‘Boom’ by the Flight of the Conchords:
‘Oh my god, she’s so hot
She’s so fucking hot, she’s like a curry
I gotta tell her how hot she is
But if I tell her how hot she is she’ll think I’m being sexist
She’s so hot, she’s making me sexist…’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT5AQIlmM0I&videos=AIi9vF6kNOA&playnext_from=TL&playnext=1

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‘”Isn’t the killing (which constitutes a much, much larger and fundamental part of the game than the sex) just as much “appealing to base instincts” and “objectification” then? Isn’t this yet another case of “there’s a speck of sex in my wholesome meal of violence”’

heheh – that’s a very good point. Personally I have all kinds of guilt about violence in games too. I really don’t think I could play Hitman for example. Battlefield 2 made me feel extremely queezy in the years after the Iraq war – ‘Fallujah on TV and the Gulf Map of BF2 on the PC’. The first time I stomped a civilian in San Andreas I felt like a complete wanker etc.

I don’t have a pithy argument or analysis at the moment but I suppose we can thank gaming – good and bad taste game elements – for opening these moral questions in ourselves.

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I quite like real life sex.

Hopefully not if it someone offers it to you in exchange for saving their lives, like the witch does :-P

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Which is rare, and a potentially interesting topic for discussion.

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“I abhor real life violence, but I have no problem with it in a fictional setting, and I don’t see why I should feel any differently about the sex.”

I quite like real life sex.

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Mind you, when I talk about violence I’m not complaining about the game; I liked it a lot. I suspended my disbelief for a while and was rewarded with well-crafted entertainment. I abhor real life violence, but I have no problem with it in a fictional setting, and I don’t see why I should feel any differently about the sex. I don’t take Geralt as a role model for real life relationships any more that I feel tempted to reach for my silver sword when I see a menacing pit bull on the street.

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It’s funny, in a lot of ways I’m coming at this with a similar attitude and background to yours, and for me the cards are the thing that really declaws any offensive content the game might have to me. I mean… you get cards. For banging girls. Cards. Seriously. Granted, they aren’t explicitly drawn in a cartoon style, but I stand by my comparison to TF2; if I wanted to I could find reasons for all sorts of offense in that game. If you take TF2 seriously, it’s implying that Russians are all stupid, Scots are all drunk (wait… isn’t that one actually true?), Australians are unhygentic (connecting piss in jars), and Germans… there’s all sorts of horrible Holocaust-related implications you could take from the medic if you wanted to be that way. But that would all involve taking it seriously, and we can clearly tell from the cartoony style and the sheer over-the-top-ness of the game that we shouldn’t do that. IMO, The Witcher woudl be potentially kind of offensive without the cards, but as it is the cards serve the same purpose as the cartoony graphics and over-the-top-ness of TF2; they’re so inanely ridiculous as to remind us that no, this is not how the real world works and it really shouldn’t be taken remotely seriously.

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@Edgar – Thank you, yes. that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not a crime, I don’t think they’re wrong to feel that way – but I do think that kind of unexamined assumption leads to poorer criticism. And the standard here is so very, very high that it sort of sticks out.

I mean, look – there’s no point in having sex in the game unless there’s an element of ‘appealing to the baser nature’. That’s what sex is. And feeling a little icky about the way that is put across isn’t always a sign of crude craftsmanship – sometimes it’s the point.

Cf: Vampire: Bloodlines. That was a game all about sex, from the first time your Tremere bloodvixen clamped her naked thighs around a victim and quiveringly humped him into submission. It felt kind of queasy, but was also sexy as hell. Is this better or worse than the Witcher? Why?

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True, but ‘Ridiculous, & that misused word’ its hardly an endorsement for a game that minor flaws aside is certainly one of the most interesting and thought provoking RPGs to be released in the last few years.

Presently I’m replaying Mass Effect and having a whale of a time, but I honestly can’t say I’ve had to think hard about what to do when presented with a dilemma in the game. Generally the ‘right’ decision (whether your paragon or renegade) is fairly clear cut, and the pay off fairly instantaneous.

With the Witcher those kind of situations are far less obvious, and the payoffs are never ones that can be easily solved through simply heading to the reload screen. That the game forces you to make hard decisions early on and then have to live with the consequences of those decisions throughout is what sets it above games like Mass Effect and that is why despite the flaws I’d recommend it to anyone whose a fan of RPGs.

Personally with ME2 I’m hoping that the good Drs at Bioware take a leaf out of The Witcher and add a bit more mystery and long term consequence as to how things play out, because I don’t think it’s enough to simply tease with ‘Shepard may die’ when you know that if past form is anything to go by, that Scenario will be as quick to address as “Kaiden or Ashley?” or “Cake or Death?”.

My apologies for being passionate about good games in the face of unjust criticism (plus Root Canal surgery…).

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It’s not that liberals think that sex is demeaning to women per se. It’s the objectification of women as ‘cardboard cutout’ sex trophies for the titilation of and conquest by men that’s the problem. This is literally what the Witcher does with the cards.

As a straight-up lefty man raised by a feminist woman, this this is a problem for my conscience and higher consciousnee. Yet at the same time the pictures, and even the nature of collection and conquest DOES appeal to the baser elements of my – and every other male’s? – nature.

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