Abstract
Dealing with the Devil is one of most prominent cultural motifs across the history of recorded folk tales. From ancient folk tales to contemporary cultural products, the Devil has appeared as an illicitly desirable being. The focal point of dealing with the Devil is that it is instigated by a pre-existent desire to exceed one's capacity determined by their temporal circumstances. In the Christian narrative tradition, a deal with the devil occurs over a Manichean undercurrent and ends in the condemnation of the participant or in the devil's humiliation. Pantheistic traditions discombobulate this contract by virtue of the nonexistence of Manichean binaries. This study aims to analyze the prevalence of desire in the deal with the devil motif throughout various tales and how the video game Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt (2015) complicates notions that are often taken for granted in Christian folk tales through its core narrative design.
Dealing with the Devil is one of the most prominent cultural motifs across the history of recorded folk tales. According to anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani and social scientist Sara Graça da Silva, who applied techniques used to study the evolutionary relationships between living organisms on the linguistic lineage of folk tales, the most common points were found in the tale of “The Smith and the Devil” (Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index 330) across 35 languages over 7000 years (Keats, 2017). The tale involves a blacksmith, who, upon desiring to improve on his craft and acquire new methods of smithing, sells his soul to the Devil, and uses his newly acquired techniques to create a powerful object upon which the Devil is bound, rendering their contract void. While the tale dates to a time before the known existence of metallurgy, the constants within resonate through the ages (Silva & Tehrani, 2016), through the formation of a studied ethical and material understanding of the world, and through cynical modernity. The entire narrative structure of a compact with the devil tale can be simplified to a desirer-desire-desire granter trinity, upon which the Devil and his (un)fortunate cosigner are placed. There is something highly compelling about the iconography of a contract with the devil that makes it culturally ubiquitous. Though the Devil is a cross-cultural phenomenon, this study will focus on the most merchandised figure of the Christian devil and his various manifestations.
The Devil is a timeless shapeshifter, an icon whose presence shifts not only within a specific culture through time, but one that manifests cross-culturally as well as cross-temporally. A superficial glance at modern pop culture depictions of the devil in film and television would suggest that the devil is an illicitly desirable being who is as charismatic as he is cunning, with emphasis placed either on his role as the adversary or on his sympathetic humanity. Devil narratives assume the shape of the dominant discourses of their time, similar to the mythologists’ efforts to establish an understanding of natural phenomena and the world. The Devil is a sign that is utilized to question the concept of evil. In the Christian tradition, narratives that deal with the Devil occur over a Manichean undercurrent, with the notion that forces of ultimate good and evil exist—a binary that is destined to eternal conflict. When reading a morality tale, or any Christian narrative regarding the devil, one must always take for granted the existence of his counterpart in the binary, even if God is absent from the narrative itself. Michael P. Levine (1994), in his article, “Pantheism, Theism and the Problem of Evil” writes of the notion that “evil is and remains a problem in this life is central to classical theism. Those who attribute it to the devil, in the case of physical evil, or free will in the case of persons, disregard the nature and the character of the problem…” (p. 131). The problem is the intrinsic irony of espousing a Manichean attitude (stamped out by the Roman Empire in the West) within a unitarian ideology—God is, after all, responsible for the existence of everything in the universe, including evil. The reified discourse of physical evil within Christian tales and narratives, however, would suggest an attempt at something other than a reconciliation between the concept of evil and God. In adapting Twardowski's tale in a pantheistic setting, the writers at CD Projekt RED remove the Devil figure from the grander locus of unitary responsibility and focus on the element of desire that is intrinsic to these contracts.
Most tales with moralizing overtones that involve a contract with the Devil have the binary result of a damnation of the participant's soul upon entering a contract with the Devil (Faust) or the salvation of redemptive soul who beseeches divine forces and receives divine intervention in turn (Theophilus). The focus of these narratives is arguably placed entirely upon the figure of the “desirer” as both the object of “desire” (knowledge, power, etc.) as well as the “desire granter” are reduced to their roles as conveyors of the desirer's path to damnation or salvation. Comedic devil tales in which the Devil is defeated or trapped within the terms of his own contract cause a rupture in the sanctimonious authority that rests comfortably on the aforementioned salvation/damnation binary. In these tales, the desirer is able to acquire the object(s) of their desire at the expense of the desire granter, and the situational complexities of these narratives are manifold. The path to salvation or damnation is one that is oft tread, fenced in with sacrosanct rules and moral guidelines, whereas each main desirer figure in a comedic Devil tale forges their own path to outmaneuvering the Devil. Pan Twardowski is a character we can place between the narratives of Faust who sold his soul for scientific knowledge and is doomed to Hell and Theophilus who sold his soul (ironically) for a higher position in the clergy and is saved through divine intervention. Twardowski, the unknown and overshadowed Polish/Slavic contemporary of Faust's, sells his soul for relatively similar reasons (knowledge and supernatural powers), and in a failed attempt at divine intervention that occurs when the devil is transporting his soul away from Earth, is dropped on the Moon. Pan Twardowski's wider cultural obscurity would diminish with his adaptation in the critically acclaimed video game, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt and its Hearts of Stone expansion. The “devil tale” framing of the video game narrative not only provides an amalgamation of familiar devil's contract motifs but suggests a meta-commentary on the state of binary choice mechanisms in video games. The adaptation displays a complicated framework of desire that disturbs the desirer-desire-desire granter constants in devil tales by incorporating the player's desire into the framework. The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone returns the deal with the Devil motif to its folk tale origins, leading back to original tale of the “Devil and the Smith” and breaking centuries of moralizing tradition.
The basic premise of Pan Twardowski's tale involves a man who sells his soul to the devil out of intellectual curiosity, with the clause that the Devil will collect his end of the bargain after several years when Twardowski goes to Rome. Twardowski, self-assured in knowing to stay away from Rome, agrees and acquires arcane knowledge. After the requisite amount of time has passed, the Devil builds a tavern called Rome and when Twardowski is summoned to the tavern, appears to collect his soul. Basic versions of the story end with the Devil carrying Twardowski's soul into the skies, upon which Twardowski utters a prayer to the Virgin Mary, who intervenes and forces the Devil to drop Twardowski on the Moon. Other versions that lean to a more comedic note include three final tasks Twardowski offers to the Devil in exchange for his soul that he believes to be impossible for the Devil to complete. The Devil accomplishes the first two tasks of creating a live horse out of a painting and taking a bath in holy water but refuses and gives up on the third task in which he must live a year with Mrs. Twardowski as husband and wife (Schamschula, 1993, pp. 214–215). Differing from his contemporary, Faust, “Twardowski is not driven by his intellectual curiosity alone, but also by a strong desire to influence his world, to exert political power, to enjoy life, to be successful with the other sex” (1992, p. 213). Among Twardowski's feats are the conjuring of the ghost of the late Queen Barbara Radziwill upon King Sigismund August II's request, experimentation with human bodies and souls, medicine, discovery of self-rejuvenation.
Twardowski's tale on its own does not appear to be a complex imbrication of desires and consequences as the structure of the story is one that follows many tales in the Christian tradition of contracts with the Devil. There is a man who requests something from the Devil in return for his soul, which results in either a comical trickery of the Devil or the inability of the Devil to acquire the soul through divine intervention. The break in the damnation/salvation binary structure, however, occurs when the divine intervention is realized to be an incomplete one; one that suggests the fallibility of the notion of a supreme Heavenly force. Edward Everett Hale's Polish narrator, in his prologue to his version of Twardowski's story proclaims that “it is again, under another form, the forbidden fruit, the tempting serpent, the expulsion from paradise, and the fall of man” Edward Everett Hale's (1871, p. 81), which might have been applicable to the tale of Faust yet does not account for the incompleteness of Twardowski's salvation narrative. The humorous absurdity of the Devil dropping a man's soul on the Moon disrupts the moralizing Christian framework of the tale and carries the tale to the realm of mythology, as Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers claim that the “key difference between mythology and our Judeo-Christian religion is that the imagery of mythology is rendered with humor. You realize that the image is symbolic of something. You’re at a distance from it” Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers (1991, p. 277). Operating within a framework that separates the realms of mythology and Judeo-Christian ideology and situating another binary of humor/gravitas might be simplistic; however, the recognition of Twardowski's tale as a failed salvation gives the impression of a morality tale with a self-defeating moral.
The split between Judeo-Christian religion and mythology is a highly contentious position, as one might argue that Judeo-Christian religion is itself a mythological schema with its own mythological motifs. The weight of the argument, however, is applied when one might consider the pre-Enlightenment position of the Church and the dominant discourses of the clergy. Just as the cautionary legend of Faust might have been conjured as a response to the invention of the printing press and rapidly shifting modes of thought, one might suggest that the tale of Pan Twardowski arose from a lived response to dominant discourses of salvation or damnation. While “one has the impression that the Enlightenment and rationalism have rendered the devil concept a sunken spiritual-cultural idea” (Röhrich, 1970, p. 22), the resurgence of these tales in the nineteenth century and their current prevalence in popular culture suggest otherwise. The religion/mythology split occurs precisely in the moment when mythic thinking is applied to sacrosanct religious material. As “myths transform the outer world into an extension of the inner one” (Segal, 1999, p. 83), one provides an internalized, experiential response to the narratives that are hegemonically disseminated from a position of power. These cultural response mechanisms are mirrored within the binding contractual structure of the desirer-desire-desire granter format of the tales.
The essence of contract with the Devil tales is the mistaken assumption of trickery that underlies any resolution allowing one party to gain an advantage over the other. In this sense, the legend of Faust is perhaps the most straightforward example where each party follows the spirit of the contract and its intention. Kimberly Ball outlines the rationale behind the possibility of seeing the legend of Faust as a cautionary tale against the invention of the printing press in her idea of a split between the letter and the spirit of a contract, the letter being the written terms and the spirit being the intention behind it Kimberly Ball (2014). Ball glances over various tales in which a human party defeats the Devil by following the letter of the contract due to the fact that “the Devil understands the language of the pact and any subsequent agreements according to what might be called its spirit—that is according to a more common-sense, less literal, construal of meaning” (2014, p. 388). These humorous, clever ruses add to the aforementioned elements that remove the tales from a morally charged ethos, which might be regarded as the condemnation of a desirer who fulfills their desires by entering a pact with a desire granting Devil figure and maintains their soul through cunning and trickery. If mythic thinking is a way of internalizing the exterior world, then the dissemination of these types of contract narratives explains the cultural shift that accompanied the birth of new technology, as no matter which party gains the advantage in a contract with the Devil, “the connecting thread in all of these stories is a preoccupation with the difference between the letter and the spirit of language, with letter trumping spirit each time” (Ball, 2014, p. 295). Unlike the tale of Pan Twardowski, these tales do have a clear victor, yet the essence of the stories along the letter/spirit divide with the letter appearing triumphant, causes another rupture in the moralizing essence of dominant clerical damnation/salvation processions. These tales told in Anno Domini hark back to the progenitor story of the “Devil and the Smith,” and in returning to an older, pantheistic tradition, problematize clerical doctrine.
The cultural shift from glorifying the spirit of things (speech-presence) to prioritizing the letter (writing-legality) occurs simultaneously with the increasing emphasis on mercantilism and legally binding forms. For Milton, mercantilism and an obsession with financial gain is attributed to the expulsion of Lucifer and his lieutenants from Heaven: “Of Mankind they corrupted to fosake / God thir Creator, and th’invisible / Glory of him that made them, to transform / Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn’d / With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold” (Milton, lines 368–372). By the time of the Brothers Grimm, and their tale of the “Peasant and the Devil” mercantile lingo would be the standard form of the narrative and the Devil assumes the position of a merchant who deals in souls as his currency. The battle of wits occurring over these contracts is more akin to mergers and acquisitions negotiations than the tragic consequences within the spiritual essence of Paradise Lost or Marlowe's The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus.
Henry Carsch in his analysis of the Devil's appearance in Grimms’ tales suggests that devil tales and those with moral overtones “constitute an effective form of social control and that under the aegis of ‘entertainment’ those who are in the position to control the narrative are in a strong position to gain access to various levels of moral consciousness and consequently of collective motivation” Henry Carsch (1968, p. 499). If we read further into the goal of assessing the moral consciousness and collective motivation of the public, we can see how devil tales are a playground upon which desires and the consequences therein exist in turmoil, and punishes or rewards the participants accordingly. Participants in compacts with the Devil have a vastly varying set of wishes, needs, wants, or above them all, desires. Part of the complexity in Faust and Twardowski arises from this notion that their myths are “conceivable only at a junction in human intellectual history when two concepts of the world coexisted: one that of a closed society dominated by the medieval church, exerting strict authority over everyone's mind; the other that of humanist emancipation and self-reliance” (Schamschula, 1993, p. 209). Thinking mythically on this cultural-intellectual crossroads allows us to recognize the shifts in the relational trinity of desirer-desire-desire granter and how this focus can complicate the often one-sided focus on individual subjects whose singular desires are at the whim of forces grander than they can conceive.
As complex as any set of consequences that can lead any of the humans involved to sign a pact with the Devil, the Devil is summoned into narratives as a resolute figure with one desire: to take possession of human souls through their disavowal of his opponent; testing whether their desires surpass the ultimate spiritual tautology of Heaven and everything it promises. Though the Christian devil would not have much written psychological complexity until John Milton's Paradise Lost, one can still locate complexity in the Devil caricatures that have stemmed from the Bible and is echoed throughout folk tales. Lacan (2007) iterates his notion of desire in that: “The necessary and sufficient reason for the repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and their permanent remembrance in a signifier that repression has appropriated – that is, in which the repressed returns – is found if one accepts the idea that in these determinations the desire for recognition dominates the desire that is to be recognized, preserving it as such until it is recognized.” (p. 431)
Video games are narrative playgrounds in which folk and fairy tales are given new life and reach a new, broadened audience. The exponential growth of the medium has made it a force of cultural impact, as they are sold internationally on release and are translated into various languages. The Witcher video game series, itself an adaptation of a Polish novel series by Andrzej Sapkowski, has sold over 50 million copies (Valentine, 2020) to this date and is available in 14 languages. The sheer reach of the series is quite a cultural accomplishment for the Polish studio and makes for an excellent impetus to introduce the less known and scarcely available tale of Pan Twardowski to a worldwide audience. Prior to discussing the video game's adaptation of the tale, one must first note that role-playing games, which were quite rich in choice-based mechanics and different outcomes in the 90's/early 00's era of Dungeons & Dragons adaptations, succumbed to binary choice-based narrative mechanisms popularized mainly by the rise of console focused RPGs (especially Bioware games) in the latter half of the 00's. The important note is that binary choice mechanics were not only limited by the reduction of optional narrative outcomes of events to two, but also limited the narrative impact of those choices by imposing a judgment upon the player or player-character as they had to decide between an ultimate Good choice or an ultimate Evil choice (Paragon/Renegade in Mass Effect, Light/Dark sides of The Old Republic, etc.). By locking certain elements of player progression behind those two ultimate choices, the games mechanically force the player into a set path from the very beginning, creating the illusion that their choices made a difference while the narrative director could have implemented the choice from the beginning and framed the narrative along those lines in the first place.
In attempting to reconcile the notions of Good and Evil in the world, the clerical theodicy of the Free Will Defense claims that the “world which contains free human beings capable of choosing between good and evil, is on the whole more valuable than a world in which there is no freedom of choice and also no evil” (Levine, 1994, p. 133). The theistic argument is as fallacious as the attempt at providing a choice-based narrative with intrinsic, prefigured moral judgment as these schemas do not account for the problematic spectrum of moral consequences ranging from necessary evils to tyrannical goods. This consequential range is widely prevalent in adaptations of tabletop RPGs, yet their categorization as such (Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, etc.) prevents them from achieving the complexity of a singular, well-constructed narrative that relies on the compelling exploration of not just the desires of the player, but the desires of the player-character and the desires of the entity which grants desires. It is within this framework that The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone complicates binary game design elements the way the tale of Pan Twardowski complicates the salvation/damnation binary of contract with the devil tales. While the concept of evil does exist in the Witcher universe, it is created with a mythic, pantheistic mindset in that “the pantheist does not need to account for the fact of evil in view of an essential supposition concerning God's (or the Unity's) perfect goodness” (1994, p. 131).
To set some essential terms, Witchers are specially trained individuals who have mutated in various ways through their ingestion of elixirs to perform their tasks of slaying or containing monsters running rampant in the world. The protagonist Geralt is one of the few remaining ones, and it is through him and his acceptance of various contracts posted by a plethora of individuals throughout the world that the player experiences the narrative. These contracts are the agreements upon which the central narrative ethos of Witchers are built, the completion of which, from a teleological perspective, provides a justification for not only the existence of Witchers, but the narrative thrust of the game. The Hearts of Stone narrative expansion begins with a contract posted by Olgierd Von Everec, the referential stand-in for Pan Twardowski in the game (whose character design is inspired by the 1936 film adaptation by Henryk Szaro). The narrative wears its fairy tale origins on its sleeve, as Olgierd has requested the investigation of missing people in the sewers of a city, upon which Geralt proceeds to fight a giant toad which he discovers was a cursed prince. It is when Geralt is confined by the prince's men for murdering the prince that Gaunter O’Dimm makes an introduction and calls himself “Master Mirror.” O’Dimm offers to free Geralt from captivity in return for his participation in a contract with him, with details to be disclosed “at the crossroads.” Upon Geralt's reluctant co-operation, O’Dimm places a mark on Geralt's face, magically officializing or sealing his contract with him and initiating the segment of the narrative that segues into the story inspired by the tale of Pan Twardowski. The game plays with several motifs here: For unitarians, GOD is an acronym for Gaunter O’Dimm, suggesting a united totality of good and evil, with O’Dimm clearly being a devil figure. The mark of the devil and crossroads are also widely recognizable pieces of satanic narrative iconography. O’Dimm claims that Olgierd refuses to relinquish his soul until O’Dimm has fulfilled three of his wishes via a proxy and when they have met on the Moon. The “by proxy” part is where the narrative involves Geralt as the player and diverges from Twardowski's known fate. O’Dimm claims that what he finds interesting “are true tales of true human lives” and placates the player by suggesting the task “needs a soul intelligent and clever, an individual who fears no dare. Someone like you.” His seductively charged rhetoric is accompanied by the aforementioned mercantilism of the devil in that he has “many interesting wares on offer” and proceeds to list a set of boons to reward the player (gold, items, etc.), but also claims that “above all I offer a great and true adventure, an experience like no other, the fate of only the chosen few.” Olgierd's three wishes are to show his brother the time of his life, to acquire the house of Max Borsodi, and to obtain the violet rose he gave to his wife upon departing her forever, vague requests that seem impossible to complete, as his brother is dead, Max Borsodi is one of the most influential figures of wealth in the game's world, and the flower that has withered to dust after the passing of decades.
Throughout the narrative, the player discovers that Olgierd made a pact with O’Dimm for three wishes in return for the life of his brother Vlodimir or his lover Iris. Upon choosing to sacrifice his brother, he acquires enough wealth to convince Iris’ father to have her hand in marriage, as well as immortality. The gravitas of the deal rests in that in acquiring what he thought was his true object of desire, he slowly turns into a cold, sociopathic being lacking any sense of empathy. The player's only impressions of Olgierd until accomplishing his tasks is colored by O’Dimm's line that he is a “vulgar, despicable man, with a heart of stone. A man who refuses to pay his debts.” The devil's single-track nature as a creature who exists only to acquire souls is embellished here by his interest in “true tales of true human lives,” and his offer to present the player with a “great and true adventure” accentuates the notion that O’Dimm or “Master Mirror” is a reflection of the player, as a stand-in for a reader, listener, or content-consumer in the current capitalist mode of cultural production. This conversation with O’Dimm reveals the relational trinity of desire to both the player and Geralt as the player-character. While the question of player desire might be relative to individual players, Geralt's “true” desire within the narrative of the game is to find his daughter, and if the expansion is tackled before the completion of the main game, O’Dimm's most valuable reward is nudges that guide the player through key and decisive moments that lead to one of the endings for the game. In focusing the relational trinity upon O’Dimm, however, we must ask ourselves what the Devil desires. At face value, O’Dimm's exclamation is one that the Hearts of Stone expansion lives up to; with its episodes of merry-making, twists, conflicts, and the tragic circumstances of the characters it involves. An intertextual reading, however, might suggest that O’Dimm's true desire rests within the acquisition of the soul which Pan Twardowski's Devil failed to grasp.
Geralt fulfills the tasks by allowing the spirit of Olgierd's dead brother to possess him at a wedding ceremony for a night of corporeal merry-making that satisfies the brother who leaves a note written in his (Geralt's) blood. O’Dimm makes another appearance here and calls the wedded couple “besotted fools bound by a contract they’ll never escape,” referencing a loop-hole in several devil tales that a married individual can’t sell their souls due to their spiritual trading of souls with one another upon wedlock. Geralt acquires Max Borsodi's house, which is a small gold chest with the shape of a house that contains Borsodi's will, and leaves the will with one of the two feuding successors determined by player choice. Upon returning the “house” to Olgierd and being questioned on the content of the casket, Geralt claims: “Delivered what you asked for. To the letter. Unhappy? Hell, should have chosen your words more carefully.” In a vividly direct reference to the spirit/letter dichotomy of a contract with the Devil motif, Geralt highlights the notion that “these are stories about the possibilities inherent in coming to terms with writing and mastering the materiality of language” (Ball, 2014, p. 403). The final request is when the player discovers the tragic pathos of Olgierd's fate. Upon visiting Olgierd's estate, Geralt must face the horrors of the prison Olgierd constructed for his wife, whose spirit wanders restlessly and refuses to communicate until Geralt has witnessed each tragic episode in their marriage and defeated tangible manifestations of Iris’ fears, the result of which leads to a choice between acquiring the flower that is bound to Iris in the mystical “painted world” or a portrait of Iris holding the flower. These three tasks are narratively parallel to the three tasks Twardowski assigns to the Devil in return for his soul, the third of which he is comedically unable to accomplish. An awareness of this parallel might lead to the notion that Hearts of Stone, in being inspired by the tale of Pan Twardowski, conjures “Twardowski's Devil” through the centuries to collect a debt long forgotten in time.
Upon completing the tasks, O’Dimm implores Geralt to summon Olgierd to a temple. When Olgierd arrives and inquires as to the purpose of their meeting at the location, O’Dimm descends from the sky against the backdrop of the full Moon. It is at this point when a blowing wind reveals that they are standing on mosaic tiles in the shape of a moon. The culmination of the narrative leads to the player having to choose between letting O’Dimm walk away with Olgierd's soul or to intervene in an attempt to defeat him. Prior to the encounter Geralt had been told to “seek salvation in glass that can’t be broken” and should the player choose to intervene in the punishment, O’Dimm transports Geralt to an obscure plane of existence and gives him a riddle: “To all things and men I appertain, and yet by some am shunned and disdained Fondle and ogle me till you’re insane, but no blow can harm me, cause me pain Children delight in me, elders take fright, fair maids rejoice and spin Cry, and I weep, yawn, and I sleep, smile, and I shall grin” (CD Projekt Red, 2015)
The verbal or literal solution to the riddle is quite simple: a reflection, however the challenge proposed to the player is to discover the means to answer the riddle mechanically in the game. It is important to note that this episode is the only one in the entire series that doesn’t conclude with a typically grand video game boss fight. The player reaches an empty well towards the end of the area and fills it with water, and as Geralt stares into his own reflection (as the player's stand-in), O’Dimm's face appears in demonic fashion, much paler and with pitch-black eyes. What follows is a cutscene in which O’Dimm speaks lines in several languages that are distant from the “common-tongue” fantasy trope of English, specifically Antillean Creole French, Georgian, and Ossetian, lines which exclaim his everlasting and undefeatable presence. O’Dimm utters these exclamations while seemingly phasing out of existence, creating in the players both a sense of satisfaction for the completion of the narrative arc as well as a lack in the sudden occurrence of the denouement without the expected climactic boss encounter.
This episode in The Witcher series stands as a referential point for many of the devil tales that precede it, whether pre-Christian or post, ancient folk tales or popular culture. The value, however, lies in the fact that while O’Dimm is referred to in game as a cross-cultural being of evil, there is nothing indicative to the player that the judgment is prefigured in a theistic sense of morality. The game plays with satanic iconography in its own way, and though it is clear that O’Dimm is a stand-in for the Devil, O’Dimm as a character in the game appears more as a cold and calculating merchant that deals in narratives. If we set the reference point to the contract Olgierd made with O’Dimm, a Lacanian perspective suggests how the attempt to fulfill misrecognized desires is detrimental to the psyche, and Olgierd slowly transforms into a fickle being of the id who lacks compunction and is able to murder anyone at will upon choosing to sacrifice his brother to achieve said desires. The final choice the player has to make is not between letting a manifestation of the Christian ultimate evil win (and be rewarded with the boons offered in the contract) or defeating said ultimate evil in a battle. The final choice is whether the player, having experienced the “true tale” of Olgierd, wishes to condemn him to his due fate or to grant him the option to redeem himself. The narrative thrusts the player into a choice that is essentially a manifestation of the salvation/damnation binary that resonates with the Christian folk tales with a moralizing telos. The Hearts of Stone, however, problematizes this binary not just with its pantheistic setting in which moral judgment is not prefigured, but with the presence of Geralt as the player-character agent by proxy and the players themselves. The story lacks the moralistic binary of an ultimate good and its counterpart as there is only a man who enters a contract with an entity beyond his conception who thrives on the “mis-recognition” of desires, and the consequences they lead to. The weight of the story, on the other hand, is carried with the proverbial “story-stuff,” the content which deals with love and loss, sympathy, empathy, and pathos. The way O’Dimm rises from Geralt's reflection, and simultaneously the player's, complicates devil narratives in a way that symbolically presents the Devil in identification with the player figure, a player of role-playing games and a seeker of tales. This reflection ultimately presents a metanarrative self-awareness on the part of the game's developers, as every player enters a “spiritual” contract upon purchasing the game, expecting to experience a satisfying adventure. O’Dimm as the centrifugal impetus of the narrative and self-ascribed consumer of tales is also a representation of the player's pure desire to experience the game's content.
Tales of a contract with the devil have existed through traditions of narrative dissemination, through formats, genres, and mediums, and though the framing of the tales is almost always constant, the essence of the tales shift temporally and culturally. The Devil beckons to humanity's desires across time, and the unknowable and deferring nature of desire allows one to respond, though incorrectly. At every point when humanity's reach extends their grasp, the Devil is conjured, just as the tale of “The Devil and the Smith” dates back to a time before metallurgy. One might want to know more than what is possible at the time, yet what is possible always shifts, and devil's contract tales are always there to remind us of the futility and incompleteness of our self-assessed desires. The Witcher 3's Hearts of Stone is not only an exception in the self-aware recognition of humanity's insatiable desire for tales and stories, but a culmination of the multitudinous themes, symbols, narrative devices, theological suppositions, interventions, and cultural motifs that have resonated through the centuries in devil's contract tales. The game places an emphasis on the relational trinity between the desirer, the object of desire, and the desire granter that exists in every tale within this tradition, yet elaborates on it by shifting the focus between the characters and their circumstances and the player's imbrication within those circumstances, as well as providing for decisive moments within which the players can negotiate their own desires with regard to the core narrative.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
