Playing in the moral imaginary: Interacting with monsters and animals in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

This paper explores the dark gothic fantasy world of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, an open-world video game from 2015. Using The Witcher 3 as a case study, the paper examines the moral dimensions of player interaction within the game beyond dialogue trees and NPC interaction. By investigating how the player is presented with monsters and animals within the game world, the paper makes an argument for how these interactions are rich with moral dimensions. By investigating, through participation (ie playing the game) and qualitative content analysis, the paper makes an initial analysis of how the idea of natural and unnatural is constructed within the sandbox open world, as an interplay between choice, fate and circumstance. Further, the concept of moral imaginaries (Dant 2012; Taylor 2004) is used within the paper to show how the morality in the game needs to be anchored in morality as imagined by the player, as it results in a tension between the potential player choices and the way the entities are programmed to act in the game world.