relationship with Geralt to not want to sacrifice herself to save the world. The videogame character needed to do things her way.

I’ve long been guilty of “white knight” and “problem solver” behavior, something that I also thought I was over by the time I was 58 or 59 and playing a damn videogame. How badly was I embedded into the mythology of “man as problem solver?” In my early 30s I once was chewed out by my district boss in a retail management job for solving a lady customer’s problem too quickly (and according to her, dismissively) and not letting her vent her anger.

While I can lay the blame for my blinders about Ciri on my personality, to some extent that blame has to also fall on the patriarchy. Why do I think so? Because once I realized why Ciri needed her own agency in the game to get a good ending, it took me probably another year to realize even the way I phrased it was patriarchal — I had to “give” Ciri her agency to get the good endings.

That way of expressing my relationship with someone else’s agency is as patriarchal as it gets. I can’t “give” Ciri — or anyone — something that is inherently theirs to begin with. Yet that is the default way it is expressed in our society – “You need to give her/him their own agency.”

It took me a few more months of pondering to come up with what I think is the best way to express that sentiment, which is: “I need to stop getting in the way of their agency.”

I can’t give someone something they already have, I can only stop trying to prevent them from using it. At nearly 60 it was pretty late to be coming to that realization, but better late than never, I guess.

So now, at nearly 66, if you see me backsliding and getting in the way of someone else’s agency, please call me out, maybe with the simple phrase, “Remember Ciri.”

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