Not to mention Poland has a rich history of interactions with the Ottomans and the Romani peoples and Mongols and tons of other races. You don't even have to go beyond the borders of Poland in it's history to discover many plausible options. Hell before WWII 10% of poles were Jews and the history of Poland being a place where Jews thrived goes back to hundreds of years before when The Witcher takes place.

As a fellow Pole: thank you for writing this piece. I couldn't care less about the Witcher, but I still managed to get extremely tired of all those articles bashing lack of diversity in the game.

As someone who has never spent any time in Poland or most of Europe, I still noticed and appreciated early on in the Witcher games what I could only vaguely call "slavic" or "eastern european" feel of the games, from things such as the the red and blue flowers painted on the walls that reminded me of folk art I had seen. The Witcher games have always had such a lived-in and cohesive atmosphere to me, and I felt like maybe that was because it was based on books written by Polish author and games made by Polish team. The world always felt far more specific than "western fantasy" to me, it felt like maybe "medieval polish fantasy" or something, very steeped in the culture and history from which it came, and I love that. It makes the world feel real and distinct.

There's no such thing as 'white culture'. That's the entire point. White is a skin color. The fact that a video game about the US military has a white protagonist doesn't somehow mean that other people who also happen to be white are properly represented.

As I mentioned in the opening post: skin color isn't culture. The pigment of the protagonist isn't representation. Polish culture is not a 'subculture' of white culture, it's a culture on its own. And if you can't understand that then I don't really know what to tell you.

Bravo, dude. Best of Giant Bomb right here.

I'm probably not smart enough to discuss things like these without offending someone, or, everyone. But sometimes I feel like the "journalists" who write about this only do so because it causes so much controversy, and not because they actually care. Especially with the quotes you've provided here where they, at least to me, come off as insensitive and ignorant. They boil everything down to "These are white people, they're all the same". And that sucks, because if it really is diverse culture they want, then even making these characters black/asian/hispanic/ wouldn't change anything. Would it? As you say, skin color is not culture.

Make love, not war.

wtf is "White culture"? As a white guy I feel like I have been missing out on this white culture. If anything I will give you that American culture is way over represented in media and as a result, that media has boiled down people of different races into "white guy" and "black guy". I have never seen a game influenced by polish culture other than the Witcher and Polish culture is nothing like what I am used to, so it's nice to see things from places different then what you are used to. I feel like that literally is the definition of diverse. Why MUST the skin color be different to be diverse? Personally I would love to see more games influenced by South American culture, specifically maybe what it was like to live during the Pinochet Era in Chile. Like you are like some bad ass rebel fucking taking out death squads in the name of Salvador Allende or something.

great write up and yes I agree. As a non-American person, this game FEELS different than games coming from america.

@imsh_pl: White culture is media. From movies to games to books the predominant culture is white. If you can't come to terms with that there's nothing else for us to say to each other

@defaultprophet: So all cultures of all white peoples is just 'white culture'? So there are no differences between the cultures, customs and traditions of Poles, Germans, Italians, Swedes, Russians, Canadians, Czechs, Greeks, the English, the French, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Spanish, or the Portuguese?

You should try travel, it broadens the mind. Actually, in your case just a book might do.

Very interesting read indeed! I have traveled to Poland quite a few times over the years and always been fascinated with Polish culture and history, although a lot of it is lost on me since I sadly don't speak any Polish. Well, I know how to ask for a Zywiec, but that's about it.

I think that is one of the reasons why the Witcher games have always grabbed me like they did is because they feel distinctly Polish. I could tell this even as someone who has only spent a grand total of maybe 9 or 10 weeks in the country over the last ten years or so. What you're saying about Polish culture really rings true for me as well - even though the vast majority of people in Poland look European, as a white American person visiting that country I never felt like I identified especially closely with Polish people in a cultural sense. Having traveled all over the world, Poland is as different a culture to me as countries in the Middle East or Asia are. Sure, being in Poland I may not have stood out as much as a tourist because I am of European ancestry, but Poland was just as foreign of a culture to me as Vietnam, Sudan, Jordan, or any number of other places were. It's in stark contrast to traveling to countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland, or Australia - places that I closely identify with their culture and in a lot of ways, feel so close to home it sometimes felt as if I had never left.

Here's me being a tourist in Krakow. Check out that sexy love handle, yeah!

@imsh_pl: Now you're being purposefully obtuse. I have already said and you have already replied to a post saying that those cultures are subcultures of the over arching white culture.

@defaultprophet: EDIT: I shouldn't have wrote what I wrote because name calling is rude. I still just don't understand how anyone in their right mind could think that there is such a thing as "White culture"

@physicalscience:

Take it easy please, dude. We expect everyone to treat their fellow users with respect on Giant Bomb. Calling someone a "crazy person" isn't cool. It's fine to disagree, but I'm sure you can find a way to express your disagreement without resorting to personal attacks like that.

Thanks!

Commander Shepard is straight?

A few scattered thoughts with some links (mostly short things)!

The Witcher seems alright with the occasional silly/"anachronistic" thing , like the Bovine Defense Force! But I'd also like to say that people of color in Medieval Europe are not an anachronism, and I think what people are trying to say is that a little more diversity in The Witcher would only have been a good thing. I totally respect a team wanting to make the game they want to make, and there's a lot I don't know about Polish culture - but I guess at the end of the day, I feel like even diversity that feels arbitrary, if it's not stereotypical, is better than nothing at all.

Also, the mindset of "they should make their own game" (they meaning a lot of things here!) does seem to ignore the multi-million dollar budget and hundreds of people it takes to make a game of this scale - but we totally should be focusing more on sharing more games of more diverse experiences! There's obviously a lot of ignorance and vitriol in the games community, but there's a lot of amazing experiences to be had as well.

Alright, I'm off to eat dinner and think about culture or whatever, pleasant times everyone!

What you're saying is that even if there were one thousand distinct and vastly different European cultures in the world, if they all share being white then they all represent the Occident, which is the binary opposite of the Oriental, and they get media exposure on the expense of their oriental counterparts.

Having taken a couple of courses on this, I agree, what you're saying is a legitimate academic belief.

Nevertheless, this is irrelevant. People who make attractive video games are mostly white. They tell their stories and they come from so many different places that they DO in fact provide different and distinct cultural products, despite the fact that they can all be put under the "white" category umbrella. This makes their work pretty legitimate.

As a non-white I don't expect whites to represent me or any other race or culture in their games, or to include me. I don't have this right. It's THEIR creation, they do it best when they do what they're doing now, and that's the way it is. It would be nice if a game really and fundamentally depicted oriental cultures, and some games do it and excel and it, but it's nobody's duty to do that.

The Occident vs. Oriental problem is a massive, old and universal human issue, you can discuss it and condemn it all you want, I'll be the first to engage you, but you can't push it on content creators and media heads and expect them to take it into consideration, that's not how it's supposed to work.

The social change has to come before it is reflected in the art, not the other way around.

As somebody who studied anthropology in college I'm pretty tired of people wielding their misunderstood notion of what constitutes "culture" as a club. Their obsession with skin color has completely blinded them in regards to The Witcher 3.

FYI Sapkowski gleefully mixed in whatever reference he could. This means there are no clear-cut parallels in his books. E.g. scoia'tael in 'Blood of elves' read at times as a rehash of Polish-Ukrainian animosities before and during WW2. It's more like echoes not parallels.

@imsh_pl

Thank you. Best voice on the subject I've seen since the medium.com write up by Adrian Chmielarz.

@defaultprophet: Do you have any idea how insulting that statement is?

Doesn't the Occident or "Western Culture" also include the United States and many different races? A person of Asian decent born and raised in western culture would be considered part of that western culture. Culture is certainly not skin deep by any means, because countries like Russia and maybe even eastern Turkey are technically part of the Orient and skin color there is also of the fairer sort. Western Vs. Eastern culture is real and academic, skin color is not.

@terminatorz: I'm not asking CDPR to figure out that massive problem. The only thing I've said re: the developers is that it would have been possible given Poland's history to incorporate people of color into the game without betraying Polish culture.

I'm not sure what orientation 'being attracted to Asari vaginas' is so I just put that in.

@anfit: I possibly didn't make it clear that I was referring exclusively to the Witcher series of videogames since I've never read the books, so I completely accept what you're saying since you're clearly better acquainted with the wider fiction as a whole than I am. The first game has a couple of references that seemed to me to be clearly drawing parallels between anti-semitism and the anti-nonhuman sentiment in the first game, and I guess that together with my pre-existing understanding of the history of anti-semitism in Europe as whole, and in the region that encompasses modern Poland in particular, is what fed into me reading things that way. I totally accept that it's possible that it's more complicated than just being that and that the fiction draws on other conflicts specific to the region, though. I know something of Poland's history during WW2 but the tension between Poland and Ukraine isn't something I've read up on, but I'll try to fix that. Thanks.

Fuckin well said. Folks wanna talk about the medium "growing up", well here you go. Grow up with it.

@defaultprophet: Ok, they could. But why should Polish stories about Poland made by Polish people who want to show the world the cool things about Polish culture accommodate for people of other cultures?

Dynasty Warriors could have better representation of non-Asian characters too, but it's non issue cause it's about bloody China.

Why is it such a problem that our people are finally making our representation to be about us?

We had same issues with cultural imperialists when it comes to Czech Kingdom Come:Deliverance being about *gaps* Bohemia. But we are small country. If we don't make our own representation we won't really get it. And here there's finally something for us that we can rejoice over with our Polish buddies but all we keep hearing about is how horrible we all are for wanting our stories to represent us properly (sorry but Russian mobsters with terrible Slavic accents don't make me feel really well represented).

Only reason people are bringing this up with Witcher is that it's a big release, not because they give a damn about proper representation of marginalized culture (because then they would care about Slavs).

This whole Witcher 3 controversy thing that I only became aware of yesterday seems so strange to me. It never crossed my mind that the world wasn't diverse. All I saw was a story that took place in a specific corner of this fantasy world that was at war.

Reading through comments it kinda bothered me that people were grouping Polish culture with "White Culture". I suppose growing up in the US you don't really get a sense of "culture" aside from the "American Culture" that we are suppose to assimilate, but even I have my own culture as a Mexican American. When people talk about "Brown" representation in games GTA 4's Ballad of Gay Tony is usually cited as an example. It seems that people don't consider the fact that Spanish speaking brown people are not all the same.

When people call for increased diversity in games I'm surprised that skin color or sexual orientation is usually the first thing people think about. When someone asks me what I identify as I don't respond with "I am a brown straight male." I always say that I'm Mexican.

@kalisto: Because they're part of Polish culture and the excuse that Polish Culture doesn't include them isn't accurate?

Edit: Also people are bringing it up with The Witcher because it's a big release but because it's literally 100% white. There's zero humans who aren't white in the game and that's not something that usually happens

That's exactly how I feel. I mean, I don't feel the need to somehow have my 'whiteness' recognized. That's just silly to me. It makes as much sense as demanding that blue-eyed people be better represented. Being white or having blue eyes is not an important part of me, it's not something I have the need to feel acknowledged of. It's just random genetics. On the other hand, me being Polish, me being an atheist, me being a gamer; those are the things I would actually want to have represented, because they are a more important part of me than how much melanin I have in my skin.

I think that is greatly dependent on the area in which one lives. Grouping everyone together as living in "The US" isn't fair, considering we have people that grew up in rural Iowa, and people who grew up in San Francisco's Tenderloin - two drastically different environments whose inhabitants whose inhabitants are more culturally diverse than they are alike.

@imsh_pl: it's silly to you because so much of the media is geared towards you. If you weren't as represented you'd probably have different opinions on it.

@defaultprophet: Jews and Romani are, but Sapkowski used the Dwarven and Elven allegories for them when he created the world. Zerrikanians live on the whole other side of that fictional continent. And that's it. Polish culture, that being the book, does not include them, and therefore neither does the game. You expect that we butcher the Polish national treasure to please some Americans? I don't think you get how important those books are over here.

Oh and I demand Marco Polo in Dynasty Warriors, cause he was totally in China. There's no reason he should be excluded.

And just to highlight the importance that The Witcher holds in Polish society...

I'd like to point out the Poland's Prime Minister gave the US President a copy of The Witcher 2.

I would counter that, at least here in the United States, there is far more content geared towards black people and the LGBT community than Slavs.

@imsh_pl said:

Hmm, I don’t think “white culture” is a super useful or helpful term. It lacks nuance and glosses over a lot of history. But, there is a shared European heritage rooted in Graeco-Roman tradition and Judaeo-Christian dogma that is quite distinguishable from, say, African or Asian culture writ large. It varies between and within countries, and there’s a continental divide between East and West, but it does exist. So, when people talk about “white culture”, I think what they’re really describing is the diluted, white-washed cocktail of European and American culture that tends to be the norm.

I guess what I’m saying is, rather than make the argument that “white culture” is over-represented, it would be fairer to say that Caucasians as a whole are over-represented. That doesn’t mean every single ethnically white subgroup has an abundance of representation, or that they aren’t entitled to share their own specific culture. Celebrating traditionally under-represented Eastern European cultures and pushing for better non-white representation shouldn’t be mutually exclusive goals.

@kalisto: The Author of your national treasure has said the games are not representative of the books so that argument falls flat to me. Likewise there's literally a Zerrikanian Mage in the first game so it's not like they are absent within the fiction of the Witcher games.

Also when Chinese culture is the dominant culture I'll take your Marco Polo suggestion seriously until then you know and I know it's a lame counter argument

Polish culture is the dominant culture?

Who knew?

No, it's silly because it's grossly shallow. Feeling disconnected from someone who doesn't look like you is a problem for humanity to overcome, not something that should be appeased.

@spoonman671: would you stop. Polish culture falls under the umbrella of white culture I already estaoshdd this point in this thread and you know it. It doesn't do this conversation any good to play ignorant

@defaultprophet: And black people fall under the umbrella of human culture. So no one has the right to say anything, because humans already represent like 100% of global media coverage.

Silly humans and their silly quarrels.

Are you aware of the staggering amount of hypocrisy involved in marginalizing an entire country full of people in the name of ethnic diversity? Oh those Poles, they're just whites like every other white person in the world...

The point he was trying to make is that you haven't "estaoshdd" this at all.

@defaultprophet: There's no point making the game about Witcher if it's not going to be about Witcher. Just because author said they don't represent the saga (because he's continuing the series) doesn't mean that the developers of the game should not follow the source material accurately.

I would have liked if they included Tea and Vea who are the only Zerrikanian characters to appear in the books, which is telling of just how common they are in the world (aka. not at all) but too bad they are not there. Less badass female representation for me. But they had no obligation to include them. There are not really any arguments presented for why they had to do anything like that apart from 'they could have added some tokens' (Hitler could have not invaded Czechoslovakia, too bad for us I guess) .

You seem to have very little knowledge of both Poland (and Slavs) and Witcher world or trolling, possibly both. Also Japan is the second biggest producer of video games in the world. A powerhouse. Demand representation from them not from the small guys in Central and Easter Europe.

You established your opinion and little more. It just so happens that other people disagree that white civilizations all around the world fall under the umbrella of a single culture.

No, you established a deep lack of understanding of what culture means. There is literally no such thing as "white culture". Nevermind the fact that you are grossly underselling the prevalence of "Chinese culture" (again, a term that one could easily argue is fairly meaningless), and ignoring its profound influence on all of Asia, and beyond.

@defaultprophet: I don't disagree that they could have placed a Zerrikan into the game. But art reflects the reality it was developed in. The world of The Witcher is extremely white, while the worlds of Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age are more diverse, and this is a direct result of the cultures where these games were made. I believe that developers in more diverse countries like the US and Canada should absolutely strive to add diversity to the industry, because we need it. White people ARE overrepresented by a great deal, and that is unfair. But it seems strange to hold a country that is 98% white to the same standard. When you take in foreign media, you often have to keep in mind that you aren't the intended audience.

It just seems weird to me that this is the game we chose to point these games out, when it seems to me that the place where developers are really failing is in North America, especially with the US being the media powerhouse it is. If there's one thing I've learned from posts like this, it's that sharing a skin color with somebody does not mean they're truly representing you.

I'm OK with a largely white country releasing a game that only contains white people. What's a far scarier idea to me, that I think speaks to issues of representation in media far better is that fact that I struggle to think of 5 games with black leads. Or even dramas on TV right now.

@defaultprophet Reading your posts I get the feeling that I should start introducing myself as "Hello, doesn't matter where I'm from, I'm white". See, I'm from Spain, and people keeps thinking "tacos and cabrón, esse", when that's not from Spain, but hey, they both speak spanish, so it must be the same culture. Sadly, I'm not safe from that generalization even in Spain, because I'm from Catalonia. "But that's Spain" I hear you say. Politically, yes, but culturally we are vastly different. See, I'm not even using skin pigmentation to make a point about cultures, because the skin pigmentation does not get you anywhere. Are you saying that "spaniard", "catalan", "mexican" and so are "subcultures"? Then why do I get the feeling that if I say that "black culture" is a bunch of black men dancing around a big fire in the jungle as they prepare themselves to eat white tourists I'll get labeled as racist? Or If I say that "asian culture" is just people meditating and practicing martial arts on top of a mountain while doing maths the same will happen?

It's okay to label hundreds (thousands!) of cultures as "subcultures" from the "white culture" because, indeed, they all share milky skin (even though not really as there are tons of shades of white) just because they are white yadda yadda check your privilege yadda yadda? No, that's what I call racism. It's okay to say "they are all white, all the same", but it's not okay to say "all asians look the same to me"?

So what's the diversity you actually want? You want a "black culture" as concept where being black is their distinctive trait? Or do you want lots of black people each representing a place and their story? And if it's the second one, why can't we have that when a polish team makes a videogame based on books from a polish author, based on polish culture? Because that diversity white? As I said before, I find that statement quite racist.

Great post but the idea that "skin color does not define culture" is slightly misguided. Obviously it does not define culture explicitly, and definitely does not for whites, but for people of color it is a bit different. It's not like it is by choice that skin color/race/ethnicity ends up defining culture, but it ends up that way for a lot of reasons. For black culture in the US, it is influenced by social, economic, and political circumstances throughout history that have shaped the complex nature of the culture that exists today.

It's kind of bigger than "well Polish culture and folklore is pretty different from American, Latin, and British culture so yeah it gets a representation pass." That being said I adore Witcher 3, and it's world is great. Though like...a game like this set in an African or Asian cultural setting that is genuine, well-done, and even produced by people who have that ethnicity in themselves? That would be pretty amazing. Anyway, Witcher 3 stands on its own and does what it wants to so very well.

@spoonman671: As others are quick to jump on me, I meant "as I've established in my opinion". Now that that is out of the way there is a such thing as white culture and it's the culture presented predominantly in western media that is the dominant culture around the globe. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about white culture. I bring up white culture only in reference to even the broadest definition of other cultures that are underrepresented not to mention the subcultures of those cultures that might as well be invisible in western media.

The point is this: White culture is so dominant that to deep dive into the subcultures and call it diversity is to ignore that even the broadest definition of non-white cultures is very much ignored.