Gaming the Witch: History and Witchcraft in Fantasy Video Games

The witch has always been an object of fantasy; an adaptable symbol for the expression of society’s deepest anxieties and dreams. In the magical worlds of medieval-inspired fantasy role-play games, stories of witchcraft (and its persecution) uniquely blend the history, fantasy, and fairy-tale of the witch tradition with video game conventions and cultures. The witch operates as a familiar Other that is simultaneously both real and fantastical. This book explores how the long tradition of fantasising the witch has been adapted through the popular medium of video games. As the first study of witchcraft representation to examine games, this analysis focuses on the genre where the witch is most prolific – fantasy roleplay games – and on three key franchises: The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, and Dragon Age. Often seen as quintessentially medieval, the figure of the witch that we know today only coalesced at the end of the western Middle Ages, thriving throughout the Early Modern period alongside movements like the scientific revolutions. The ubiquity of the witch in medieval-inspired fantasy thus reveals less about history and more about our modern desire to relegate the perceived superstition and barbarity surrounding the witch to a comfortably distant past, even while reenacting it on our screens.