Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, awe, fear, and death in contemporary video games by Matthew Spokes

Author:Matthew Spokes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2020-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

6.3 Beauty and the Sublime in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

Myth and legend, coupled with a realistic game space, can also be seen in W3:WH, and before moving on to explore beauty in more detail through Burke and RDR2, I’d like to sketch out the beautiful/sublime dichotomy with regard to the environments of Skellige in particular, an island kingdom to the west of the W3:WH game map: like Odyssey it is predominantly covered by vast expanses of open ocean, and the ways in which the landscape is designed and detailed does, I think, correspond neatly with Burke’s arguments around the sublime object in contrast to the beautiful.

When Burke explores the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful he talks about a number of preoccupations with theories of the sublime at the time (such as whether or not representations of the sublime can themselves be sublime … which they can). For Burke (1996), beauty resides in smaller things, whereas ‘sublime objects are vast in their dimensions’ (p. 140), as well as being rugged, negligent, dark and gloomy in the face of beauty’s love of ‘the right line’ (p. 140). W3:WH excels in the environmental story-telling stakes, and can be described as most of the above. The opening portion of the game, as you ride across the dead on the battlefields of Velen not only drops you in at the deep end with the horror of war, but also lays the foundation for a broader malaise that penetrates everything from the destructive marriage of key NPCs like Phillip Strenger – the Bloody Baron – who offers Geralt (your Witcher avatar) the immortal advice ‘the world might seem black and white to you Witchers, but for us common folk it’s shades of grey’, all the way to the shadow cast over the village of Mulbrydale by the hanging tree outside the village, populated by the swinging corpses of deserters from the games’ civil war. These locales are vast, the sublime framed as the terrible outcome of war.

The intensity of the game space is encapsulated in the Isles of Skellige, a Northern Kingdom of the game that you first visit during the Destination: Skellige mission. My first encounter with Skellige sees Geralt washed up on the shore following a sea battle with pirates. The ship you travel in is shipwrecked on the coast of the largest island. Here the skies are brooding, seemingly on the verge of perpetual thunder; the seas that surround the island are unending, haunted by ghostly apparitions of long-sunk vessels and giant whales. Of the six individual islands, most are peopled by a menagerie of grotesque mythical beasts intent on pulling out your insides (like the Arch Griffin). What contributes to the sense of dread – beyond the inevitable interpersonal violence – is the scope of the space itself. Mountains tower over you, with castles like Kaer Trolde cut into the sheer rock of immense cliff faces. Travelling from island to island in a tiny boat underscores how wide the seas are.

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